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Comment by _eht | Hacker News Reader

> Current price increases are not a result of too much money, or bad policies

This seems naive. Was the sudden onset of printed USD not a factor in the Feds rate surging?

It would be a factor but larger factors would be supply and demand issues due to COVID and sanctions on Russian oil due to the war in Ukraine. Without Russian oil on the global market, supply is down, causing high fuel prices. These high fuel prices not only affect the cost to fill your vehicle, but increase the cost of transporting every good and even some services. High transportation costs increases the cost of everything you buy that wasn't locally produced.

"larger" is just more unsupported speculation. We know energy prices flow through the entire economy and energy is expensive right now. We also know The US and other advanced economies printed a huge amount of money in 2020 and money supply is correlated with inflation [1][1].

[1]: https://www.longtermtrends.net/m2-money-supply-vs-inflation/

Author also believes in the “peak oil” thesis.

There is so much oil, so insanely much, and we constantly find new sources. The biggest risk to oil is governments outlawing / taxing it to be uncompetitive.

That and people realising that, in fact, solar and wind can fully replace oil with a concerted logistical and infrastructure buildout.

Not yet, no. Not at all in fact. Not for at least 50 years.

When i get the proof that cooper mines and refineries can work without oil and coal, i will get my hopes up.

[edit] And anyway, we're nowhere clse to that yet. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-browser?country...

Peak oil generally refers to extraction peak. It is possible to have more sources than ever but no longer the need to extract as much as in the past.

Also the energy return on investment (EROI) to extract oil is steadily declining I believe.

The reserves are high, but the energy required to extract them are increasingly costly. Shale oil extraction requires about 25% of the energy extracted. Same goes for Venezuela's gargantuan reserves: higher volume than Saudi Arabia, but the lowest quality; almost entirely asphalt-like. You have to expend large amounts of energy to heat it so that it becomes liquid and can go into a pipe.

And peak oil is very real. Earth is desperately still 13k km in diameter, in the face of economic growth that has been exponential for the last 200 years. At some point some limits are going to be reached; and the author thinks we're not that far from them.

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