What happens to an America built on cheap energy when energy is no longer cheap? It’s a question that most Americans do not want to confront. Especially the slick talking politicians.
The fact is most of the way America was built depends upon cheap energy supplies. The love for the automobile, the vast suburbs that surround America’s majors cities, the neglect of a high speed railway system, huge suburban shopping malls and office parks, American agriculture with its dependence upon fertilizers, pesticides, and massive diesel fuel driven combines and tractors, the aviation industry, and the trucking industry, all were constructed on the back of cheap energy.
Now that energy is not cheap what will happen to the American lifestyle? Optimists look towards the development of alternative energy sources. Some of these possible aids to the energy crisis will be helpful, such as solar and wind power, and some will be counterproductive, like ethanol production using corn as the energy source. However, in time the optimists will learn that we are nowhere near to replacing a significant percentage of our total energy needs with alternative energy sources. Time is already up. We are going to have an energy shortfall and the energy that we do have will be very expensive.
We live in a world designed for cheap energy inputs and energy is no longer cheap. We are already transferring hundreds of billions of Dollars a year to oil producing nations with no end in sight. America is going broke. American citizens will be feeling the pain of this fact for a long time to come, perhaps from now on as the American standard of living drops as expensive energy pricing takes its toll.
Byron King writing for The Daily Reckoning picks up this point…
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I have mentioned the TomDispatch website a time or two before. As stated in the tag line on their site TomDispatch is “A Regular antidote to the Mainstream Media.” Certainly you will find well researched and documented reporting in articles posted on the site that you will never see in our largely state controlled mainstream media.
Here is a portion of an article that details numbers that should be important to every America living today. Unfortunately, most Americans seem to be too wrapped up in worrying about the American economy’s general malaise brought on in large part by the Bush administration’s reaction to the 9/11 disaster and to the series of self inflicted disasters that the event triggered to be too concerned about very much else. This is understandable as pocketbook issues always move front and center when it is your pocketbook that is being threatened.
Here is a sample of the “insecurity” article:
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15 Numbers That Add Up to an Age of Insecurity
By Tom Engelhardt
In the meantime, consider the following little list — 15 numbers that offer an indication of just what the Tai Chi Principle meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than we were in January 2001, when George W. Bush entered the Oval Office:
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Rice is such an important commodity in much of the world and now rice prices go ballistic.
In Asia rice is an especially important food crop. Almost every meal depends upon rice to make up an important part of it. Rice is especially important to the poor people of the region as it is the staple food that so many depend upon just to survive.Of course, it is not just rice that has gone hyper with price increases. Wheat, corn, and soybeans have similar price patterns. Food inflation is serious business. One might be able to deal with higher prices for a nice suit, a pair of shoes, movie tickets, or even a gallon of gasoline. You can cut back on your consumption a bit.
People can cut back on the consumption of food too. In many developed counties it would improve the populations health if they did so. But, there are many more poor people than rich people in this world. For these billions of poor people huge increases in food prices, for rice and just about everything else, like cooking oil, is the kind of thing that puts blood on the streets.
Governments around the world had better wake up and get real about the urgent issues of the day. The child like mindless bickering among the US presidential candidates who make promises that they know they can not keep is not reassuring. No matter who wins the election the challenges faced by this nation and the world community are likely to be overwhelming. We need a far sighted leader who has a good sense of priorities to plan for a future that is going to be challenging on many fronts.
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The more I think about the resignation of Admiral William Fallon this week the more concerned I become about the readiness of the US military to engage in anything other than senseless warfare. Admiral Fallon was a brave seasoned warrior who knows that it is far better to talk and work out differences than to engage in warfare.
During the Bush administration there have been a number of top rate career military officers who have been drummed out of the service because they questioned the wisdom and policies of men in Washington who have never experienced the bitter taste of combat. This buck really does stop with the man at the top.
George W. Bush is a man who does not like open debate nor disagreement with his plans. With Bush there is a low level of tolerance for those who disagree with his ridiculous behavior and policies.
You might recall Gen. Hugh Shelton, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who argued that war in Iraq would distract from the war on terrorism. Then there was General Joseph Hoar, former Commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East who said the the war was a mistake.
In October of 2007, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, called the 2007 “surge” a “flawed strategy”, and suggested that the political leadership in the US would have been court marshaled for their actions, had they been military personnel.
There are others, quite a few others, who said that the war in Iraq was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The sinking of the US dollar in foreign exchange markets is partially caused by the drain on American resources caused by this badly conceived and executed war.
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George W. Bush has locked up his legacy of being the only in favor of and supporter of torture president in the United States proud history. At least we could be proud of the US before George W. Bush lowered our nation’s moral standards to the point of acute embarrassment.
Bush has vetoed a bill that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding. According to Bush harsh interrogation methods are not torture as long as the prisoner survives the ordeal.
This is a very stubborn dangerous man we have as our president. How can any American take pride in a man who thinks that it is OK to waterboard anyone as he states that waterboarding is not torture? This president has placed the United States in the position of being one of the world’s greatest human rights abusers.
“The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror,” Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. “So today I vetoed it,” Bush said. The bill he rejected provides guidelines for intelligence activities for the year and has the interrogation requirement as one provision. It cleared the House in December and the Senate last month.
“This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe,” the president said.
“We created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous al Qaeda operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland,” Bush said. “If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the field manual, we could lose vital information from senior al Qaeda terrorists, and that could cost American lives.”
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