As the Chinese aphorism says, what goes up like a rocket comes down like a rocket. Gold will plummet as soon as the recession begins from the high price of oil. Economists quoted in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL say that we go into recession when oil hits $125 to $150 a barrel. Well, that could be tomorrow with the right mix of global problems. And it will happen anyway in about 6 months due to just high demand. And when global oil production begins its terminal descent, gold won't be worth much. Gold is valuable for its use in electronics and jewelery. In an oil depleted world, electronics and jewelery will hit the skids, and so too will the price of gold.
The value of paper money will drop too, but gold drop faster. In the long run, all money, bank investments, pensions, long term care insurance, etc. will have no value. All investments and money represent the power to buy oil, natural gas, and coal, and the energy and stuff it provides in the future. In the long run there will be no fossil energy, and not much energy, and promises to deliver energy in the future are illusionary.
In that case it is very weird that gold and silver were valued not just as ornaments but as stores of value for thousands of years before fossil fuels were substantially exploited.
That was yesterday, today is another day. What will people do with gold in a fossil fuel depleted stone age society? Will you trade your vegetables for something just because it is shiny?? The new stone age won't be anything like even 2000 B.C. In 2100, there won't be any global, national or even trade between cities. Just how do you suppose people will get around to trade gold tokens for stuff from afar. Maybe read some of Chris Shaws' stuff to get some historical perspective on gold and energy. His 5 articles can be found here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3837
He makes the point that energy has always been the one true currency. Think about it. He is right.
I have thought about it, and decided you were incorrect.
You are moving on to another line of argument now the first that the value of gold is dependent on fossil fuels has proved unsustainable.
I do not intend to follow you there, now that the first grounds are proved specious, nor to read 5 articles.
Please sort out the case you wish to present in the first case, and please do not request that anyone read 5 articles - if you wish to make an argument, you should be able to summarise.
I have looked at the alleged loss of value for gold as much as I wish to.
You didn't think for very long. I thought about what Shaw wrote for months before concluding that he is right. Indeed, I read his articles several times. He has much to say about energy and history, and he is quite humorous too. This gave me new insights for thinking about Peak Oil.
For every person buying gold there is another person selling gold - I wonder what the person selling the gold is buying with his money. If he has held the gold for any length of time his pile of money has magically grown, but was it a good store of wealth?
Most people are using gold as a compact, very dense, indestructible store of wealth, gold is not convienient any more for day to day financial transactions - they are two different uses.
If you hold gold as a store of wealth no interest is payable, so it is viable long term so long as everybody accepts gold has value - unlike our current fiat, fractional banking, system which must have growth.
All saving methods are risky, gold is no exception.
It's interesting to see what happened with gold in other societies that suffered economic collapse. The guy from Argentina recommended gold, but said to buy a bunch of cheap gold wedding rings, rather than coins or other investment pieces. He said the dealers would give you the same amount for any piece of gold, regardless of size or quality. And I suppose offering a cheap wedding ring would make you less of a target than flashing around a big coin or ingot.
The Yugoslavia guy didn't recommend gold. What use is gold, when there's no food or fuel to buy? He said other things were far more valuable: soap, cosmetics, toilet paper, cast iron cookware. People would trade food for those items.
Sorry cjwirth but people move to gold when they are uncertain about the value of paper money. This is exactly what we are seeing now with the problems in the interbank market, even securities backed by the government are being marked down. The US government is panicking if they have to inject hundreds of billions into the market to keep it from collapsing.
Gold has been seen as a store of wealth for thousands of years since unlike paper money the amount cannot just be changed overnight by governments.
Only a small fraction of gold is used for anything, the vast majority of gold is held in store.
You buy gold then. I sold my mutual fund investments in gold and I'm buying land now, 1 hectare on a river, in a location with 2 meters of rain annually, with a short dry season, coldest in the 40s and warmest about 95. After the collapse, you'll have gold, and I'll have food. See ACE's chart on world population at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3726#more
I won't want any of your gold, and I don't think my neighbors will either.
That's fine if you think that things will really go down the pan.
It is really the old conundrum that you can't eat gold.
However, people are remarkably resistant to throwing away their ill-gotten gains, for instance the French army on the retreat from Moscow carried as much loot as they could for as long as they could before abandoning it, and almost up to the end there were a few optimists who for enough gold would swap some invaluable food, if they had any.
So gold will loose it's value eventually, but things have to get pretty extreme for that to happen.
It was your original assertion that the value placed in gold was solely due to fossil fuels which is incorrect.
The last time the dollar was falling this hard and inflation was roaring, gold went up, not down. Not until Jimmy Carter convinced some of the largest gold buyers in the world (among them at that time being Saudi Arabia) that the dollar would be ok, did gold fall. In other words, gold did not fall until the dollar began to strengthen.
Thus, I don't see how gold can fall at the same time that the dollar falls. You can believe what you choose but are you actually short gold? Are you putting your money into that bet? Some of us have been long gold and silver for quite a while and I don't see any reason to change that position.
Will there be periodic corrections? Yes, just as oil has been volatile. But the trend line remains upwards unless or until the dollar actually strengthens. So long as the dollar is weak, I will expect gold to either rise or at least retain its current levels. Historically, it has been more accurate to think of gold as the "anti-dollar" - when the dollar falls, gold rises. When the dollar rises, gold falls.
You are clearly clueless. Check out the gold price at the end of the first oil crisis. Gold increased 10 fold during the crisis. Jewelry and industrial demand are both negligible compared to the stocks kept as investment by banks and individuals. Gold will follow oil up. And silver will do even better.
The intrinsic value of an asset is a direct function of the amount of energy it takes to extract it from nature. What makes gold so valuable is that once that energy is expended, the product stays good for a very long time (gold doesn't oxidize or otherwise fall apart). Even if its utility is limited, gold is something you can always count on, regardless of the future availability of energy.
Please, no ad hominum attacks. Gold is not very nutritious, see my comments above. Why would things remain the same after the world economy and civilization as we know it collapses, and most people on the planet die??
Most of human history occurred with less than 8% of the current population. Great empires of non-technological societies were forged and extended, often in search of gold (as well as other resources), when global population was a mere 4% of right now. That would have been Rome, you know?
You seem to assume that collapse means The End. It hasn't before so far and I don't expect it to this time either. And if it did, we're talking extinction, where nothing, not skills, food, sewing needles, or gold would matter anyway.
Doubt about the value of gold (and silver, particularly in ancient China) globally as a means of storing value suggests considerable reading of history with regards to precious metals might give your reason to reconsider your position. There have been a very few isolated societies where gold was not seen as having value. Those are far outnumbered by those societies that saw gold as being valuable.
Of course people should prepare first for collapse by emphasizing usable skills, materials, tools, land, etc. But if you reached the point where you felt as prepared as you could be but still wished to find a way to transfer wealth out of a collapsing society, across the void of collapse, and into a new society, gold might be one very likely means to do that.
Economy and civilization will not collapse everywhere and certainly not at the same time. In many parts of the world, people will muddle through for a long time.
Seems to me that everyone is discounting the value of wits, as "living by one's wits." Gold and land will be important, then as now. Intelligence will be the most important, then as now. Intelligence, and the ability to use it, that is -- as in social networking. Clever people will always find "legal" ways to take the gold and land away from the less clever.
Nothing has changed, or ever can change without a total change in the nature of our species. And then, it wouldn't be us.
In "Gone with the Wind", one had land. But not the money to keep the tax men at bay.
If we do enter economic collapse, Governments will be looking anywhere they can for some entities which are ripe for extracting cash. Its hard to know who has gold. Or knowledge. They already know who has accounts or land - and what its worth.
KNOWLEDGE is the most valuable of anything I have. I have almost all of my assets in practical skills. I can build/repair damned near anything. Right now, my skills are unused, as I am in competition with the cellphone.
Today, stuff is replaced cheaper than it can be fixed.
Example: No-one today runs R-290 in their refrigerator.
Say we have the fullbore economic collapse and freon and new refrigerators are unavailable? But I can still get compressors from scrap yards? I am not gonna tell you what R-290 is, but I will give you a hint: its widely available and is a damned good refrigerant, albeit it is flammable.
Maybe that interested you enough to google it.
If there is no-one answering the other end of the phone, my services will be invaluable - more precious than gold.
Anything else I have is fair game for the thief or tax man.
Either of them will find ways of taking everything I have, except whats in my head. That alone is mine.
I feel the only thing I have going for me is to make myself useful to others. I get a strong impression that useless people will not survive in a scenario where what you can DO reflects how much your community needs YOU.
Propane goes up pretty good if the refigerator leaks (as do other hydrocarbons) that's why halons HFCs and HCFCs are used so widely - R290 usually blows the doors off the house.
You think we will have spare energy for refrigeration? Hmmm ... I think it depends where in the world you happen to be!
But I do agree 'Mr fixit' type people will be in great demand sooner than most expect - that's why I am teaching myself to design, program and build circuits with PIC chips. Even the apparently simplest devices such as refrigerators have embedded microprocessors which are no longer manufactured after a very short while - IMO there will be a need for people who can build and program electronics enough to keep basic systems running without the correct spare parts.
In the UK at least, the 'useless' people now consume a good part of our taxes - what happens if there are insufficient taxes to pay for the social security?
Too bad that GDP chart doesn't extend backwards for another decade. I suspect that it would clearly illustrate that the US has indeed essentially been in a long-term recession since the mid 1970s, broken by only a few brief episodes of positive GDP growth.
What is clear is that the long term trend is not flat, but down.
wnc, i wonder if the national debt, imo,a keynesian index, doesn't show what you are saying:
"the US has indeed essentially been in a long-term recession since the mid 1970s, broken by only a few brief episodes of positive GDP growth"
i sometimes wonder if regan and his cia trained vp didnt see this. 1980 was the start of the current and onging national debt bubble.
I count six prior: The Square Deal (TR 1904), New Freedom (Wilson 1912-13), New Deal (FDR 1933), Fair Deal (HST 1949), Great Society (Initiated by JFK 1963, finished by LBJ 1964), and the no-name, supply-side, trickle-down "Voodoo Economics" of Reagan, 1981. Those interested in their particulars can look them up in wikipedia.
In additional to its use in jewelry and electronics, gold also functions as a currency. Did gold go up from $250/oz to $1000/oz because its use increased in electronics and jewelry? The bull market in gold is a mirror image of the bear market in US $. As long as the US $ keeps falling, gold will keep going up.
As long as we have civilization, gold will be considered valuable.
Your Quote: "As long as we have civilization, gold will be considered valuable."
The basis of civilization, job specialization, and wealth creation is food surpluses. Food surpluses are only possible with I/O-NPK.
My speculation is that those of us who can't afford land might gain some small survival advantage by hoarding I-NPK to trade for food. Farmers will not be interested in gold, big screen TVs, or plastic salad shooters, but they will be interested in the 10:1 ERoEI of I-NPK.
Of course, the timing and methods of achieving this on a personal, community, and regional scale have been the subject of my recent postings. I just wish I had more expertise on this topic.
The above post is based upon the assumption that the American masses will prefer to wheelbarrow their way into relocalized permaculture. If not, then stockpiling ammo and machetes for trade may be the better investment. :(
Nauruans once enjoyed the second highest per capita income in the world, thanks to their island consisting of almost pure phosphate, a mixture of ancient coral and millions of years of seabird droppings.
They went on a giddy spending spree, chartering planes to take them on shopping trips to Hawaii, Guam and Singapore.
In spite of the island's 25mph speed limit, a chief of police bought a yellow Lamborghini, then found himself too fat to fit behind the wheel.
-------------------------------------------------------
Recall my earlier Mo-rock-o P-irates & AFRICOM postings for control of Life's Bottleneck. Have you hugged your bag of NPK today?
Totoneila,
Why do you think we will not have a food surplus in the US for the next 20 years? We have enough oil & natural gas in this country for agriculture, making fertilizer, railways, etc; just not enough for everybody to drive a ICE car. If it comes to a crunch, people will get rid of their lawns and create food gardens and raise chicken and goats in their backyard.
There will be considerable hardship, no doubt. But civilization - at least in N. America & Australia - will survive.
As the Chinese aphorism says, what goes up like a rocket comes down like a rocket. Gold will plummet as soon as the recession begins from the high price of oil. Economists quoted in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL say that we go into recession when oil hits $125 to $150 a barrel. Well, that could be tomorrow with the right mix of global problems. And it will happen anyway in about 6 months due to just high demand. And when global oil production begins its terminal descent, gold won't be worth much. Gold is valuable for its use in electronics and jewelery. In an oil depleted world, electronics and jewelery will hit the skids, and so too will the price of gold.
and what are those paper $$$$'s worth ? imo, the demand for wallpaper will "hit the skids" as well.
The value of paper money will drop too, but gold drop faster. In the long run, all money, bank investments, pensions, long term care insurance, etc. will have no value. All investments and money represent the power to buy oil, natural gas, and coal, and the energy and stuff it provides in the future. In the long run there will be no fossil energy, and not much energy, and promises to deliver energy in the future are illusionary.
In that case it is very weird that gold and silver were valued not just as ornaments but as stores of value for thousands of years before fossil fuels were substantially exploited.
What's changed?
That was yesterday, today is another day. What will people do with gold in a fossil fuel depleted stone age society? Will you trade your vegetables for something just because it is shiny?? The new stone age won't be anything like even 2000 B.C. In 2100, there won't be any global, national or even trade between cities. Just how do you suppose people will get around to trade gold tokens for stuff from afar. Maybe read some of Chris Shaws' stuff to get some historical perspective on gold and energy. His 5 articles can be found here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3837
He makes the point that energy has always been the one true currency. Think about it. He is right.
I have thought about it, and decided you were incorrect.
You are moving on to another line of argument now the first that the value of gold is dependent on fossil fuels has proved unsustainable.
I do not intend to follow you there, now that the first grounds are proved specious, nor to read 5 articles.
Please sort out the case you wish to present in the first case, and please do not request that anyone read 5 articles - if you wish to make an argument, you should be able to summarise.
I have looked at the alleged loss of value for gold as much as I wish to.
You didn't think for very long. I thought about what Shaw wrote for months before concluding that he is right. Indeed, I read his articles several times. He has much to say about energy and history, and he is quite humorous too. This gave me new insights for thinking about Peak Oil.
Didn't take long to think about, really.
IMO, humans will always value gold. Also IMO, we're not going back to the stone age. If we're unlucky, perhaps a modern dark age. Perhaps.
For every person buying gold there is another person selling gold - I wonder what the person selling the gold is buying with his money. If he has held the gold for any length of time his pile of money has magically grown, but was it a good store of wealth?
Most people are using gold as a compact, very dense, indestructible store of wealth, gold is not convienient any more for day to day financial transactions - they are two different uses.
If you hold gold as a store of wealth no interest is payable, so it is viable long term so long as everybody accepts gold has value - unlike our current fiat, fractional banking, system which must have growth.
All saving methods are risky, gold is no exception.
Maybe he's just meeting a margin call?
It's interesting to see what happened with gold in other societies that suffered economic collapse. The guy from Argentina recommended gold, but said to buy a bunch of cheap gold wedding rings, rather than coins or other investment pieces. He said the dealers would give you the same amount for any piece of gold, regardless of size or quality. And I suppose offering a cheap wedding ring would make you less of a target than flashing around a big coin or ingot.
The Yugoslavia guy didn't recommend gold. What use is gold, when there's no food or fuel to buy? He said other things were far more valuable: soap, cosmetics, toilet paper, cast iron cookware. People would trade food for those items.
Maybe we'll just trade with cigarettes. Right.
Sorry cjwirth but people move to gold when they are uncertain about the value of paper money. This is exactly what we are seeing now with the problems in the interbank market, even securities backed by the government are being marked down. The US government is panicking if they have to inject hundreds of billions into the market to keep it from collapsing.
Gold has been seen as a store of wealth for thousands of years since unlike paper money the amount cannot just be changed overnight by governments.
Only a small fraction of gold is used for anything, the vast majority of gold is held in store.
You buy gold then. I sold my mutual fund investments in gold and I'm buying land now, 1 hectare on a river, in a location with 2 meters of rain annually, with a short dry season, coldest in the 40s and warmest about 95. After the collapse, you'll have gold, and I'll have food. See ACE's chart on world population at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3726#more
I won't want any of your gold, and I don't think my neighbors will either.
That's fine if you think that things will really go down the pan.
It is really the old conundrum that you can't eat gold.
However, people are remarkably resistant to throwing away their ill-gotten gains, for instance the French army on the retreat from Moscow carried as much loot as they could for as long as they could before abandoning it, and almost up to the end there were a few optimists who for enough gold would swap some invaluable food, if they had any.
So gold will loose it's value eventually, but things have to get pretty extreme for that to happen.
It was your original assertion that the value placed in gold was solely due to fossil fuels which is incorrect.
The last time the dollar was falling this hard and inflation was roaring, gold went up, not down. Not until Jimmy Carter convinced some of the largest gold buyers in the world (among them at that time being Saudi Arabia) that the dollar would be ok, did gold fall. In other words, gold did not fall until the dollar began to strengthen.
Thus, I don't see how gold can fall at the same time that the dollar falls. You can believe what you choose but are you actually short gold? Are you putting your money into that bet? Some of us have been long gold and silver for quite a while and I don't see any reason to change that position.
Will there be periodic corrections? Yes, just as oil has been volatile. But the trend line remains upwards unless or until the dollar actually strengthens. So long as the dollar is weak, I will expect gold to either rise or at least retain its current levels. Historically, it has been more accurate to think of gold as the "anti-dollar" - when the dollar falls, gold rises. When the dollar rises, gold falls.
You are clearly clueless. Check out the gold price at the end of the first oil crisis. Gold increased 10 fold during the crisis. Jewelry and industrial demand are both negligible compared to the stocks kept as investment by banks and individuals. Gold will follow oil up. And silver will do even better.
The intrinsic value of an asset is a direct function of the amount of energy it takes to extract it from nature. What makes gold so valuable is that once that energy is expended, the product stays good for a very long time (gold doesn't oxidize or otherwise fall apart). Even if its utility is limited, gold is something you can always count on, regardless of the future availability of energy.
Please, no ad hominum attacks. Gold is not very nutritious, see my comments above. Why would things remain the same after the world economy and civilization as we know it collapses, and most people on the planet die??
Most of human history occurred with less than 8% of the current population. Great empires of non-technological societies were forged and extended, often in search of gold (as well as other resources), when global population was a mere 4% of right now. That would have been Rome, you know?
You seem to assume that collapse means The End. It hasn't before so far and I don't expect it to this time either. And if it did, we're talking extinction, where nothing, not skills, food, sewing needles, or gold would matter anyway.
Doubt about the value of gold (and silver, particularly in ancient China) globally as a means of storing value suggests considerable reading of history with regards to precious metals might give your reason to reconsider your position. There have been a very few isolated societies where gold was not seen as having value. Those are far outnumbered by those societies that saw gold as being valuable.
Of course people should prepare first for collapse by emphasizing usable skills, materials, tools, land, etc. But if you reached the point where you felt as prepared as you could be but still wished to find a way to transfer wealth out of a collapsing society, across the void of collapse, and into a new society, gold might be one very likely means to do that.
Economy and civilization will not collapse everywhere and certainly not at the same time. In many parts of the world, people will muddle through for a long time.
I completely disagree..
People with wealth want to preserve that wealth.
If there is fear that other assets might under perform, there will be a flight to quality:
Gold and Land
Seems to me that everyone is discounting the value of wits, as "living by one's wits." Gold and land will be important, then as now. Intelligence will be the most important, then as now. Intelligence, and the ability to use it, that is -- as in social networking. Clever people will always find "legal" ways to take the gold and land away from the less clever.
Nothing has changed, or ever can change without a total change in the nature of our species. And then, it wouldn't be us.
My fear with land is that it will be taxed.
In "Gone with the Wind", one had land. But not the money to keep the tax men at bay.
If we do enter economic collapse, Governments will be looking anywhere they can for some entities which are ripe for extracting cash. Its hard to know who has gold. Or knowledge. They already know who has accounts or land - and what its worth.
KNOWLEDGE is the most valuable of anything I have. I have almost all of my assets in practical skills. I can build/repair damned near anything. Right now, my skills are unused, as I am in competition with the cellphone.
Today, stuff is replaced cheaper than it can be fixed.
Example: No-one today runs R-290 in their refrigerator.
Say we have the fullbore economic collapse and freon and new refrigerators are unavailable? But I can still get compressors from scrap yards? I am not gonna tell you what R-290 is, but I will give you a hint: its widely available and is a damned good refrigerant, albeit it is flammable.
Maybe that interested you enough to google it.
If there is no-one answering the other end of the phone, my services will be invaluable - more precious than gold.
Anything else I have is fair game for the thief or tax man.
Either of them will find ways of taking everything I have, except whats in my head. That alone is mine.
I feel the only thing I have going for me is to make myself useful to others. I get a strong impression that useless people will not survive in a scenario where what you can DO reflects how much your community needs YOU.
Steve...
"my services will be invaluable - more precious than gold."
Yes, but what will you accept as payment?
Food.
:-)
Propane goes up pretty good if the refigerator leaks (as do other hydrocarbons) that's why halons HFCs and HCFCs are used so widely - R290 usually blows the doors off the house.
You think we will have spare energy for refrigeration? Hmmm ... I think it depends where in the world you happen to be!
But I do agree 'Mr fixit' type people will be in great demand sooner than most expect - that's why I am teaching myself to design, program and build circuits with PIC chips. Even the apparently simplest devices such as refrigerators have embedded microprocessors which are no longer manufactured after a very short while - IMO there will be a need for people who can build and program electronics enough to keep basic systems running without the correct spare parts.
In the UK at least, the 'useless' people now consume a good part of our taxes - what happens if there are insufficient taxes to pay for the social security?
The US isn't in recession now? Look at the second chart.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data
Cheers
Too bad that GDP chart doesn't extend backwards for another decade. I suspect that it would clearly illustrate that the US has indeed essentially been in a long-term recession since the mid 1970s, broken by only a few brief episodes of positive GDP growth.
What is clear is that the long term trend is not flat, but down.
wnc, i wonder if the national debt, imo,a keynesian index, doesn't show what you are saying:
"the US has indeed essentially been in a long-term recession since the mid 1970s, broken by only a few brief episodes of positive GDP growth"
i sometimes wonder if regan and his cia trained vp didnt see this. 1980 was the start of the current and onging national debt bubble.
AKA "living beyond our means"
... AKA "Contract
withon America."that didnt happen until '94
"that didnt happen until '94"
I count six prior: The Square Deal (TR 1904), New Freedom (Wilson 1912-13), New Deal (FDR 1933), Fair Deal (HST 1949), Great Society (Initiated by JFK 1963, finished by LBJ 1964), and the no-name, supply-side, trickle-down "Voodoo Economics" of Reagan, 1981. Those interested in their particulars can look them up in wikipedia.
The most likely name for that voodoo was Morning In America. Followed by the ominous New World Order.
In additional to its use in jewelry and electronics, gold also functions as a currency. Did gold go up from $250/oz to $1000/oz because its use increased in electronics and jewelry? The bull market in gold is a mirror image of the bear market in US $. As long as the US $ keeps falling, gold will keep going up.
As long as we have civilization, gold will be considered valuable.
Hello Suyog,
Your Quote: "As long as we have civilization, gold will be considered valuable."
The basis of civilization, job specialization, and wealth creation is food surpluses. Food surpluses are only possible with I/O-NPK.
My speculation is that those of us who can't afford land might gain some small survival advantage by hoarding I-NPK to trade for food. Farmers will not be interested in gold, big screen TVs, or plastic salad shooters, but they will be interested in the 10:1 ERoEI of I-NPK.
Of course, the timing and methods of achieving this on a personal, community, and regional scale have been the subject of my recent postings. I just wish I had more expertise on this topic.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
The above post is based upon the assumption that the American masses will prefer to wheelbarrow their way into relocalized permaculture. If not, then stockpiling ammo and machetes for trade may be the better investment. :(
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Strong words even today bob.
Here is a fomerly very wealthy society that didn't hoard their phosphate when they had the chance:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/13/wnauru11...
-------------------------------------
Tough times for Nauru as money runs out
Nauruans once enjoyed the second highest per capita income in the world, thanks to their island consisting of almost pure phosphate, a mixture of ancient coral and millions of years of seabird droppings.
They went on a giddy spending spree, chartering planes to take them on shopping trips to Hawaii, Guam and Singapore.
In spite of the island's 25mph speed limit, a chief of police bought a yellow Lamborghini, then found himself too fat to fit behind the wheel.
-------------------------------------------------------
Recall my earlier Mo-rock-o P-irates & AFRICOM postings for control of Life's Bottleneck. Have you hugged your bag of NPK today?
Totoneila,
Why do you think we will not have a food surplus in the US for the next 20 years? We have enough oil & natural gas in this country for agriculture, making fertilizer, railways, etc; just not enough for everybody to drive a ICE car. If it comes to a crunch, people will get rid of their lawns and create food gardens and raise chicken and goats in their backyard.
There will be considerable hardship, no doubt. But civilization - at least in N. America & Australia - will survive.
I hope nobody is making investment decisions based on this advice!
Good on you cjwirth - you rarely find commentators who understand that less oil is less wealth..