Energy Prices Sting US- Cripple Poor Countries

Many Americans my self included have felt the painful sting of energy prices over the last couple years.  It was over a year ago that I purchased a small motorcycle for commutting and later sold my gas guzzling Mazda 3 (guzzling at 27 MPG).

We have seen our heating bills, air conditioning bills, fuel bills, even prices for food and other goods have increased as a result of fuel stipends and transportation kickers.

That's nothing compared to the impact higher energy prices have had on poor nations around the world.

The Wall Street Journal ran a weekend edition report titled "As Fuel Prices Soar, a country Unravels" detailing the problems that have hit Africa's Guinea, a small and very poor on the Western (Atlantic) Coast of Africa.

To bring this home the article details how nurses at a hospital have to regularly pull premature babies out of the incubators and rouse resting mothers to hold the babies covered in extra blankets while the hospital and surrounding city experiences the regularly occurring power blackouts.

In poor countries energy prices are hitting the part of the population that could have been the most upwardly mobile.  City workers and people that are poor, but not still cooking on open fires suffer the most.  They rely on the city infrastructure and jobs in the community, but when those fail they fail.  As the nations cities go, so goes industry and the potential for the economies of these countries to support themselves.

This is rapidly becoming a serious problem for these countries that were already over burdoned with serious problems.

Consider how far Iraq has fallen and how its people were severely agitated by rolling blackouts and the collapse of government support structures.  Consider that many of these countries were not even as well off as Iraq and they are now failing too.

This is a world problem.  The people are suffering now, but as they suffer their anger will increase and this will increase the amount of instability throughout these regions.  We may have an unstable middle east and a civil war in Iraq.  The world will suffer many more problems if problems grow and more countries follow in Iraq's wake and start to fail and break down into civil war also.

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