Is the cost of living crisis real ? or is it greatly exaggerated by the left? , sure things have gone up in price but I`m getting fed up of listening to fat knackers wailing about having to miss a meal every day , lighting candles because the leccy has run out, kids starving etc , I suspect in 90% of cases the "victims" have an entitlement disorder and could get by if they acctually got off their fat arrses and cooked fresh food , cancelled their £40.00 pm mobile contracts x 4 per household, cancelled all the other tv subsriptions and turned the heating down from 28 degs to 20 degs an so on.
The energy crisis is real. What is interesting is seeing those of various political leanings trying to avoid the obvious conclusions that:
a) everything they have been saying about renewable electricity generation is, at best, much much further away from present reality than they suggested, and at worst, never going to be viable.
b) the only other option is fossil fuels
c) one of the reasons that b) is because they focused on a) to the exclusion of other realistic options (i.e. nuclear)
So "cost of living crisis" is a much more politically favourable way (to them) to phrase the problem, even when you look at the figures, by far the largest increases in cost - both for individuals and at a supply chain level (e.g. ships cost more to fuel so food prices go up) are rooted in energy prices and supply. If you live in, say, the Middle East or Africa, you'll also get hit by other cost of living effects, like the cessation of your entire wheat supply from Ukraine this year.
It is going to get worse before it gets better, because energy supply problems tend to take a longish time to fix (though so do vaccines, so who knows we might manage to do it quicker), but also because at present many governments are desperately trying to ignore the real issue because they can see the obvious consequences it will have given they've spent 10-20 years insisting that this wouldn't happen.
There has been a largely ignored minority of people who actually understand these things saying that regardless of the science around climate change, any action (either to solve or ignore it) is an economic problem. The same people have noted that the economic solutions proposed by governments and environmentalists are largely pie in the sky, and rely on either wildly optimistic forecasts by renewables industry, or flat out lies. We're going to see what happens when you spend several decades ignoring those people, while listening to shouty activists, far-left ideologues and Hollywood actors.
