Stagflation: Back To the 70s

Despite trying to stick my head in the sand for the last few… is it years now? I couldn’t help but notice how between supply line hick-ups from the pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war a lot of shit is getting seriously expensive these days.

Chief among them is the cost of gasoline, diesel, and other forms of petroleum, but also natural gas. Anything that Russia has been selling to the West is under steep price pressures. The cost of gas (‘petrol’ to you Europeans and Aussies!) has skyrocketed in recent weeks. There are so many pressure points that one more was enough to make the whole thing go wiggy.

I’m barely old enough to remember a thing called “Stagflation” from the 1970s. Basically, it’s when gas prices go up, causing massive inflation in prices across the board, at the same time that the economy contracts– businesses close, people lose jobs. Normally, things either go up together (prices and economy) or down together. With Stagflation, you get the worst of both worlds! FUN, huh?

John Michael Greer wrote a post on this just this week, actually:
www.ecosophia.net/running-on-empty/

Greer predicts a decade of high fuel prices with subsequent economic contraction. Demand destruction, conservation of energy, and some renewables will eventually bring us some stability again, but we won’t be the same nation or people on the other side of that in many ways. The crazy “high” of recent boom times we had before the pandemic is going away, and will probably never return to previous highs.

Hopefully my own household is in a good place for that. I encouraged Cat to buy a gas/electric hybrid car when she got her windfall from the sale of her last home she lived in with her mother. I had a feeling something was going to give within the next 5 years of our move to Heron Hold that would make owning such a car before it was in much higher demand a good idea. It was 4 years before it was needed. (Hard to believe we’ve been here that long already!)

The one net energy sink in our house is heating. We’ve figured out a system of using our wood stove combined with fans to heat the place pretty decently without using the furnace as much. It may end up being worth it, given that the high ceilings and profile of the house make it very cheap to cool in the summer, and summers are getting noticeably hotter and longer. So… there’s a trade off there, and if we end up with rolling blackouts or brownouts in the summer or winter, Heron House may just be well set up to ride that crazy train.

I hope!