Tfgray’s Weblog

Just a note pertaining to a previous post, Their Pork, Your Pig Farm, My Porkchop:

Pig odor is not just about aesthetics. Eau de Hogfarm is linked to a host of ailments including depression and asthma. You can read about the scary details here. Kudos to Salon.com.

Like other environmental issues, it’s a public health issue. Why do Republicans think that’s so funny?

 Back in the dinosaur days, the Earth was toasty-warm and humid. Plants grew like crazy and the only limit to the size of an animal seemed to be how much it could eat. Then something changed. Something called “the environment.” It got cooler, dryer. Plant growth slowed. Food became scarce. The lower temperatures were less reptile-friendly and more favorable to the warm-blooded critters. Sorry to go all Darwin on you, but giant reptiles were no longer “the fittest.” In fact they didn’t fit at all, and died out.

We’re living in our own version of the dinosaur days. For the past century and a half, oil has kept us toasty-warm. Oh heck, let’s go back to the beginning…

In 1859, Col. Drake figured out how to get “rock oil” (in Latin, “petroleum”) out of the ground in commercially viable quantities. There was a need for it, you see. We’d been lighting our homes with whale oil for centuries and we were running out of whales. The petroleum industry took off like a rocket, well, until Edison. Major industry crisis when electricity, safer than spillable oil or explodable gas, took over the lighting business.

The petroleum guys were resourceful, however, and found lots of other uses for their product: automobiles, the solution to the urban horse shit crisis. Plastic. Heck, they even figured out how to generate electricity by burning oil.

And there was so much of it! Billions of barrels hidden under the ground all over the world!

So we used it. And used it. Have we used it all up? Nowhere close, but there is a teeny weeny problem: we’re getting close to using up the oil that is easy to get to. What’s left is in remote, politically hostile, or environmentally harsh places. American oil production peaked in 1971. Global oil production may have peaked in 2006. What does it all mean?

At the end of World War II, the American colossus bestrode the world. Although we may tell ourselves that it was due to our superior virtue,

[Wait! Must tell story here. A Swedish engineer was working in North Korea, helping to build the Pyonyang subway system. The workers were running 4 watt drills off battery packs. There were four plugs in each 12 volt battery, and the Koreans insisted that they could run four drills off each pack, despite the engineer's insistence that 4 x 3, not 4 x 4 = 12. The Koreans insisted it would work due to their “superior moral virtue.”]

As I was saying:

in reality, it had more to do with three facts: During the war we built factories while other nations were getting theirs bombed into rubble; other than Pearl Harbor, we took virtually no infrastructure damage; and we had the world’s largest oil reserves.

That environment no longer exists. We have been shutting down factories and outsourcing our manufacturing capacity; our infrastructure is crumbling, a victim of budget cuts and misaligned priorities; and our oil reserves now account for 3% of the world’s total.

Now understand that we’ve built our entire economy upon the tarry sands of low oil prices, and that environment hit the skids when Bush 43 took office. Are there people who do well under the current system? Yes, there are, and the more shares they own of major oil companies, the better they are doing. Much of the real trade deficit (buying more from other countries than they are buying from us) is masked by profits returning to American shareholders from businesses who have offshored their manufacturing capacity. If our current economy can be compared to dinosaurs, I would call these folks the top of the food chain, the T. Rexes, if you will, (or T. Rexes from Texas, if you prefer rhyming analogies) and as rich as they are, and as powerful as they are, they are in pure survival mode.

So the question is, fellow mammals, how do we survive in this new environment? The death of the dinosaurs may be fated, and not require our assistance, but they still thrash around a lot in the process. How do we keep from getting squashed?

Share your thoughts. Send me links you find appropriate. I’ll be posting more later.

I was listening to the news today, and heard many Republicans cackling over Obama’s suggestion that we could use less oil by keeping our tires properly inflated. Let’s leave aside all the stuff from sources as diverse as NASCAR and the Department of Energy that agrees with Senator O.

Has anyone noticed that the Democrat is urging people to help solve their own problems while the Republicans are telling us to forget about personal responsibility and let the big boys take care of it?

Just asking.