The only thing worse than running out of oil
Posted: December 22, 2011 Filed under: Climate Change, Psychopaths in charge | Tags: energy, fracking, gas, independence, oil 17 CommentsIs not running out of oil.
This headline today is not good news: Does shale oil boom mean U.S. energy independence is near?
Neither is this one that the US has a “200-year-supply” of coal. Nor these about all the fuel available in the Marcellus Shale, or the Canadian tar sands, or the Green River oil shale.
At this point it’s obvious to the meanest intelligence that burning fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which causes climate change, which causes floods, fire, famine, pestilence, and war. It will kill billions of humans. I’ll repeat that. It will kill us. And I do mean “us.” Anybody who thinks they’ll be unaffected by the social consequences of global disasters is too dumb to last long in the hard new world. We are committing suicide.
We’re doing it right now. Not tomorrow. Not if things get worse. All we have to do is keep on doing what we’re doing.
Can I tell you a secret? Apparently, a lot of people don’t know this. Earth is the only planet we have.
Greenhouse gases are a gun pointed at our own heads. We have pulled the trigger.
But now comes the only good news: Planets work very slowly. The bullet has decades to travel. It’s already been traveling for about two centuries. Who knows how much more time we have? Probably minutes, but at least we’re not dead yet. If we did it very fast, we could move our heads out of the way.
Instead people write pleased headlines that more ways have been found to keep the bullet on track.
The whole species is headed for a Darwin Award. Except in this case it’ll be the planet whose survival is improved after we eliminate ourselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner.
Crossposted from Acid Test
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I realize that’s just a big downer of a post. (Well, except for the link to how feasible it is to switch to efficiency plus all-renewables within thirty years.) I’m in a “We’re doomed. Doomed!” mood. The short days, maybe.
Add to that this stuff about the Keystone XL BS that I saw via Suburban Guerrilla, Anthony Swift of the Natural Resources Defense Council:
They can’t even honestly commit the environmental crime of burning more oil. The crime turns out to be a front for a scam.
My head hurts.
When I was in Texas a couple of months ago I asked as many people as possible if they had even heard of the Keystone pipeline bringing (oil) tar sands from Canada down through Texas to made into oil and then exported?? Not one person I spoke to in Texas had heard about the scam.
Perhaps now that a bit more information has been released — plus the bogus “jobs” angle a few more folks from Texas might have gotten the word.
The Texas oil lobby has done a great job of keeping most Texans ignorant of yet another project which will use more water than the state has. The tar sands refinery is supposed to be extremely messy and will go in an area with few people.
The project is a no win for most of Texas and the Gulf region.
0 will never say no to his buddies.
Keystone cops — anyone remember the comedy capers of the very early movies?
Keystone is a good name for this stupid scam.
Yeah. I thought it was funny in a ghoulish-gallows sort of way that first B0 says, “Oh gee whiz, I just can’t decide on this pipeline now, I’ll wait till after the election.” Then the Repubs try to force him to come out of the closet by requiring some sort of decision as part of the payroll-tax-holiday-Medicare-unemployment-extension-but-no-millionaires-tax-oh-heavens-no. And now the whole works goes down in flames, including Keystone, because it’s not bad enough for a few of the germs in the House.
There’s guys in boardrooms all across the country wondering why they spent good money on Congresscritters and reaching for their Maalox
Then again, I see in Dak’s comment on the Thursday Reads that Boehner has blinked. Apparently we get the two month extension nonsense, which means, I think, that the B0-must-decide-on-Keystone-now is attached. Although I gather they can say “We decide now to decide later” and that it all still doesn’t matter one damn bit.
It strikes me as so ironic that Nebraska–a solid republican state if there ever was one–was the one that asked Obama to reconsider. That included pleas from nearly all of its top state pols. No one seems to be having the conversation that republicans from Nebraska don’t want their aquifer and farm industry ruined for this travesty.
No one seems to be having the conversation that republicans from Nebraska don’t want their aquifer and farm industry ruined for this travesty.
Word.
Quixote, brillliant rant. I won’t be around to witness the results of this blind deaf and dumb political class, but I fear for my children.
Like you, HT, I’m no spring chicken, but when I was I’d always assumed that getting old would be unpleasant. Well, it’s not for sissies, I’ll grant my younger self that. But a couple of years back, in an earlier we’re-all-doomed mood, I was struck all of a heap by the realization that I don’t envy the young. Which is sad beyond words. That time should be sunrise and promise and laughter, and it should be enviable, in the right order of things.
In my past, I worked in petroleum exploration for over 15 years and I would like to disagree with something you wrote, but I don’t. It’s a huge problem without easy answers.
What can be done? There is groundswell, but no high tide yet. Kick the rocks out of the way of the pathway, and understand that most won’t respond, because the catastrophe that hits them in the face hasn’t happened yet. Talk and act. Small actions, that won’t ever appreciated or understood, matter now. There will be no reward for having been right, only mourning for having done that below our ability.
Gotta go water my veggies.
What I can stand is that those of us who can see what is happening have to be dragged to our deaths by the stupid people. Like the Obot craze in 2008, the Iraq War, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Patriot act, Military Commissions act, and now the indefinite detention of American citizens–hell, even the the Vietnam War! We’re going to be living under a fascist dictator long before the assaults on the environment kills us.
You’re right, we are committing suicide as a species, but some of us don’t want to die that way. We’re being murdered.
/*Glumly agrees*/
Yup, the psychological damage to us under NDAA will be telling in a couple of years. Will we comply, will we protest, or will it simply lead to our eventual end…end of the idea of being free.
Rage is sanity, but irrelevant to the perpetrators. Action is insanity because it may be immediately life threatening, but is relevant to the perpetrators.
JWS is on the case …
Keystone is a good name for this stupid scam.best ever, 😦