How we are being misled

One of the first responses that many people have when they hear about peak oil and the consequences that our irresponsible monetary system will have for the future is - why have I not heard this before? or - if this were true surely our politicians would know about it and do something.

Well, imagine what would happen if a politician would say that the oil is hitting its peak and that we have to cut our standard of living by 50%, build vast amounts of renewable energy, put a limit to child birth or downright prepare for war and times of famine. His time as a politician would be over before he even finished his speech. Don't believe me? Just look what happened to France when they proposed to raise the retirement age by just two years.

So, how are they managing to keep the situation under control? I'm not going to bother to be politically correct. By distorting data such as the rate of inflation, they can justify their fiscal policies and claim that the way out of this crisis is to keep consuming, keep stimulating the economy and worst of all, keep printing money.

In the example with inflation, they use a variety of dirty tricks to reach the numbers they are claiming. Instead of just measuring the flat out increase in a variety of products from one year to another, like they did until about 20 years ago, they implement certain tools before to make sure that the number will end up at a presentable figure. Products that are rising in price too fast are removed from "the inflation basket" while others are considered to be less important and therefor have a smaller impact on the final rise in inflation. To justify this, they say that consumers simply switch to other products when something becomes more expensive. In the long run however, this means that inflation is no longer a tool to measure the cost of living, but the cost of survival. Another tool used is called hedonics, where products are adjusted down in price if they consider that they have improved in quality. All in all, inflation is undervalued by at least 10 points.

Another example is unemployment, where workers that have "left the workforce", part time workers and so on included, the real unemployment rate would be around 22% (in the US).

So, what about the mainstream media? My personal opinion is that the media has been going down a long dark path for many years. Investigative journalism is all but extinct and instead we have this over indulgence in so called "entertainment" where you can read about Angelina Jolie's newly adopted African baby. What is being printed is what sells and creates profit, and what sells is what people want to hear.

A public entity that is not as concerned with staying in office or making profit is the military. In Germany and the US among others the military have been taking peak oil seriously and recognize the danger to national security that it poses. National security? Well, the implications of an oil supply shortage could have potentially devastating consequences...