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Addiction
February 6, 2006
By now, President Bush's wildly irresponsible remarks on energy in
his state of the union speech may have already vanished down the memory
hole, but the damage will linger on. "America is addicted to oil," Mr.
Bush began, failing to mention that underlying this addiction was a
living arrangement that required people to drive their cars incessantly.
A clueless public will continue to believe that "the best way to break
this addiction is through technology . . ." and that "we must also
change how we power our automobiles."
Mr. Bush recommended ethanol. As one wag put it after the speech:
"America's heroin is oil, and ethanol will be our methadone." The
expectation will still be that everybody must drive incessantly.
It is hard to believe that Mr. Bush does not know the truth of the
situation, or that some of the clever people around him who run his
brain do not know it, namely that ethanol and all other bio-fuels are
net energy losers, that they require more energy to grow and process
them than they produce in the end, and that the energy "inputs" required
to do this are none other than oil and natural gas, the same fuels we
already run engines on.
The president also said that "breakthroughs on this and other new
technologies will help us reach another great goal, to replace more than
75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."
In point of fact, our oil imports from anywhere on the planet will
be reduced by more than 75 percent because by that time worldwide oil
depletion will be advanced to its terminal stage, and nobody will have
any oil left to export -- assuming that the industrial nations have not
ravaged each other by then in a war to control the diminishing supply of
oil.
The key to the stupidity evinced by Mr. Bush's speech is the
assumption that we ought to keep living the way we do in America, that
we can keep running the interstate highway system, WalMart, and Walt
Disney World on some other basis besides fossil fuels. The public
probably wishes that this were so, but it isn't a service to pander to
their wishes instead of addressing the mandates of reality. And reality
is telling us something very different. Reality is saying that the life
of incessant motoring is a suicidal fiasco, and if we don't learn to
inhabit the terrain of North America differently, a lot of us are going
die, either in war, or by starvation when oil-and-gas-based farming
craps out, or in civil violence proceeding from failed economic
expectations.
I hate to keep harping on this, but Mr. Bush could have announced
a major effort to restore the American railroad system. It would have
been a major political coup. It would have a huge impact on our oil use.
The public would benefit from it tremendously. And it would have put
thousands of people to work on something really meaningful. Unlike trips
to Mars and experiments in cold fusion, railroads are something we
already know how to do, and the tracks are lying out there waiting to be
fixed. But the reigning delusions of Hollywood and Las Vegas prevent us
from thinking realistically about these things. We're only into wishing
for grand slam home runs and five-hundred-million-dollar lottery
jackpots. Anything less than that makes us feel like losers.
Meanwhile, the official Democratic Party response to Mr. Bush's
fucking nonsense was the stupendous fatuousness of newly-elected
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine's rebuttal, a saccharine gruel of platitudes
and panderings that made me want to shoot members of my own party on
sight.
History will look back in wonder and nausea at the twitterings of
these idiots as the world they pretended to run lurched into darkness.
James Kunstler
Read a well-written intro to the problem of "peak oil" here
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php Yahoo! Groups Links
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