Energy up 49 percent
Industrial metals up 21 percent
Precious metals up 48 percent
Agriculture up 59 percent
For the last 12 months

Much of this increase in prices is that the Federal Reserve has to fight the slow economy and has temporarily stopped fighting inflation. But the Federal Reserve will do what it has to do if inflation becomes the major problem.

Prices have I’m sure some component of going up because of demand and supply around the world and some because the dollar is dropping. It gets complicated.

http://www.iht.com/ articles/ 2008/ 03/ 09/ business/ crop.php

which does not fully report the various ‘food’ riots in South Asia nor the semi-starvation in Haiti, as examples.

The point is that food and energy are both in short supply just now…

You might care to speculate $$ that such will happen again. I certainly will not.

Heat pumps require electricity, but they can provide some three units of heat energy for every unit of electric energy expended. We have heat pumps in our (around-year) summer home, and the investment pays itself back in 3-5 years.

There are two types of heat pump: outside air based, or ground based. The latter are more expensive but work better if it is very cold a large part of the year.

About fuel cells, I am less sure about their economy. They are some 60% efficient, i.e. 40% comes out as waste heat. The remaining 60% is “multiplied” by the heat pump to 180%, totaling an efficiency of 220% compared to your current solution.

I hope you can do something with this thinking.

Do any of those conditions sound familiar?

So really the story here is that the dollar has dropped and everything else that we buy in dollars is going to cost more.

Many countries in OPEC are talking of using the Euro for it’s transactions. If Bush and the US tries to push OPEC at all, they just would do it.

To get a real view on whether the price of oil has increased world wide, you might want to see what the oil price has done to the Euro, Yen and Pound and other currencies.

As far as heating the house, I’ve made the house so none of the water pipes in the house freezes no matter what the temperature gets down to and the furnace doesn’t run when nobodies home. I’ve isolated 3 rooms in the house with gas fireplaces, (I used to install them for a living) so a person only has to heat the one room in the house that’s occupied. We have only heated the whole house less than 12 hours a week. Last summer I super insulated the bedroom (R70 ceiling, R33 walls) when we thought we should resheetrock (older house.) It’s really made a difference.

When J. Piermont Morgan was asked, according to the story, what the stock market would do, he allegedly said “It will fluctuate.”

Looking at the historical trend of crude oil prices, there are indeed ups and downs superimposed upon a secular upward trend. The reasons for the trend are clear, the reasons for the fluctuations opaque.

A bet that the price of crude will go down some amount in the next few years is a good one. If you set a particular price on a particular date the bet is quite, quite chancy. Rouhgly akin to the difference between the climate and the weather, IMHO.

The world of hurt is worse in, say, Haiti. Also, all across Africa, people are very seriously affected by the high prices of petroleum products.

One (partial) solutiion is bioenergy:

http://biopact.com/

http://www.icis.com/blogs/biofuels/

Try, if you can, to put some thought into your comments. There is a world of hurt out there already among bill payers, heads of households stuggling harder to keep up. As energy costs increase, why don’t we just cut to the chase and tell the whinners to shiver in the dark.

Terry, weigh in here. YOU made a valid point. David made no sense.

John McCormick