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For some purposes, all the price increases/decreases are important. For others, some aren't important.
Look around. If you see something consuming food or energy, then that consumption is more expensive.
My computer and the lump of lard that's in front of it typing, my printer, the stove, the hot water heater, the car in the driveway, the tv and DVD player and the 6-year-old sitting in front of it, my clock radio, the washing machine and dryer and the wife that's putting clothes from one to the other. It costs more to run them all, people and gadgets. It's easier to use metonymy and list the things doing the energy consumption than list the energy sources themselves--the chicken nuggets, electricity, methane, gasoline, pancakes, blueberries, milk, etc.
Then there are all the things that aren't energy: The glass on my desk, the scissors and pens and Dictionary of Russian folk dialects and the novel/stories by Osorgin, the stapler and index cards I use for learning vocabulary, the paper in the printer; the printer, the stove, the hot water heater, the car, the driveway, the tv and DVD player and the DVD in the player, the clock radio, the washing machine and dryer, the clothes and the water in the clothes that the dyer will remove, the toilet paper I have on my desk in lieu of kleenex.
The energy sources tend to be unstable and vary a lot in the course of a year: gasoline goes up in spring, down in fall; blueberries are more expensive now than in the summer (but we picked ours in the summer), etc. Since they tend to be very volatile, sometimes they account for the majority of the change in prices so that if you look at the price index over time you see a waveform--with longer changes as milk prices creep up over years and then back down, as beef prices react to the slaughter of steers when increased grain prices make keeping them less profitable, and then a slow decline as the heards build up when grain prices come back down. If you want to know how the underlying price structure is doing, energy--both in terms of food and chemical and electrical--really has to be kept separate. You have to look at it and not pretend those prices don't matter--but they matter for some uses and not for others. For me, paying bills, they all matter. For an economist looking at inflation and monetary policy, they matter far, far less.
"Important", like "good" and "bad" or "meaningless," always has an implied grammatical and semantic complement: important/good/bad/meaningless for what?
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