Burn, baby. Burn! It’s coming soon to a housing tract near you, and maybe even your own: wildfires, hot and raging house eaters, burning down McMansions and wrecking every lawn from Moreno Valley to Anaheim, Ca. Thanks to global warming, we live in a time where wild and crazy weather is what we can expect when we climb out of bed, jump in our SUVs and head to work with the rest of the lemmings in the shiny boxes. From Katrina to hundreds of thousands of charred acres in Montana and Yucca Valley, the weather outside has turned decidedly frightful, life threatening and out of control.
Thank you, Mr. Bush. You and your Dad can hold up New Orleans as the waterlogged and bloody fruit of your oil-addled policies.
Tut, tut. Such nasty talk never solved anything, but hey – it sure does feel good to have you Massachusetts boys to blame. Fact is we bought the ticket and now we ride on a big bus headed for Trouble Town, packing along with us our insatiable need to consume fossil fuel. It’s growing, too, like Freddy the Flame at a Bark Beetle Festival.
Not that we care. Bad news of the complicated kind, why, we just glaze over and light another cigarette, change the channel and pop another Liprinosil. We’re more fixated on the health of a horse – ignoring that the only reason for his survival is as stud payoff for his owners – than what’s going on around us. Whatever the reason – work, HBO, ESPN or just plain indifference, the collective “we” have covered our faces, plugged up our ears and have flat turned away from the news that matters:
1. The Middle East conflict is sending the price of oil to $100 per barrel, which will set the price of gas – on a national average – to over $4 per gallon. This means that in major metro areas around the country, gas will clip $4.50 a gallon. Look for it later this year – hooray! Despite this, we continue to consume more gasoline, which makes oil companies very happy, but Mother Earth really, really, mad, which makes her do crazy things like send us heat waves, cold spells, drought and hurricane.
2. Greenland is melting. Greenland is melting! It was on the front page of the LA Times, not so long ago, but no one read it – it was just so darn long. When the waters rise and we lose Newport Beach, we’ll all wonder why – and that’s when Happy Pappy Gore will pop back up, that old crazy Greenie – but he won’t seem so crazy anymore.
3. Automakers continue to play mind games when it comes to conservation, ignoring the facts and pushing our weak-fingered government around, stifling any significant rise in the CAF� fuel standard and tooting the horn of what is one of the biggest frauds perpetrated on the American public: E85 fuel. E85 is not the solution and will never be the solution, unless some farmer in Iowa finds a magic corn husk that will make all the problems disappear, like distribution, refining inefficiencies, and most of all, the flat out fact that E85 fuel is less efficient and only slightly better for the environment.
That’s just the start, but it gets complicated – and my brain is beginning to glaze. Here’s the headline, just so we can all stay in focus: Bush: We’re Screwed. Sorry!