- "At this point, it's almost certainly too late to
manage a transition to sustainability on a global or national scale, even
if the political will to attempt it existed, which it clearly does not.
Our civilization is in the early stages of the same curve of decline and
fall as so many others have followed before it. What likely lies in wait
for us is a long, uneven decline into a new Dark Age from which, centuries
from now, the civilizations of the future will gradually emerge."
-
- Who can we blame for $4.00 a gallon? Answer: every last
one of us cotton pickin' American gas guzzling 8-cylinder SUV drivers,
trucks, trains, boats and planes! We burn 20 million barrels a day in
the United States. The world's humans burn 84 million barrels daily.
That's 29.9 billion barrels of oil annually worldwide! Whopping carbon
footprint! Hey! Did you think a finite resource like 'endless oil' could
go on forever? That's like sucking on an 'endless milkshake' straw at
the local diner! It eventually runs dry and you suck on air.
-
- Are you upset? You gotta' be kiddin' me! The "Hubbert
Curve" told us that "Peak Oil" would hit the United States
in 1970 when geologist M.King Hubbert predicted a drop from nine million
barrels to three million barrels daily. It came to pass!
-
- Peak Everything: Facing a Century of Declines by
Richard Heinberg tells us we face rapidly declining supplies of metals,
water, oil, coal, minerals and most other resources we rape the Earth to
acquire for our rapacious human activities. Are we preparing with such
simple plans like 10 cent deposit/return laws on all metals, plastics and
glass. Not a chance!
-
- If you think $4.00 a gallon today hits your wallet, think
again. Chris Steiner wrote $20 Per Gallon, which predicts with deadly
accuracy a steady rise of prices from $5.00 to $10.00 to ultimately $20.00
per gallon before mid-century. Why? Answer: we may have only burned
50 percent of the Earth's oil supplies, but it's father down, harder to
get at and more expensive to extract. Thus, costs rise!
-
- Experts knew it would happen, but since 1970, we just
kept burning oil like there was no tomorrow. Tomorrow happens to be today!
How's that big Ram truck with eight powerful cylinders doing for you at
$4.00 a gallon. Peak Oil will prove a game-changer!
-
- We failed to incorporate conservation in any form. We
failed to plan. We failed ourselves and future generations.
-
- "As we go from this happy hydrocarbon bubble we
have reached now to a renewable energy resource economy, which we do this
century, will the "civil" part of civilization survive? As we
both know there is no way that alternative energy sources can supply the
amount of per capita energy we enjoy now, much less for the 9 billion expected
by 2050. And energy is what keeps this game going. We are involved in a
Faustian bargain-selling our economic souls for the luxurious life of the
moment, but sooner or later the price has to be paid." Walter Youngquist,
energy
-
- "An immutable fact of expensive gasoline: Americans
will find someone to blame," said Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street
Journal. "We can expect in the coming months to hear many sober analysts
attempt to explain the complex reasons for rising oil prices: inflation,
Middle East tremors, growing demand. Expect, too, for all those reasons
to vanish behind what most Americans will see as the far more obvious cause:
President Obama's regulatory assault on domestic oil and gas production."
-
- Obama, Congress and the American people dance around
the fact that we failed to plan. We face an unsustainable "Peak Oil"
consumption conundrum. We created a "Faustian Bargain" with
the inevitable "Hobson's Choice" for the final answer. That
'answer' forces us to take only two choices left to us: pick door number
1 and you get to walk over a cliff with no parachute; pick door number
2 and you fall into quicksand with no lifeguard.
-
- In January 2008, candidate Obama told the San Francisco
Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan, "electricity rates would
necessarily skyrocket." Steven Chu, now Secretary of Energy, told
this newspaper in the same year: "Somehow, we have to figure out how
to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." Currently,
$8.00 a gallon in UK!
-
- In his book The Long Emergency by James Howard
Kunstler, he predicted that China would burn 98 million barrels of oil
daily by 2030. They stick six million new cars on their highways every
year-so they will reach that burn rate in 19 years.
-
- However, the planet will be coughing up only empty 'stuff'
like you do at the end of your 'endless milkshake' when you suck on 'nothing
left'.
-
- What can we do?
-
- · Massive
change-over to two and four cylinder cars
- · Massive
push for electric and solar cars
- · Massive
push for wind and solar energy
- · Massive
push conservation on all fronts
- · Massive
push for walking centric cities
- · Massive
push for mass transit
- · Massive
push to ride bicycles!
-
-
-
- As the USA adds 3.1 million people annually, net gain,
to rise from 312 million to 400 million by 2035-more demand, less oil-higher
prices and lucky to have any oil at all! Finally, we need a massive push
for population stability by the United States to lead the rest of the countries
of the world.
-
- We cannot keep adding human numbers if we expect to survive
the 21st century.
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