Word: preciousness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...energy action. Year after year, that action has been impeded by debate over which groups in the population, which regions of the country, should make the largest economic and environmental sacrifices. After Caracas, it was clear that unless the U.S. accepts some compromises that will cut its consumption of precious petroleum, the OPEC cartel will simply regroup and start pushing up prices in unison once again...
...everyone from drivers to drinkers was victimized, the Chicken Little pessimists, who had bet on bullion and other precious metals, were made to look prescient. Among the winners were people who had shrewdly put away dimes, quarters and half dollars minted before 1965; at year's end an original $1,000 in those almost pure silver coins was worth $16,300. But anybody who had put his money in a savings bank was a sucker; a $1,000 deposit declined in real value during the year to about $900, after inflation and taxes on the interest receipts...
...what America produces best: food. Average farm incomes increased 117% from 1970 to $23,263 per family in 1978 and are higher now. The region that fared best of all was the intermountain West because it is a trove of oil, gas, coal, shale and almost all the increasingly precious energy resources. Construction cranes climbed like church spires in Denver, Salt Lake City and other booming communities...
...Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico sold last week for a record $22,000. "We can see the day when a single photograph will fetch $100,000," says Philippe Garner, a Sotheby's photographic expert. Almost any object from the once scorned 19th century now seems as precious as Suez Canal Co. stock was in its heyday. Twenty years ago, a New York dealer reminisces, "people were giving away Victorian furniture for wood scrap." Today those otherwise indestructible pieces, long derided by the English as "chocolate" (they are Hershey brown), still cost less than glued-and-screwed contemporary...
...deepest among poor people, the petro-squeeze hurts the yearning, less developed countries (LDCS) most of all. They can afford the painful pinch of rocketing costs for energy and petroleum-based products such as fertilizers and other chemicals much less than affluent industrial nations can. Climbing oil costs consume precious foreign exchange, make it harder to buy farm equipment or factory machinery, and curb development spending on agriculture, industry, education and health...