Inconvenient Truths

My blogging has been intermittent lately because I'm pretty much shell shocked at the state of the world. I feel trapped between a sense that everything is changing and that nothing is changing. The markets are reeling and people are panicking. Yet somehow, that one cup of coffee isn't enough which means it feels like every other day. Yet the nagging feeling goes, we've leveraged ourselves financially and it's finally come home to haunt us. What kills me is that this financial crisis was a matter of when not a matter of if. It caused me to defer my housing purchases for the longest time since I knew that what was going was just nuts. It made no sense. People knew, but they deluded themselves. The current crisis is basically an inconvenient truth of what was going to happen after years of crazy lending.

Another more inconvenient truth or I should say truths are waiting to collapse on us. The first is the energy crisis. Our economic engine is based on cheap oil and we got a shock of oil out of control this past summer. But at some point, the price will not be driven by speculation but reality of lessened supplies. We all know this as a when, not an if. And cries of "Drill baby drill" are not going to change that.

The second crisis is going to that of global warming. We know that greenhouse gases are raising the temperature of the planet on average. Yet we do nothing about it. What is going to happen when we have a greenhouse crisis instead of a financial crisis. It's not clear to me whether there will be a bailout. When things spin out of control, it may be at a rate we cannot handle. This is what we are seeing with the current bailout. We can't do it fast enough, nor know whether it actually makes a difference. The only thing we do know is prevention, but somehow that's called regulation.

There are tipping points in life, and we shouldn't dance around them until we know how tip them back.