What are we up to? - by Robb

Here's a link to an interesting article quoting Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish and Southern Energy, regarding our oil addiction and it's likely looming implications.


"Energy boss foretells future scarred by oil wars"


This brings to mind some other implications of our oil addiction. Aside from the blindingly obvious , climate change, drivers should be aware that largely due to the desperate need to fuel trips to the mall people in the developing world can no longer afford basic food stuffs. Burning food based ethanol in our cars is inhumane! You don't have to take my word for it. Lester Brown at the

Earth Policy Institute

is the recipient of forty honorary degrees and a MacArthur Fellowship, among numerous other awards, Brown has been described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers." (Wikipedia) Check out his writing on food security in this lecture;

WORLD FACING HUGE NEW CHALLENGE ON FOOD FRONT
Business-as-Usual Not a Viable Option

Can we remember the Exxon Valdez disaster? The oil is still wreaking havoc in the ecosystem as Exxon continues to avoid it's obligations to Prince William Sound and the people who depend on it in,

Cordova Alaska

How about the plastic choking the oceans and it's life that we all depend on for food, carbon sequestration, and inspiration. Many oceanographers believe that the oceans are close to ecological collapse. Huge quantities of petrochemical rubbish are swirling in the north Pacific.

"The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,"

The North Pacific Gyre

Sorry to be so gloomy but I'm sick of all the glad handing green washed eco consumerism promising us that if we just do this or buy that we won't need to change anything else about our bloated, wasteful, unethical, greedy, war mongering lifestyles. Business as usual is not an option in any context, not just food.
Much of the science suggests that a 2ºC rise in global temperature is locked in, with it's attendant sea level rise, impacts on water scarcity and food production. All those impacts will be a fond memory to your grandchildren as they begin to experience 5ºC to 7ºC rises due to our negligence. The rising tide of information has washed away the sand from our buried heads. We won't be able to say "Oh we didn't know, the Fox channel didn't tell us about it", what will be crystal clear is, we knew and we didn't care. We chose to burn food, over-heat and cool our homes, over-consume anything we could get our hands on, spend our resources building theme parks instead of solar and wind power plants, we even chose to build more coal fired power plants and removed mountaintops so we might never have to risk missing an episode of "Lost"!
As we did so, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and millions of people died, as well as most of the wildlife on the planet. Is that the future you want?

To quote the Tragically Hip "Desperate times call for desperate measures"
Find something substantive and do it, give up your car, go off grid, grow your own food, build sustainable communities, protest war, buy local or better yet don't buy at all, become a citizen not a consumer.