Jobs and Natural Resources

As we all know, jobs and natural resources are increasingly scarce in today's world. While this is mainly a tech and DIY related blog, occasionally I will mention issues I think are related to the subjects at hand. Jobs and natural resources are an imperative for nearly all my readership - indeed the two are intertwined.

No doubt anyone buying groceries has noticed the prices of food trending sharply upward within the past couple years, despite government and media claims that inflation "is nearly flat". Food prices are going up for a variety of reasons. These include the following:
1) Fuel costs. Oil is used to make fertilizer, run the farm itself, refrigerate the product, and truck it to market. The typical food we eat has travelled some 1600 miles from its point of origin to our table, according to some sources.
2) Commodities Speculation. Commodities speculators are wreaking havoc with the prices of precious metals, fuel, and food.
3) Fuel alcohol production. Programs designed to create fuel alcohol to supplement existing fossil fuels are diverting resources from food production to fuels. Corn that was used to feed our cows and chickens is now being fermented into alcohol to run vehicles.
4) Devaluation of the Dollar. Due to our government's drunken-sailor style spending spree and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's policy of "Quantitative Easing", which is essentially a process of creating money out of thin air with nothing tangible to back it, the value of a dollar has severely eroded. A simple law of supply and demand economics - when you have more dollars chasing the same supply of goods, the buying power of a dollar decreases - and prices go up as a result.
5) Water. Simply put, we're running out of fresh, potable water. 97% of Earth's water is in the oceans and cannot be used directly for drinking or irrigation. And we're in danger of pumping some of our most important ground water aquifers dry.

Per point number 5 above, see the following article:
http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/in-drought-ravaged-plains-efforts-to-save-a-vital-aquifer-85899460061

Jobs
Without raw materials to make and grow stuff with, we can't have job growth, either. The job situation is far more complicated than that, at this point. America's current employment situation is by far most attributable to lopsided treaties such as GATT and NAFTA which place Americans in direct competition with people earning a fraction of what it costs to live in America. On top of lopsided treaties, we have simple bad management on the part of local and state governments which makes it harder to start or maintain a business. The following article details what some states are trying to do about it:

http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/how-did-states-create-jobs-85899482158

I invite my readers to do further research into these and realted issues; only by arming one's self with factual information can one NOT be misled by all the disinformation, misinformation, and half-truths being disseminated out there.