Yes...but!

June 9 2008

Home > Columns >Yes...But! Year 8-31a

Suddenly it has hit home. The big news is oil. I went back to see when I first mentioned the phrase PEAK OIL, and discovered that it was way back in 2003: five years ago. So the event should not be a surprise, yet, it hurts, and will keep on hurting from Here to Eternity.

While scanning my old columns, I also saw that I had predicted the ‘housing horror’ in the USA some four years before it hit: another nail in the capitalistic coffin. It now looks more and more likely, as I predicted last March that the US economy will collapse in September, a mere three months from now.

When in panic, start a war. Bomb Iran. I am afraid that this will be the Bush response. And panic it is. The Stock market lost some 400 points last Friday, while oil jumped to $138 per barrel.

Already we see chain stores closing, credit tightening, economic conditions worsening. The American government is broke, so the administration proposes to cut taxes. The people are broke(r). Cutting taxes for the rich started this race toward economic disaster that, and the two wars the USA is fighting and losing, while making moves to start a third.

Thank to the USA the world is in a real pickle. Oil will only go up, tightening the noose around the consumers’ neck even more. The majority of Americans, having lost their home equity, are now maxing out their credit cards – paying 20 percent interest in the process- just to get food on the table.

Bye-bye cheap travel. It costs Air Canada $70,000 for a fill up to fly to London, or $200.00 per person with a full load. This cannot last. Ten of thousands of air-line jobs will disappear, and even more in the automotive industry.

With high and higher oil prices, utility bills will go unpaid, cutting off thousands of households from electricity and heating. With high and higher oil prices, foreclosures will dramatically increase, while house prices collapse even more and jobs there disappear by the thousands.

Global warming too is in high gear, with floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornados, killing and drowning people and livestock, destroying precious properties, causing escalating insurance rates and stretching public finances to the breaking point, making higher property taxes inevitable.

Combine all this with ever rising inflation, and ever more depressed real estate values- I am talking USA all the time- and the word ‘depression’ is perhaps a euphemism. Now also the corn belt – Iowa, Illinois - is receiving pelting rain, destroying the crops that were supposed to provide the world with food and the USA with export money. Corn is used in practically every prepared food item. Both it and wheat, another export item, doubled in price in the past year, because we burn them to fuel cars: resulting in famine everywhere. Our gods are killing us.

Fortunately Canada has been spared the bad weather so far. Also fortunately we don’t have the housing crisis, the basis of the ills afflicting our neighbours to the south. As a nation of immigrants, we are savers and not spenders, while our government runs a surplus, where in Washington the real deficit in 2007 was more than 2 trillion dollars.

Yet we will be affected by the economic eclipse of America. The world is so integrated economically that all suffer when the real motor of the capitalistic system, accounting for 25 percent of the world’s products, undergoes a drastic cut in spending.

With infinite inflation, peak oil and stagnating wages, we better get in shape, physically, economically, spiritually. As always the best medicine is prevention. Bike, walk, reduce both spending and body weight. Get rid of that riding or gas lawnmower where you inhale poison for hours on end: go electric. With a large vegetable garden, there’d be less grass to mow anyway.

The world is in poor shape, also physically. The real epidemic we’re having today concerns food: globally people are either undernourished or overfed and in the Western world both overfed and undernourished. Peak Oil means Peak Food, with ever rising prices for both. When we are forced to eat less, we, surprisingly, live longer and better. Now more than 400 million adults worldwide are obese. Obese people eat more. They need daily 1,680 calories to sustain normal energy and 1,280 calories more to maintain daily activities – 18 percent more than someone with a normal Body Mass Index. We all must do our bit to combat Global Warming. Weight reduction is one way, because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk or bike than to rely on cars. Also a slimmer population needs less fuel for transportation and for agriculture, where 20 percent of green-house-gas emission originates. Slim down. Save yourself. Save the world.