Many Working Twice as Long to Fill Gas Tanks -- and Worse Yet May be on the Horizon

Many Now Working Twice as Many Hours to Fill Fuel Tanks -- And There May be Worse Yet on the Horizon...

Compared to 1970, a new article from Sightline Daily finds that low-income U.S. earners are working for 7.5 hours a week to fill their cars with gas compared to 3.3 hours per week.

Median-income earners work 2.5 hours per week, up from 1.4 hours per week in 1970, while the average CEO works just 33 seconds per week, down dramatically from the 3.2 minutes her or she would have had to work in 1970.

One run chart included with the article makes it clear that, as a percentage of income,  middle-class Americans paid more for gasoline in 2008 than they did in the darkest days of the energy crisis.

"Despite skyrocketing prices for fuel and other basic commodities, the very rich are increasingly insulated from the real economy", says the article. "The working poor, in particular, are getting absolutely crushed...[and] for median income-earners -- the middle class, by definition -- things have been getting pretty gloomy".

"Middle class Gen-Xers are watching the lifestyle they grew up with -- the average Baby Boomer purchasing power -- recede over the horizon."  

The Sightlines article is clear that immediate aid to the working poor is necessary to keep even basic transportation within the reach of all Americans, but is less than sanguine that the stimulus package currently working its way through congress will have much, if any, effect.

More important the article says, is a concerted push for relieving America's addiction to oil, which is not totally dissimilar to what newly fledged President Obama is planning.

The Sightline Daily article urges conservation rather than a push toward domestic sourcing. That is, before you seek a new source of supply, take the necessary steps to reduce consumption as much as you can.

President Obama, on the other hand, has said he's committed to "energy sovereignty", which could mean conservation, but could also mean "drill, baby, drill!"

Nevertheless, in his opening moves in the war against oil dependency, Mr Obama is demonstrating a relatively balanced approach, taking steps to allow numerous states to allow tight new standards on emissions, and setting a timeline for improved fuel efficiency.

In the meantime, though, it's beginning to appear that things are more dire than the general public has been led to believe thus far. First of all, if the more pessimistic predictions of the peak oil theorists come to fruition, it's possible that Mr Obama's target of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 will be far too little, and far too late.

Worse yet is the nagging feeling that, even if the hammer-blow of peak oil strikes as hard as the original acolytes of the theory suggest, another shoe or two may still be waiting to drop.

Right on us.

Unless mitigated, beginning now, these additional major economic pressures promise to make peak oil's impact on our lifestyles seem truly trivial. The first of these -- call it "peak water" -- is not exactly new. In fact, the U.S. Southwest is already battling the first harbingers of the crisis.

But there may be a new doom swooping down: one of mankind's oldest scourges, but one against which the United States has been thoroughly insulated against until now. In less buzzword-conscious times, the term famine has been employed, but for the sake of a certain symmetry, we propose the phrase "peak food".\

It turns out this risk is not out of the question, and soon. According to a report just  released by the U.K. think tank Chatham House, skyrocketing food prices, water shortages and climate change may soon combine to cause unprecedented global food shortages that will threaten even the wealthiest nations.

So serious is the situation according to Chatham House that among its 10 recommendations the report suggests the creation of "strategic food reserves" to be used in emergency, and the development of which it urges begin immediately, since "part of the reason for the recent food price spike is that worldwide food stocks had fallen to unsustainably low levels." 

It is beginning to appear that we are facing down the barrel of not one, but three guns.

It is beginning to appear that even the trillions in funding the U.S. is willing to deploy may have finally met a problem more intransigent than the abiliity of mere mountains of cash to resolve.

It is beginning to appear that even Mr Obama may not be enough.