My friend Nathan left for France a couple months ago to stay for a year. He's been living and working on an organic farm there, in trade for food and lodging. I spoke to him on the phone today for the first time since he left. Aparently he's decided he's not coming back, and judging by how it looks in the pictures he posts, I can't really blame him. We talked for a while today about the way the infrastructure in France is run as opposed to the way it is run here. Very interesting. Gas prices in France are about double what they are here. Not surprising, since our gas is so heavily subsidized; about the only thing our government seems to subsidize. Nobody in France owns an SUV. If we had to pay what gas really costs, nobody ehre would either, let alone a Hummer. The interesting thing is that the value of the dollar is so linked with the price of gas, that they are nearly interchangeable. Five out of eight of the OPEC nations trade their gas with the dollar. The rising price of gasoline we experience here in the states is only a foretaste of things to come. The amount of oil that is contained under the earth's crust is over half depleted now. This has happened within a hundred years. Which means that since we weren't consuming oil at nearly half the rate we are now a hundred years ago, we have much less than that amount of time before we run out. Not only this, but the supply of oil in relation to the value of oil is shifting. More and more nations in Europe are moving their way toward become oil independent to avoid rampant economic crisis, or worse, considering the amount of things we use oil to run. America's best guess is the Prius. So oil may be entirely gone in about fifty years, tops. Probably less. Even given this, though, being that the value of the dollar is so linked to oil, the fact that the oil market will inevitably begin to tank long before the oil is actually entirely gone, there is a more immanent economic crisis facing the United States in particular. Our money all around is facing the kind of inflation worse than there was in the great depression. Not to mention the humongous debt Americans hold to other countries. Let alone the national debt of six trillion dollars, the average American is in debt for car payments, mortgages, student loans, small business loans, etc. that amount to a figure which towers over even that. This is not so in other countries, and it translates to the fact that when the value of the dollar declines sharply due to the tanking oil industry, no one will be able to pay off their debt. For me personally, the amount of debt I have in student loans alone is over twenty times everything I own. In short, this is all due to the fact that we want whatever we want and we want it now: a motto which was not all that sustainable to begin with, but which will not work at all whatsoever in the coming years, when no one will be giving loans to Americans at all, because they know they won't be able to pay them back. People's retirement funds run a high risk here, not to mention plastics production: if you are reading this a a computer, how much of that computer do you think is made out of plastic? When you go to the hospital, when you drink out of a soda bottle, wherever you go, how much plastic is involved in supporting our basic infrastructure? If there is no oil, there is no plastic either. And the gung ho, take whatever we need mentality we have, embodied most visibly in the current American administration, is directly to blame for it. If I may digress for a sec: George W Bush is a liar and a thief. There, I said it. And shame on you America for blindly following him. If we had paid any attention at all to the rest of the world, we would have seen that the supplies we import from them, which run our whole society, are running out, and the extortionist practices we use to get them cheaply have offended a world to which we are deeply financially indebted. But we don't pay attention. This was and is the main reason for the Iraq war. A last crazed attempt to keep our heads above water, and we should have known it all along. I am not ranting. I am putting this mildly. Pay some more attention America, please.
