How much longer?

"Jay Honeck" wrote in
news:%_JKj.57911$TT4.27145@attbi_s22:

Move the pain up sooner? Leave the oil in the ground and force the
collapse to happen sooner?

you'll die without oil?

I don't think you've thought this all the way through, Martin. The
affect on the world economy of $100/barrel oil prices is staggering.
The recent run-up in gas prices alone has thrown the U.S. into a major
(if media-enhanced) recession.

Trillions of dollars that were being spent on, oh, say, *food*, is now
being spent on oil. The economy can't make that up instantly or
fully, translating into terrible hardship for common folks.

An example close to home: Our employees have been hit terribly hard
by the decades-old decision to not develop our domestic oil reserves.
Housekeepers, desk staff, and other entry-level jobs don't pay
exceptionally well in the best of times, and no one has received a
raise to "make up" for the sudden doubling of energy costs.
EVERYTHING -- gasoline, heat, air conditioning, (and, thus, rent,
food, clothes, etc.) -- has gone up in cost dramatically, causing them
extreme hardship. I see and hear about it every day.

Unfortunately, there is no way for me to raise their pay to match,
because no one is willing to pay more for a hotel room during an
economic downturn. As business drops, there is LESS money with which
to pay employees, and the downward spiral can really get wound up
tightly.

And it's only just begun. Thanks to the short-sighted policies of
people who put the well-being of polar bears ahead of people, we
haven't developed our Alaskan oil reserves. Thanks to the
short-sighted policies of people who fear marring the beauty of the
Rocky Mountains (as if we *could*), we have not developed our Colorado
oil reserves. And the Canadian oil shale reserves. And the
off-shore reserves.

The list goes on and on. My father was in the energy business his
whole life, and predicted this exact scenario almost 40 years ago.
He called it the "environmentalist's energy crisis", and -- although
he predicted the collapse for the year 2000 -- he was only off by a
decade or so.

You may wish to ponder this, Martin. You're well protected from a
backlash, sitting in Austria, but at some point people around the
world -- stupid, slow, and easily kept in the dark for short periods
-- are going to wake up to the fact that their economic hard times are
due to people who think like *you*.


Good grief.


Bertie