Permanent War or Peace Through Sustainability

When the average American finds himself without food for three meals in a row, the ensuing chaos (riots, etc.) will make the United States a rather inhospitable place to be. Martial Law will immediately be declared, and the country will become a police state starvation camp. This can all be avoided, by the way, by shifting America away from an oil-based economy.


Here is a good article about Peak Oil written in 2007.

Here is a story about a town in Germany whose renewable energy systems generates 321% more electricity than the town itself needs.

Here is a fascinating story about the estimates of a Stanford professor who calculated what it would cost to shift America to a solar and wind energy system.

If you've never heard about "concentrated solar power" before, here is a great article about it on a popular, free, collectively edited internet encyclopedia.

Now, what few facts do we know about ME?

1) I work in a restaurant at a ski resort.

2) I slept in the truck last night up here because I was tired and I didn't want to drive home.

3) I live in a town of 850 people in the summer in almost total political isolation from mainstream America.

This means that there are restaurant workers sleeping in trucks at ski resorts who spend almost half of their year in total political isolation from any part of organized political life in America and some of them have better ideas, and more vision about how to create a sustainable long term future for our civilization than do any elected politicians from either of the two political parties.

Is that because people sleeping in trucks and working in restaurants are more intelligent than people with graduate degrees and years of paid political experience? Does it mean I, with google and a facebook news feed in lieu of any "Central Intelligence Agency" or "Federal Bureau of Investigation" have access to any kind of secret information that most people never hear about?

Hardly.

It does not take a whole lot of special knowledge or international networks of spies to learn about this stuff. You can go online and read for yourself.

So why isn't anyone in Washington talking about any of this?

It is because this is not a free and democratic country, and the people making decisions in Washington are doing as the representatives of short sighted oligarchy and nothing else. This is a country where rich people and rich corporations pay someone from their own ranks to represent their own interests. That is all they care about. Making money. Quite a lot of it has already been invested into oil and gas extraction, and politicians are bribed by legalized bribers called "lobbyists" to allow those invested interests to get the maximum possible profit- through of course destroying our environment and creating an unstable civilization that based on diminishing supplies of fossil fuels and increasing global war.

There is a GREAT LIE that renewables are bad because running an electric car off a solar / wind grid would cost more than running a car on gasoline. This is not the case! The true and "hidden" costs of oil are to be found in the tax-payer subsidized military industrial complex! Hundreds of billions of dollars a year pour from Congress into the Pentagon and from there into the coffers of the weapons makers. THAT is the source of our great budget deficits- not overpaid teachers, but overpaid war mongerers.

The cost of oil is something you will only come close to calculating when you factor in the costs of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan, and Palestinian dead. How do we quantify such a thing? Certainly, of course, not in war reparations! How much does it cost to afford medical care to a decade's worth of veterans with hundreds of thousands of PTSD cases and TBIs for the rest of their lives? How much does it cost to maintain over a thousand military bases?

Like the Wall Mart super profits supported by the nation's largest workforce being eligible for food stamps, the price of pumping gas (as intolerably high as it already is!) is deliberately concealed.

Now that I have exposed and defeated the economics of oil-war on its own terms, allow a moment to reflect upon the moral bankruptcy of that very proposition! How do you quantify a life? How do you estimate the moral cost to a country of its network of international torture chambers? Is a world of depleted uranium riddled deserts, littered with unexploded cluster bomblets, arbitrarily arrested citizens and monarchies kept in power by their US trained and supported sadists worth it?

And yet the wars still continue, troops and planes shifted from one country to another, half million dollar missiles are shot into peasant tents, creating terrorists far more effectively than they are destroying them.

In the 1930s we realized our agricultural and grazing policies were destroying the soils, creating dustbowls, ruining the range, and working rather well to ensure an increasingly limited future of wealth, job, and food production. At that time the mood for change among the citizens was high and this mood found its way into a political expression. Investments were made. New systems were experimented with. We changed how we did things, dropped bad habits, and adopted better ones.

Today there is no one left in that tradition of intelligent investment and planning in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, of course, is even more out of touch, and will go to its grave on the eve of peak oil with a greater fear of homosexuals kissing than it will ever have of an energy crisis. The Military Industrial complex will not solve the problem of peak oil, though they are actively preparing to follow it to its conclusion by training our soldiers to oppress hungry citizens should domestic "order" fail.

An economic system whose planners and leaders predict their own collapse is system that has publicly confessed its own bankruptcy. Why should we listen to its pundits any longer?

We need a new political leadership in this country. It will come from neither of the established parties, to whom thinking people can only wish the speediest possible death. Let us throw off their oppression, and form a new party with the courage to re-invest in an actually sustainable future.