Tuesday, May 1, 2007

A Sceptical Eye

With my introduction established, it is time to blog. I will start with a reaction to a reaction; namely, the surprised reaction to the dollar rise in oil prices in good old America. As predicted, people are probably pissed ready to throw blame around for a problem they should have seen coming. With such a reaction, one would think Americans never learn from their mistakes, that we were just as blind to our past as we are to our future. Unfortunately, the majority of people choose to ignore such signs and focus on the immediate future, never realizing what lies around the bend. I'm not saying we can know everything about the future, but we can get some idea about how our actions make things better or worse down the road.

The scientists have been trying to point us towards this for a long time coming, and not enough people have taken what they say to heart. Religion and evolution be damned; these guys are talking about a world that everybody shares in equally (or unequally, depending on how you view the rich). In our drive to meet the growing demands of our population, we have sped up production of pesticide-treated and genetically engineered foods. If we keep going without our precious petroleum-based herbicides, we might not have enough food to feed everybody adequately. On top of our already staggering numbers of malnutrition, this would be chaos. If we ought to reduce our use of pesticides and all that unhealthy crap and grow more organic food, then why aren't we advocating that instead of genetic engineering? That's a subject for another post entirely.

My point is that we should look at how we have reacted to such crises in the past. We got pissed, prices dropped, life went on. The problem of limited reserves still remained, albeit in the background. The government and the big companies (bane of my existence, but that's another post) pledged to support cleaner fuels without oil, but they have died down as well, back to pushing their SUVs and the ego boost they bring. The longer these prices stay like this, the better; maybe people and companies and the government will actually follow through with their promises and threats this time around. Until then, I am forced to continue my scepticism in our new old reactions to the impending crisis.

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