I live in an area with character and old homes and am renting an old home that is slowly returning to the earth through lack of maintenance. There is little to maintain, since it would be throwing good money after bad. Where do you start patching up a house that needs a complete seismic retrofit; has no insulation; single pane windows; no overhead lights controlled by switches; no bathroom ventilation; two outlets per room; a 60 Amp service; a 6.5 foot basement ceiling; etc. It needs to be stripped to the studs to start over.

This is why my wife and I are waiting for the gut rehab. We don't want to be nickeled and dimed by surprises; we want something that is clearly a basketcase and is priced that way. A small yard, near a public park would top it all off.

2006 was a bad time to buy, but plenty of people knew it at the time. I recall standing in a tract in Sacramento with a builder the week of the peak in that area, and we both nodded knowingly to each other that this was the peak right now - and sure enough, it was later proven to be. This was before subprime; it just seemed to me that the psychology driving the market and endless TV dream shows was done.

I'm sure oil can be drilled for neatly off the coasts. I'm also sure that every drop of oil on the planet will be recovered regardless of the environmental impact beyond global warming. We would even drill under the Capital to get it, and knock down the Statue of Liberty to get just a little more.

But what happens when McMansions plummet in value due to commuting cost? When food prices spike due to fertilizer cost? When supplies become tight due to increased demand from now developing nations? When politicians respond to their constituents demanding $2 gas, when their constituents say things like "I don't care how you get, just go get it". What happens when we shred our constitution and our national character to justify invading an oil rich Middle East nation? When we torture and kill civilians to make it look like a just war is taking place?

Oh, wait. All these things already happened.

At $125 per barrel, we destroy pristine wilderness at home to stave off the need to conserve and abandon our Hummer H2's.

At $250 per barrel, we kill 1 billion Arabs to secure oil for ourselves.

At $500 per barrel, we kill 1 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians to keep our access to oil.

These are my fears. I would rather conserve now than risk even slightly the possibility that the last two scenarios come true.

There is a possibility that GWB will be vindicated in some imaginable but unlikely future. Where all the deaths, lies, and destruction are forgotten because some objective was finally achieved. Perhaps actions GWB took today could even be connected to those positive outcomes.

But there are plenty of things GWB failed to act on today that we can already judge him on, without the need to look back in 50 years. Failing to act when you had the chance is the same size failure as taking the wrong action when you did act. It is impossible to imagine any future where the number of things on which GWB should have acted but chose not to or chose the obviously wrong course could possibly outweigh a few things he got right.

History won't be kind, and today isn't kind either.

In one part of Salon, writers write about limiting CO2 to preserve the climate at is current, mostly nice level. On the other hand, other writers write about getting more oil, in this case 20 million barrels by 2015.

The point is moot. There is no place to put the waste products of burning that oil (most will be consumed in transport). If you have no place to put the waste products, you don't need to go get more oil.

Can Salon's writers start talking to each other and integrate their thinking? Disjointed, disintegrated thinking created the problem; the same thinking won't solve it. Every time new oil is discovered or added to the market, it must have a means to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere that burning it liberates. There is no other way to get started reducing CO2 output. Simply require new additions to world production have a means to prevent waste products being dumped in the atmosphere, and have at it. Until then, it needs to be left in the ground.