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Post Peak Iberia
Luis de Sousa, The Oil Drum: Europe
It all started in Spain, it quickly spread to Portugal and southern France. Lorry drivers are on the streets and on roads protesting against high fuel prices and bringing normal day life to a stand still.
Spanish lorry drivers blocking main access roads to Madrid.
[Update IV : 13-06-2008 19h00]
Spotty shortages of fresh goods, petrol and diesel are still enduring. This morning the radio reported that the route connections between Algarve and Andalucía were still being blocked, disrupting fuel supplies to the former region. In Spain fresh goods are still a problem in some supermarkets, with picket lines now blockading access to central warehouses that supply retailers. It is likely that these products will see price hikes during the following days, as supply falls from normal levels.
Up to this fifth day of strike there have been more than 1000 protesters detained by the police and 600 others have been fined for ill driving practices. But on the overall order seems to have been restored and life appears to coming back to normal for the regular citizen.
(14 June 2008)
Fuel Protests Intensify Across Asia
Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times
Thousands of South Korean truck drivers went on strike Friday to protest rising fuel prices, threatening to paralyze the country’s ports and challenging the already unpopular government of President Lee Myung-bak.
Across Asia, sharp rises in fuel prices continued to stoke public anger. In Malaysia and Thailand, consumers and truckers demanding bigger fuel subsidies from their governments threatened to strike and Thai fishermen warned that they would burn their boats.
(14 June 2008)
The Wal-Mart Dilemma, the Two-Income Trap and the End of Oil
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World
I’ve written before about the Wal-Mart Dilemma: Less disposable real income for workers forces suppliers to lower prices and quality by offshoring production and service and laying off domestic workers, so they have even less disposable income. It’s a classic vicious cycle.
Its consequences — unemployment, underemployment, low wages, low product quality, and endemic poverty — are visible everywhere in North America, and the disease is spreading. The solution — duties on imported goods and services that can reasonably be produced locally — is enough to make globalists and ‘free’ traders foam at the mouth, and they have invested heavily in politicians to make sure it doesn’t happen.
… What will the average citizen do when these goods become unaffordable? Here’s my take on how the Wal-Mart Dilemma will play out:
1. We will eat less healthy foods. The cheapest foods are the processed, canned goods made from leftover food products, the stuff that would never sell if presented in its natural state on the shelves. Sugar, corn and soybeans are still very cheap, despite their appeal as bio-fuels. Because we’re mostly (thanks to the Wal-Mart Dilemma and the Two-Income Trap) underpaid, overworked, two-income families, there is no time or energy to prepare healthy meals from scratch, so we’ll continue to patronize take-out junk food places, but buy more of the cheaper, less nutritious items on their menus.
2. We will buy very cheap ‘second cars’. Two jobs means two cars are needed by most of our suburban sprawl families, but despite the jump in gasoline prices, only 20% of the cost of car ownership is fuel. Rather than going to unaffordable hybrids and diesel vehicles, we will buy new Chinese and Indian-made $2500 ‘junk cars’ as their second vehicles, letting them keep the luxury of one gas-gulping SUV (for the illusion of safety), while keeping the overall cost of car ownership at 1990s levels even with $7/gal gasoline. “Your turn to take the Tata to work, dear!”
3. We will use space heaters and room air conditioners (made guess where?) instead of central ones. …
(12 June 2008)
