I read "global warming" and yes, I immediately shut down. Peak oil starts NOW -- this year or next or the year after that. That means the crisis starts now: prices the pump doubling, and the panic and inflation that goes with that, and the justification it will give GWB to enact whatever diabolic facistic militaristic scheme he already had in the works.
The worst affects of global warming are decades off. To bring it up is a diversion. Our crisis about saving industrial civilization, not about a few feet of the coastline off California, or about the transformation of Many Glacier national park into a "A Few Glaciers National Park".
Yes, yes, I know -- you lose enough of artic ice, and you could release enough methane to end all life on earth. In fact, global warming may already be far enough along to make that impossible to reverse. Who cares? We need a President who will announce tomorrow -- no, TONIGHT, the following:
1. The INSTANT return of the 55 MPG speed limit.
2. The INSTANT ban on sales of SUVs. This is war. Tonight. Send the G-damn national guard into GM while they fight it in court. That's where the war is -- not Iraq.
3. The INSTANT take over be eminant demain of all mass production of all automobile production and the transformtion of them -- just as was done during war -- into the production of windmills and Amory Lovins style 100 mph composite vehicles.
4. The withdrawal of our troops from Iraq immediately so we can use the $2 billion we spend there EACH DAY for research on fusion and use of deep earth thermal energy and deepspace solar energy. (I suppose that will send Iraq into civil war and ultimately in Iran's hands; but where do you think it's going ultimately anyway?)
5. The public trial of the architects of 911 for conspiracy. I am skeptical they had advanced knowledge, let alone planned any of it, but if they did, I would reconsider my opposition to the death penalty. We have enough evidence now to put Cheney and Bush in chains on suspicion pending a fair trial.
6. A gasoline tax of $4.
7. Let's not criminalize the oil companies. I'd rather have the crooks on my side, and organize a big conference with them, the coal and natural gas companies and what's left of the railroads and strand all of them with 100 physicists and 1,000 former rockettes on a small island riddled with advanced listened devices and 2 weeks worth of the finest food, drugs and alcohol, and tell them they have that much time to work out a deal that allows them to carve up a pollution free railroad intensive city and town-based future. I don't care if they get rich from it. Rah Rah free enterprise. If they need an extra few weeks, I'll send in some fresh Rockettes and the entire Boston priesthood and a carload of xtacsy and 14 Tony Bennet CDs and soundtrack recordings of the B&O bigboy heading up the Montezuma pass as recorded in 1958 plus a truckload of saltines and cheese whiz. Whatever it takes, as long as the result is effcient hi-speed railroads, small towns, no televisions -- and they can make as much money as they can out of that.
That's my schedule for day one.
Maybe on day two I'd think about global warming a little. Some way to sequester the crap that's already in the atmosphere. Probably I could wait a year or two though, before, that really has to be worried about much.
The industrial age is doomed for sure, probably no matter what we do, but handwringing about global warming 40 years from now totally misleads people about the nature and immediacy of the our real problem.
Gore should be put in the same firing line as Ronald Reagan and the inventor of the SUV; if anything he is a worse criminal because he holds himself out a pious man and he ought to know better. He ran for President and didn't say ONE DAMN WORD ABOUT PEAK OIL so we muddled along another 4 years in ignorance rocketing closer to hell. Gore bears a lot of the responsibility for our doom, damn him.
- Charles |
