Of Economics, oil, and ranting

"A long rant to begin with, followed by an even longer rant to finish"

So a while back I read Matt Savinar's book Life beyond the oil crash(or some title like that), and boy did that book ever make me mad, it made me terrible mad. (Now, I pretty much believe in the idea of peak oil , but this book is just absurd i.e. not enough platnium in the world to make hydrogen fuel cells, hello? our you retarded, modern catylitc converters for our cars contain more platnium then this fuel cells would take.) It kind of put me on the otherside issue, not the "it's not going to happen" side, but the "it's not going to be as bad as this guy says by a long shot" side. What are the real costs of oil, and running out? It all comes down to rates. If it crashes like this guy says, then he's right, doom and gloom. That's not going to happen. He states it himself, rate drop offs of 2% a year with increase in demand at 2% a year. (I think he might be right about the supply side, but not completely on the demand side, are driving as much as you used too?) At that kind of drop off, we will still have abundant oil for a couple of decades at least. That's if we even needed it. We don't need oil for economic growth. We don't need oil(fossil fuels) for our excessive life style. Energy consumption accounts for 7% of our GDP. Our economy has grown out of this problem. That is the point this book misses. With all our money and technology, this isn't a crash, it's a changing of the guard.

"Everything is worth what people are willing to pay."

Things have gotten a little distorted in the last while. This is due to externalities ie. pollution. If the price that things are sold at does not include the price of cleaning up after yourselves than you are not really paying the correct price. Walmart is a good example of this. We exported all the dirty industries that are expensive in america because we force the companies to clean up after themselves to china. Thus when we save money at walmart, all we are really saving is cleaning up after ourselves and shifting all that cost over to china.

This first decade of the 2000's has been marked by the suv. The huge thing that probably isn't necessary, but I can afford it, so screw you. A kind of one ups manship in excess. Now if there is an area that this will hurt us economically it is certainly this one. When someone does buy the huge thing that isn't necessary but can't afford it, we run into problems. There is bancruptcy, pain, suffering, all things that lead to the dark side. All things that are not equal.
Stopping for a second to think about this, there is the housing crisis, the unaffordability of health insurance, and tuition costs. Sadly most these problems probably effect the same people. We are all in the boat together so I think health care and high quality public education are noble goals that we should try for. As for the housing crisis, jeez banana, can you draw a line on a graph. Buying a house is scary shit. You don't need to do it. Simply put it is an investment. You don't need a house to live, you need shelter and a place of your own, but you don't need a house. If we include social security, general retirement crap and military hulabaloo then we can top off our list of hot button social/economic issues.

So where am I going with this, it comes back to growth. If we grow the economic pie, we can diversify. If food used to cost 20% of my budget, now it costs 17%, and that happened because I made more money, I have 3% I can use for something totally different, possibly unrelated, or maybe better food. Growth over the last 10 years in america has been good, but its distribution, not so much. Take a look at the CIA fact book and you can compare the GINI index versus some european ones. Wow it's late, i better rap this up.

Growth is good, externalities bad. We can have growth and fix our problems with our externalities to make the world a better place. We can learn from Europe, more efficient cars, public transit. We can learn from ourselves, crazy hippies in oregon, technocrats in california. We are aware of problem that is 80,000 years old. We were not aware of it for ~79,950 of those years. The problem is of course our consumption of the earths resources. Not only are we now aware of it, but we have the money and technology to fix it.

It works, it's ugly, but it works

So I'll try this for a while, not that I blog a lot lately anyway, but I'll try to somehow integrate google into myspace. It's myspace who is the son of a bitch about this compatability and being closed if you every try to do it.

tldr

This is my first blog, and it's a test, mostly, to see if this is even worth it. This all seems wonderful and integrated with google, so if I could get working how I think I can get it to work, Hooray! Elsewise, too long didn't read.