Just one more edit.
If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.
While the real issue of this election is how we can reorganize our civilization to get through the decades ahead when motor fuel becomes unaffordable, our economy continues to contract, and we are likely to be devastated by repeated natural disasters stemming from climate change. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that federal disaster declarations, related to extreme weather events, totaled 15 in 1981, 43 in 1991, and 99 in 2011.
Mr. Obama keeps telling nationwide audiences that “we have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years.” That is just not true. If he believes it then he is either 1) getting treasonously bad advice from dishonest advisors or 2) not reading reports issued by his own agencies or 3) just making shit up. This was the same week, by the way, when the US Department of Energy dropped its estimate for the Marcellus shale gas play by 66 percent, while the estimate for all US shale basins went down 42 percent. The shale gas industry is another Ponzi bubble that is about to founder on a scarcity of investment capital. Just watch.
Patients were brought to us for medical care between interrogation sessions, so that they would be fit for further interrogation. This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.
The average barrel of oil that we bought last year cost $15 more than the year before. Here in America, we burn about 6.7 billion barrels of the stuff each year. Therefore, our collective oil bill for 2011 was about $100 billion higher for the same amount of energy that we burned in 2010. This $100 billion created few new jobs here in the USA. Much of it went overseas and into the coffers of people who don’t like us very much.
If your life, and your economy, is bound up with shifting more people and stuff further and faster, maybe the thing to do is to think about having different kinds of economy and ways of living.
We burned Saudi Arabia, and that raised the temperature of the Earth a degree, we didn’t know about climate change when we went into Saudi Arabia, so no great shame on us. But if we go into the second Saudi Arabia knowing what we now know, and do the same thing, then we’re the worst kind of idiots.
Arriving amidst an intractable 10-year military occupation of Afghanistan, the decreasing likelihood that workers will be able to retire at 65, and a wildly fluctuating stock market, today’s announcement that the national average price of self-serve regular has fallen to $3.39 verified that the worries of the past are now officially behind us, and that the U.S. stands alone as the world’s preeminent superpower.
Check this out as well: the State Department, at the recommendation of Keystone XL pipeline builder TransCanada, hired a second company to carry out the environmental review. That company already considered itself a ‘major client’ of TransCanada. This is simply corrupt, potentially the biggest scandal of the Obama years.
One of the stars of this sordid drama was Paul Elliott, TransCanada’s chief Washington lobbyist for its pipeline project. Back in 2008, he was the deputy national campaign manager of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential bid. Around the time she became secretary of state, he was hired by TransCanada. Why did he get the job? Just ask Marja Verloop, a member of the diplomatic staff at the United States Embassy in Canada who oversaw environmental and energy issues. In one of the friendly e-mails between the diplomat and the lobbyist, Ms. Verloop reassured Mr. Elliott about an article that mentioned his possible conflicts of interest: “it’s precisely because you have connections that you’re sought after and hired.”
