NPR piece on $100 oil

[ajohnmeyer]

Did anyone else hear the piece on NPR today about the impending "crisis" posed by $100/barrel crude? I found the link online, but it just doesn't have the same tinge of hysteria and impending doom that the audio version had.

I just listened to it in wondering how people could still be shocked by the prospect of continually rising oil prices.
Somehow I had it drilled into my head as a youngster that oil was eventually going to run out. Couple that with later lessons on supply-and-demand and I have never been shocked by the suggestion that oil prices will continue to rise.
Maybe I had a particularly liberal-environmental education in my little rural Missouri hometown

So what's up with the rest of the country? Are people just that dumb? (wait...don't answer that.)

[SVOboy]

Completely off topic, but where'd you grow up in MO?

Oh well, oil prices will go up, but guess what, comparatively other forms of energy will become cheaper,

[trebuchet03]

Originally Posted by ajohnmeyer

So what's up with the rest of the country? Are people just that dumb? (wait...don't answer that.)

A piece of your insides die when you ask yourself that question... I guess we should rewrite some of the conservation rhetoric.... Don't think about your children's children - think about your retirement

"We're in much better shape than we were 30 years ago," says Lester Lave, a professor of economics at Carnegie-Mellon University. High oil prices are like a headwind that slows the economy, he says, and that headwind is about half as strong as it was in the 1970s.

Oh dear.... But as just about everyone here knows... the faster you're moving, the more traumatic the losses from a headwind....

Why the shift? Partly because the U.S. economy is less dependent on manufacturing, which consumes more oil than service industries.

I guess we can analyze any article to pieces.... But imagine if china's economy collapses (doesn't seem likely), but think about it for a moment... Just where would a great deal of our cost efficiently manufactured goods come from? Or rather, how much would they cost? Bugger :/

[ajohnmeyer]

I'm delighted to call Fayette, MO my hometown. 2500 people and one of those red flashing lights suspended above the main intersection.

[SVOboy]

Nice, fayette, my mom comes from a farm about 6 miles outside of the 198 person metropolis of dawn and mehbe 12 miles from chillicothe. I <3 MO.