2004-10-20
ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS
"Civilization as we know it will come to an end some time in the century
unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels"
The raw costs of oil continue to soar | The troubling thing to all of this, as it appears from here, is that those in our nation's leadership positions continue to make decisions with their heads deep in the sand | We cannot afford to have planning be conducted as if things will always remain the same | I'm not even faulting anyone here | No pointing fingers, not much anyway |
But leadership should lead not follow the same course of action | We've known about global warming for over 20 years | We've known at least that long that the supplies of underground petrol reserves are finite as well as wasteful | Jim Kunsteler notes that, come the days of reconciling the gross disparity between lack of planning and acting as is change never happens, there will be a lot of folks asking "why didn't you do something"? | And the leaders of the nation [and the world] shall be held accountable for their inactions | Yet the failure to pursue other directions for energy production speaks to a monumental lack of vision, not only on leadership's part, but on the citizenry as a whole | We don't need all the crap that gets foisted upon us as necessities | We don't need to drive 15 mpg vehicles to go pick up a video to watch | We need to plan for the future | Something quarterly profits watchers are woefully inept at doing | And we need to make ouurselves personally accountable to make things change |
"The world will soon start to run out of
conventionally produced, cheap oil"
conventionally produced, cheap oil"
Humans have consumed almost a trillion barrels of oil [that's 42 trillion gallons], or about half of the earth's total supply; ...a devastating global pertroleum crisis will begin not when we have pumped the last barrel out of the ground but when we reach the halfway point, because at that moment, for the first time in history, the line representing supply will fall through the line representing demand; ...we will probably pass that point within the current decade, if we haven't passed it already; the various well-established laws of economics are about to assert themselves, with disastrous repercussions for almost everything
"Civilization as we know it will come to an end some time in the century
unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels"
The raw costs of oil continue to soar | The troubling thing to all of this, as it appears from here, is that those in our nation's leadership positions continue to make decisions with their heads deep in the sand | We cannot afford to have planning be conducted as if things will always remain the same | I'm not even faulting anyone here | No pointing fingers, not much anyway |
But leadership should lead not follow the same course of action | We've known about global warming for over 20 years | We've known at least that long that the supplies of underground petrol reserves are finite as well as wasteful | Jim Kunsteler notes that, come the days of reconciling the gross disparity between lack of planning and acting as is change never happens, there will be a lot of folks asking "why didn't you do something"? | And the leaders of the nation [and the world] shall be held accountable for their inactions | Yet the failure to pursue other directions for energy production speaks to a monumental lack of vision, not only on leadership's part, but on the citizenry as a whole | We don't need all the crap that gets foisted upon us as necessities | We don't need to drive 15 mpg vehicles to go pick up a video to watch | We need to plan for the future | Something quarterly profits watchers are woefully inept at doing | And we need to make ouurselves personally accountable to make things change |
QUOTES FROM: [boldface] David Goodstein, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil; [lightface] David Owen, Green Manhattan; an article published in the New Yorker, 18 October 2004 |
¶ 09:48
