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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

1) Peak Oil

2) Our so called "health care" system is extremely fubarred.

There's probably more, but those strike me as the big two.

Edit: To elaborate a bit on point 1, Peak Oil is not the end of oil. It is the end of cheap oil. The current U.S. economy and (expected) lifestyle was developed in the era of cheap oil. That era is ending, which is likely part of what is fueling the depression. Our current infrastructure, habits, etc are simply not sustainable with the cost of oil going up and not coming back down. (At this point, if we discovered that Antarctica or the moon were essentially 99% oil with a thin top layer of dust/snow/whatever, that would not solve this because endless expensive oil does not solve the problem here.)

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Energy spending as percentage of income has gone down.

Also, the inflation adjusted price of gasoline hasn't really changed in a brutal manner:

http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.html

It's twice as high as the 'typical' trend, but vehicles make better enough mileage to eat most of that.

Edit: and if you drill into it, the shipping cost of the food at the grocery store is probably less than the gas cost of driving to the store. So shipping hits prices, but it hits them when a $0.05 shipping cost for a package of whatever goes to $0.10.

Please support your first statement. Because the link you give does not fit with your assertion. It shows price compared to 1979, once of the worst years in the U.S. for the price of gas. The chart shows a steady climb in recent years to a point where it now matches or exceeds the inflation adjusted price of 1979 -- again, one of the worst years for gas prices in the U.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis

Further, the theory of Peak Oil is rooted in actual history. After the Alaska oil pipline came online, oil prices steadily went down for a time. It came online in 1977 and the reduction was in the 1980's: http://www.api.org/oil-and-natural-gas-overview/exploration-...

So please explain to me how a chart showing that current prices are, in real terms, as bad as or worse than 1979 prices supports your first statement.

Thank you.

I was sort of sloppily making two points. Gas prices are energy prices that 'we really feel', and they have only gone up some; qualitatively, gas is still cheap enough that (many) people drive around without thinking about it much.

This shows residential energy as a percentage going down:

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10891

This shows gasoline roughly matching the other link:

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=9831

But to the point, a 1 or 2% increase in gasoline spending might stink, but it shouldn't be smashing the economy.

Well, I have had two classes on Peak Oil and I really don't agree. To reiterate: The current U.S. economy/lifestyle is based on cheap oil. Cheap oil is gradually disappearing. It will only get worse from here. This is just the beginning. Since cheap oil is a foundation stone for our current culture, changes there will be felt wide and deep.

But I guess this is the point at which we agree to disagree.

Thank you for responding. (Edit: and have some upvotes)

Energy cost and availability are a real issue, it's just that if you look backwards, there isn't much of story about where we are right now.

(I would take this a step further and say that $4 is still cheap for gasoline; it isn't clear that the much higher fuel prices in Europe have been bad economically. And I'm someone who got to start driving in the '90s when prices fell below a dollar)

I have gone back and checked your links in your second reply. The second one indicates we are now spending between 4% and 6% of total household income on gasoline, which is double or triple what it was in 1979 at 2% of total household income. That's one helluva a jump.

And the residential energy link you gave: This is the headline: "Lower residential energy use reduces home energy expenditures as share of household income". So people are apparently reducing their use of energy, probably in part because they are feeling pinched.

At this point, it looks to me like you and I do not see the same conclusions from the same data. I don't understand how you can submit the links you did in support of your point of view here.

So I think it's probably best to walk away from this discussion.

Thank you.

You are reading the graph incorrectly. The values for percent of mean income are in the line graph and shown on the right axes. So in 1979, 5%, 2012, 4%.

It's not a very good measure, it isn't worth analyzing it deeply, but (to me anyway), it doesn't point to a massive increase in energy spending.

Concentrating blindly on the gasoline price is misleading. Consider our environment: We largely wear products made directly or indirectly out of fossil fuels. We eat food grown using synthetic fertilizers made out of natural gas. That's also where the plastic in the keyboard you're typing on came from. Not to mention the rest of your computer which probably took at least a barrel of oil to produce from mining the ores to the finished product.

We live in compounds built out of materials that at least in some phase of their production include major oil or gas inputs. We drive and walk on roads literally made out of oil, in vehicles that were built out of parts which required major amounts of oil.

We live in an era of oil, our life is based on oil.

For now.

I'm not denying peak oil, I'm arguing that oil prices (and other energy prices) have not gone up so much in recent decades that they have smashed the economy. They must impact the economy, but I sure would point to things like increased size of the domestic labor force, the skill hoisting of the global labor force and automation before I would point to energy prices. And then things like expectations of skilled labor in the U.S. have changed substantially.

I guess we'll see soon enough. I think oil price is the real reason behind the economic trouble.

I think we're in for several more 2008-style stair step economic crashes over a longer period of time, with little growth between them. At least until we can truly replace oil as a transportable high density energy source. (Or until political and societal systems break down.)

Hopefully we get some major new energy source, like cheap fusion or space based generation, like orbital mass production of photovoltaics panels and beaming it back to earth in microwaves. Given sufficient energy, we could just synthesize the liquid fuels we need.

There's unfortunately a low chance we get this magic energy source in time, but let's hope for the best.

I think it's a big mistake to assume most of the expensive oil effect are through direct energy expenditures.

Consider what is listed as "shelter", "transportation" and "food". The biggest costs are there, according to the first page you linked. Those areas heavily affected by cost of energy and reduce what is available for all the rest, including spending on gasoline.

Are vehicle miles going up or down? Maybe gasoline spending is not increasing, because people just don't have any money left for it?

Yeah, it's not a great measure.

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