A World of Hurt 2

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Posted on March 14, 2008
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Almost everything seems to be going wrong for the American economy at once. People are buying less, but most things are costing more. Mortgage rates are rising, the dollar is falling and prices of key commodities like oil are leaping from one record high to the next.

A world of hurt, indeed.

That opening quote is from today’s NY Times Business Day section, with a title succinctly descriptive of the moment: One Ill Compounds Another, Hammering the Economy.

Hammered is exactly what many people are feeling. (NOTE: the headline in my print edition is different from this one on the website — I like mine better.)

Could you believe Bush in his press conference today? What a disconnect from reality — but what would any golden-spoon boy know about the suffering of real people? Forgive me the snide crack, but this is a guy who a week ago was stunned when a journalist told him the price of gas at the pump could hit $4 per gallon. “Really? I hadn’t heard that.”

Earth to George — this has already happened in some communities out west. I mean, who is talking to this guy? Does he have any advisors pointing out to him what is happening to the price of crude, the falling dollar, the collapse of Bear Stearns?!

It’s bad enough to have this world of hurt; it is dangerous and unconscionable to have a president this out of touch — for 10 more months, God help us.

How the hurt impacts us was described very well in my local paper today, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. On the front page: Oil prices seep into economy.

$111 per barrel yesterday — and folks, we will never have cheap gas again. Those days are over. The price may come down some, but not a lot. “We will look back at $3 gas as cheap,” said one of the energy market experts quoted here.

Making matters worse is how the price of diesel has skyrocketed. This effects our modes of transport — trucks and freight trains — which means the price of everything will continue to escalate. So will the price of production, as oil is needed by most industries to make just about anything, including the food we eat (for chemical fertilizers, tractors, transport, etc.).

Then add to this the escalating price of grains because of the rise of the grain-based energy industry — and you have another addition to the creation of the perfect storm.

I encourage you to go to the Journal Sentinel article because it provides brief snippets about how escalating energy prices are affecting the lives of real people — bakers, florists, farmers, etc.

A world of hurt has been created by an unsustainable way of life mixed in with a great deal of denial, subterfuge and negligence on the part of political leaders, the energy industries, mainstream economists, and investors like the Saudi monarchy or ExxonMobil shareholders, who are making breath-taking profits off these escalating energy prices.

The sad part is that we could have prepared for this time long ago because we knew just about everything we needed to know 30 years ago to make this transition less painful — predictions of energy shortages, climate changes, population demographics, land use demands. Studies, reports, books, warnings. We heard them all, then went on our merry ways.

Right now, big oil companies are negotiating agreements to manage Iraqi oil fields – in case you forgot why we went to war there.

Here on my blog I vent my frustration. Why are we so resistant to change? Are we really so attached to our lifestyles, to our U.S. way of life, that we cannot wean ourselves from its unreasonable expectations even in the face of this deepening world of hurt?

Wall Street and Washington are trying to figure out how to get out of this fix and keep the markets intact for investors and stockholders. They are trying to figure out how to get through what they keep speaking of as a crisis of cyclical nature that is part of market-based caplitalism, that the markets will work it all out and we will all be okay again one day.

But news of the permanent rise in energy prices should be enough to tell us there is no norm to return to. We are in uncharted territory now.

And where are the religious and moral leaders to start talking about the new way of living required of us now?


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