Are We Really Going to Ride Fossil Fuels to the Bitter End?

by Ian Wilker September 22, 2008
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fossil fuels | oil dependence | oil shale | Peak Oil | tar sands

Journalist Andrew Nikiforuk -- who a year ago gave OnEarth Canada's Highway to Hell, a memorably sharp portrait of the abomination that is Alberta's sprawling tar-sands oil field -- has a full-length book coming out next month. Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent will map out in painstaking detail the dystopia that U.S. demand for oil is fast making a reality; check out a small excerpt from the book.

Nikiforuk's OnEarth piece sticks with me, grouped in my mind with a story about Wyoming's oil and gas fields -- Alexandra Fuller's February 2007 New Yorker article "Boomtown Blues." In both stories, the energy industry is cashing out vast swaths of landscape, leaving behind what amounts to industrial sacrifice zones. But what's always really struck me about this pair is that in each, the communities in and around the oil patch are troubled by profound spiritual blight -- booze and crystal meth are ubiquitous; crime is through the roof. These people are not doing well. It makes sense to me intuitively that being complicit in (or simply experiencing first-hand) the annihilation of place exacts a heavy toll on the soul, and these stories provide some confirmation.

Meanwhile, there's been almost no gas for sale here in western North Carolina for the last two days, and the grapevine has been buzzing over this news and its profound impact on dailylife and the local economy. Government services are being cancelled; fights are breaking out at hour-long gas lines. This may be just a temporary Hurricane Ike-related shortage, but it affords a glimpse of an ugly Peak Oil future none of us will want to see made real.

It's all too obvious where all this is going without a radical, all-hands-on-deck effort to move to a clean, much more efficient energy economy. But it's not at all clear that humans are going to rise to the challenge. Let's face it, even as the engine of this new energy economy is beginning to thrum to life, the world is still tumbling headlong down the fossil-fuel highway. Groups like NRDC have to fight tooth-and-nail every day to slow the momentum behind backward projects like developing the Tar Sands and Rocky Mountain oil shale -- these are taking us right toward the ol' buffalo jump. Can't people see this? I admit to intense and unremitting frustration. Do we really want to give our children a world that looks like George Miller's "Mad Max" movies?

The end of the fossil-fuels road

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Steven Earl Salmony wrote on September 26, 2008, 09:01AM : Flag this comment as inappropriate

What are we thinking and doing? What is to become of our children?

Our children’s future is being mortgaged and put at risk by leaders in my not-so-great generation of elders. Is there no end to arrogance and adamant avarice of the greedy kings of wealth concentration, their bought-and-paid-for politicians, their many minions in the mass media?

Somehow we and our children have got to find more effective ways of communicating about threats to human wellbeing that are being perpetrated before our eyes by self-proclaimed “Masters of the Universe” among us.

Good and able people are not saying loudly, clearly and often enough what they know to be true.........not speaking truth to power.

Many too many politicians are posing for the public and pandering to those with great wealth; too many investment brokers are devising economic bubbles and pyramid schemes, skimming millions for themselves.......”breaking” the financial system and threatening the real economy; and the mass media has been turning a blind eye to the entire mess.

Such woefully inadequate leadership needs to be named, shamed and replaced.

Perhaps more people will stand up, remain standing, and speak out loudly, clearly and often about what they see and know to be happening.

Our children could soon be confronted with an economic and/or ecological wreckage of an unimaginable kind; but, because so many people are not reasonably, sensibly and responsibly communicating with one another now, the chances for taking the measure of certain ominously looming economic and ecological challenges and finding adequate solutions to them appear to be diminishing day by day.

Perhaps there are at least three questions worthy of consideration by young people and their elders today.

Is it possible that the wondrous planetary home we inhabit was given unto the stewardship of humankind simply for the purpose of allowing the greediest people on the planet to fulfill their unending wishes and insatiable desires, come what may for a good enough future for their own children, coming generations, billions of less fortunate people in the family of humanity, global biodiversity, Earth’s body and environment? Are the greedy kings of wealth concentration and power politics, who consume, possess and hoard a lion’s share of the world’s wealth, the only people who matter? Are the selfish among us, the ones who are about to be “bailed out” this week despite their unbridled avarice and obscene behavior, supposed to be source of our primary concern?

At least to me, it is crystal clear how so few have stolen so much from so many.

Not ever in the course of human history have so few people been so greedy by having taken surreptitiously and then hoarded so much wealth that rightfully belonged to so many less fortunate people.

Clearly and evidently, the colossal global economy is an ever-expanding, artificially designed, manmade construction. For whom does the world’s human economy exist? To fulfill the wishes and insatiable desires of those with ill-gotten gains? Only to provide security for the greediest among us?

And, of all things, for many too many leaders of my not-so-great generation of elders to extoll the virtues of their unbridled avariciousness and applaud each other by passing out ‘awards’ to each other for the triumph of their greed, all of this is plainly outrageous.

In light of what has occurred in the both the financial system and the real economy in recent years, can someone please explain what the terms “fairness” and “equity” mean? Can anyone find examples of these phenomena in the distribution of wealth by the organizers and managers of the world’s human economy today?

Who knows, perhaps change toward common sense, fair play and sustainable behavior is in the offing.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php