Letters to the Editor
Clockwork Smurf
Published Letters: 571 Editor's Choice: 20
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Peak Oil, Peak Coal, Peak Uranium....what else we got?
[Read the article: The missing link in Mexico's declining oil production]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Peak Oil is a big problem...but I really hate how it is always discussed only in terms of Peak Oil, as if there were not already numerous products on the market right now to fill the gap once oil becomes too expensive.
The problem of peak oil is the temporary shock of switching from oil to coal, nucular and other methods of energy production, not the shock of the end of the world as we know it.
Yes if you own exxon mobil stock, now might be a good time to sell, but then again if they've been investing in other energy sources maybe not. Does Exxon own any Coal mines?
That's the real interesting question in peak oil, not when, when is too problematic of a question to answer, there are too many variables to know about when. What is interesting is what happens next. Unless we can talk about West Virginia as the new Saudi Arabia, and the effects of an oil free Middle East on the global situation, why even bother discussing the issue.
Oil will cease to be a practical commodity, but thinking of peak oil as the end is thinking backwards. It's only the begining of where the world and its energy needs and the effects there of will go.
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let's be honest here...
[Read the article: Salon's new letters registration policy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You always had to put in your email address to publish a letter, and there is nothing keeping people from creating a dozen differnt junk gmail accounts for their anonymous posting.
Sure we can track all the letters anonymous214356 have posted, but what differnce does that make?
I belive, that Salon probably had some personal qualms about selling our email to spammers before "registration" and now that we're official "customers" they can feel free to sell that information on to others.
Ahh well, could be worse, they could be charging.
Of course, personally I think the ease of letter writing was an advantage to Salon, and helped keep the eyeballs up. But we'll have to see.
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david sugarman & RealName
[Read the article: Salon's new letters registration policy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I doubt it will be so obvious as yesterday you were spam free and today you have a hundred thousand ads for Viagra in your inbox. But I would be shocked and diapointed in Salon (a cash strapped organization looking to be a political force for good) if our email addresses didn't wind up in a customer database, that was then sold to a third party information broker to be sold to various and a sundry direct mailers. Quite frankly there's no way to know how a spamer got your email address, but somehow they alwasy manage to.
As to real vs. fake email address, just goes to show that you should never assume. Had I known I could have written a fake email address I would have. Oh well. I stand corrected.
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Can we break a thousand?
[Read the article: Real inconvenient truths]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let's see the story published yesterday, we're at a little over 330 posts now.
Five hundred is definite...a thousand probably pushing it, but you can't say Salon's not getting its' money's worth.
The sad part is...all these eyeballs, and the only ads are for Salon premium and It Can Happen Here. Ahh well, I’m sure the banner ads for Lexus will come soon enough.
As to the content of Camille's posting, as always perfectly designed to tweak, annoy, and offend, with out being truly offensive.
It's funny to watch people scramble at the suggestion that global warming may not be the horror show that some would like us to believe.
That isn't denial of the reality of the situation, just an acknowledgement that A) we really don't have the foggiest inkling of the timetable or outcome of global warming, despite recent reports to the contrary and B) Most lay people really don't understand the science involved in large scale climate predictions let alone the basic physics involved in global warming; Ms. Paglia, as much as I love her, included.
Simply put the primary cause of warming is proximity to the sun, as Miss Paglia rightly points out. Now, whether or not this proximity combined with excessive CO2 concentration has put us on a warming trend that is greater than our world has ever experienced is yet to be known. The recent highly politicized report (politicized both on the left and the right) serves as a dire warning, a modern Cassandra if you will. However as important as it is to remember that Cassandra was right, it is likewise important to remember that she was only speaking about the status quo of Trojan society. Troy falls, but Greece stays whole, and Virgil tells us that from the ashes of Troy will rise the power of Rome.
It is to complex a story for one snapshot of the earth at an instant to cause the rending of garments and the gnashing of teeth.
Conservation is a great idea, but for the same reason it was a great idea in the 70's, fears of peak oil. Global warming is a long term issue, best faced by dealing with the short term problems we must already deal with. If we worry more about peak oil, (which high oil prices are making us do) we will limit our carbon output and make global warming an inconsequential concern.
It's all about perspective, and this is where Ms. Paglia is correct, the minor machinations of man can no more destroy life on this planet than it can to create it. We are but a part of a great machine that has been unwinding for millennia, all we can and should do is ensure our own survival as a species, which we've done all right at so far, and have no reason to presume we will fail in this action in the future. Even the darkest predictions of global warming have the planet's ecosystem simply returning to a state it existed at millennia ago, man will adapt, and so will the wild species, as they did millennia ago.