Read a good book by Jeff Rubin entitled Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller. It is about the price of petroleum, cheap oil, and its impact on the world economy.

He says it was the main instigator of the 2008 economic meltdown, and he expects more of these events to occur, when the price of gasoline does a sudden increase. He says eventually manufacturing will return to North America, when the cost of shipping from China becomes prohibitive. He is in favor of a carbon tax and for the current trade imbalance of importing from cheaper countries without a carbon tax is to put a carbon tariff on imported goods from countries that do not have a carbon tax. Kyoto and carbon tax puts countries at disadvantage. They must add the cost of a carbon tax onto their products, or invest to produce the products cleanly. Either way their costs go up. China is free to pollute and emit with no extra costs, and export what they produce. A tariff at our current carbon rates would mitigate that, and make our goods competitive. When it becomes more economical to produce locally, then our factories, now clean, can reopen.

It isn’t quite a doom and gloom book, but our world will change, the overall cost of things will go up, the majority of the population won’t have access to the luxuries of the current era, but we can adapt. He says it is inevitable. Either we lessen the pain and start to take the steps he outlines now, or we have those changes thrust upon us and we suffer the pain.