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How Close To Energy Collapse Must We Be?

As one Chinese proverb said: "If we don't change course, we'll end up where we're headed."

At a point not too distant, reality will take a different turn.  Because we are already far behind the knowledge curve, we have only a short while before we are overwhelmed with systemic environmental collapse in the West to say nothing about the calamities facing newly organized capitalistic-authoritarian governments, particularly in the East, Middle East, and the former Soviet satrapies.

Western consumptive-capitalism, pandemic now in China and India, forces significant inefficiencies in national energy-production functions. For these emerging, giant nations, emulation of the West creates a dependence on fossil fuels to maintain comparative wage/price advantages not wholly provided by currency manipulation.  Moreover, these nations are “Johnny-come-lately” to the table of renewable and environmentally protective forms of energy.  China builds hundreds of new coal fired plants each year.  India will build ten to twenty nuclear plants over the next ten years.  Former Soviet satrapies will rely on natural gas, coal and diminishing reserves of oil.  In all, these governments will expend hundred of billions of dollars to maintain the status quo.  They will follow the pattern dictated to national ‘leaders’ by the oil cartels in the U.S., Middle East and EC…i.e., no competing forms of energy will be tolerated as long as there remains a few barrels of oil, a few lumps of coal, and a liter of natural gas.

                                 

 The renewable, but inefficient alternative fuel suggestions that are being offered now are strawmen to placate the public’s rising awareness of depleted oil reserves and worsening conditions brought on by global warming. Politicians and their powerful, unrelenting fossil fuel interests won’t allow a viable price competitive alternative to flourish because it would signal the eventual replacement of these inefficient, legacy energy technologies.

“Time magazine’s comprehensive cover story on global warming, done in the spring of 2006, does not mention the huge potential of the ocean energy option, just like their story, so long ago, in their sister publication Fortune, did not mention the JFK’s dream of using tidal power in the Passamaquoddy Bay. Some things never change, including journalism complicity with political positions.  Of course, since the government is in the clutches of fossil fuel interests, as Vanity Fair magazine says it is, then we will watch them fiddle while we burn.”1

To effect real change that matters the President will need to change energy policy. Oil the “King” must be replaced.  In the absence of such a change there is little reason to have hope.  We will have demonstrated to the world that because we have sacrificed our freedom by bowing to oil, we have also sacrificed our progress as a creative nation.

The Wizard of Water

To what wizardry, then, can the President turn to restore the economy during his four year term?  What grand strategy must he employ to reduce energy prices, the rate of inflation and the extraordinary debt burden, and at the same time increase employment and average income?  Real change will emerge if the next President simply dethrones the “King”----Imported Crude Oil.

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1. Silverthorne, Andrea, “THE DREAM OF PASSAMAQUODDY”,09/06/07

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