The Domesday Book, Chapter VII

A Colorado reader comments:
I think the best thing to do at this point is to stop waiting for our governments to do something and instead, take personal responsibility for the problem. And this approach will work regardless of which crooks are running our government by growing the businesses that will create the change.

You are missing the point. And for the same reason everyone else misses it.

See, it doesn't matter whether everyone in America has hybrid cars. The energy it took to produce them comes from fossil fuel. The energy it takes to produce a photovoltaic array or a windmill farm far exceeds the possible energy return from them. The amount of fuel it takes to grow food and bring it to the marketplace is staggering and the electrical grid of the WORLD is powered by fossil fuels for the most part. The energy required to convert raw uranium to a fuel isotope and store it after it is used is more than the potential power produced by the plant over it's lifetime. That's why we aren't building any more...and you didn't address the reason we are running out of resources: overpopulation.

We have already used up most of the earth's natural resources. They are not renewable. When the oil is gone and the coal is gone and the forests have been burned for heat, we are really and truly ****ed. And that is not some fantasy humans will need to address in a thousand years. We will all be dead in a thousand years. GOD will not appear at the last minute and save us. He has never appeared at the last minute and saved ANYONE! He did show up once to to Show Moses His hindquarters. Moses was mooned by God. Holy Moses!

The only thing that will slow our complete extinction that is a mass extinction event or a huge nuclear war or an uncontrolled pandemic, and all of those are looming big. Depending upon exactly how it plays out, there will either be a few mammals left or none at all. If there are a few left they will immediately go about the business of killing or enslaving the rest.

But even then, the ice is already melting, faster and faster each day. Very soon, the weather will either go completely out of control and revert back to the premordial soup era with constant acid rain and rapidly increasing CO2 levels, or it will simply stop. The jetstream will stop, the Atlantic conveyor will stop and the seas will become stagnant ponds of red algae. Clouds will no longer form (I need an entire chapter to explain THAT) and there won't be any more rain. The Ozone layer will dissolve.

There is nothing you can do as an individual or a town or a country to stop it. Believe me, China is not going to stop burning coal and the US is going to start burning it again big time when the Mideast goes up in flames because of that ****ing idiot George Bush. My state has one geothermal plant which is clean....until we have an earthquake and it vents a million tons of SO2 into the atmosphere. As it is, our volcano tosses out a million pounds a month anyway, but it usually blows north over Maui and Oahu. And we are one of the three PRIME areas in North America to have a windmill farm. We actually have several of them, put in years ago at the cost of untold millions of dollars. But after the oil crisis of the 70s went away, no one wanted to fund their maintenance anymore, so they sat there and rusted. Now that we need them they are merely eyesores.

Our local power generation grid is coal powered and diesel powered. A collier docks here every month or so and offloads a whole shipload of coal. And a barge comes in with diesel and gasoline. And we have no industry here except growing macadamia nuts and orchids. Industrial states and countries cannot get enough power and will use force when it starts to run out, JUST AS WE ARE DOING IN IRAQ. But because Bush lied about it instead of simply saying "OK, we now own this oil", we have been ****ing around and will end up without it.

I think I need to write a book. I am not as good at connecting the dots as Richard Burke (Connections), but I have thought a lot of this through and every time I find another connection, it points to a closed entropic system which is nearing chaos. And when we start hemorrhaging, stop-gap political band-aids won't even begin to help.