Why do things like wood and gas go up over the years when the world has developed way better methods and equipment for gathering and refining them?
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The price for _everything_ goes up over time. You can’t buy a coke for 5¢, like you could in the 1930s, for example. But (until recently, perhaps) the cost of a coke was (effectively) less than that, allowing for inflation.
This is due in part to the continued growth of our global population. The price of a good or service rises with demand.
And the fact that all energy companies are now with record high profits there no actual reason why they couldn’t lower the prices. They get to keep the money in bonuses while
We all free and die
Many things. Corporate greed, inflation (5¢ back in the 80s are not worth the same as 5¢ now), increased population (and thus increased demand).
Because of inflation and also because the natural resources are not infinite there is a point where it gets more difficult and you need even more sophisticated gathering methods so you need to invest more and more on new methods.
100 years ago you had people manually scouring the rivers and they would just stumble across a 1 ounce piece of gold. Now you have absolute beast machines, burning thousands of litres of diesel moving thousands of tons of dirt until they collect enough pieces to make 1 ounce of gold
1) More Demands : The population increase, we produce new technology that need those resources, etc. Even if you can mine 10 times more stuff than 100 years ago, if you have 11 times more demand than in the past, the price will probably go up.
2) Sometime we run out of easily accessible sources and we then need to use more expensive method to get to new sources of that material. For example, oil that isn’t too deep was mostly all pump out. Now we mostly need to make expensive deep drilling or drill in the Ocean. Stuff that is a lot harder to do.
3) More regulations from government. In the past you could just have an open mine not too far away from a population center. This could create a lot of issues for the community, dust, explosion create loud sound and vibration, infiltration of dangerous matter into the soil, maybe up to the water source, etc. Being a miner is also very dangerous and regulation were created to make their job safer. All of this increase the price, now is that a good or a bad things will depend on who you ask.
While we have better methods, we’ve already harvested/mined the best/easiest sources so have to travel further, deal with more other materials, harvest more, smaller trees, etc. Also, overall inflation has caused price in actual dollars to go up, but relative to other costs may have gone down. And there are also more costs like living/union wages for miners and loggers, expensive machinery, global transportation.
Demand has also gone up, and the problem with natural resources is that simply having more efficient methods isn’t enough when you’re dealing with an entire globe worth of demand. You have to go seek out more physical sources, or use more expensive techniques to increase yield. Those sources are often located in hard-to-access locations, so the cost of access and transportation goes up. The expensive techniques needed to increase yield also only make sense if prices are high, for example fracking for natural gas is not profitable below a certain price because of the high costs involved.
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