The World’s Energy Problem Is Far Worse Than We’re Being Told
“No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work.“<p>This is the real problem and also the lie. The people to whom the prices are “unacceptably high” are the people at the top of the pyramid who would subsequently need to pay appropriate wages. I would hazard a guess that if you took the current wages of workers which have essentially stagnated and regressed for fifty years and raised them to where they would have been had they been increasing at their pre 1970s rate, and then compared that purchasing power to where prices are at now, all of a sudden the prices of things would not seem so out of whack.<p>Executive suite are still getting ridiculous pay rises, investors are still getting ridiculous returns, meanwhile the same companies are continuing to try to shaft workers with below inflation pay rises. You cannot skim in this fashion indefinitely, eventually you get to the point we’re at now where the jig is up, you’ve put so much wealth at the top that it collapses the pillars holding the whole system up.<p>You cannot just park billions of money in ‘safe’ assets (e.g housing) like Smaug the dragon because you’re afraid of losing money. The money represents resources. If you’re not smart enough or brave enough to choose worthwhile and worthy people and enterprises, organisations etc to invest the money in then you don’t deserve to have it and it should be reallocated via the mechanisms of the market to smarter people who do. Yet the government keep bailing out failing company or bank after failing company or bank rather than letting the natural reallocation occur. And so we end up with a zombie economy that preys on the living to feed the dead.