- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
This article is a perfect example of an ignorant pundit pronouncing on a subject on which they have no real knowledge.
Number 1 the world is NOT running out of oil. The US alone is estimated to have approximately 2 TRILLION!! barrels of oil in oil shales in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The oil is easily recoverable at prices well below what we currently pay. The issue is not scarcity it is willingness to produce.
Secondly forty years ago there were occasional spills associated with oil production but they are now very very rare and almost always small. Pray tell what industrial activity is without ANY risk? In case you do not know industrial production creates wealth and wealth leads to less poverty, death and sickness so by your Luddite exposition I guess one could say you are an advocate of all these ills.
Thirdly it is clearly imbecilic to try to limit energy use to try to ward off some supposed voodoo curse like alleged global warming. Even the most optimistic scenarios of any reasonable decrease in CO2 production will at best lead to a few tenths of a degree lowering of global temps out 50 to 100 years, and this only if man made CO2 is any part of global warming, which many would doubt.
What cannot be doubted is that energy equals wealth in our industrial economy and lack of energy production will lead to death and destruction for the weak of the world. A more callous proposal than you make would be hard to imagine.
Please do at least a little research into the facts surrounding the very real possibility of global cooling being the most likely prospect over the next twenty years. I suggest you read BOTH sides of climatedebatecaily.com.
In the future you would be well advised to stick to a subject of which you have at least a small amount of knowledge.
