Fossil Fuel Slavery

I've read several books recently on the American Revolution: Founding Brothers and American Creation among them, as well as a series of book reviews and articles. One of the things that struck me is an identification of the extreme moral failures of the founding fathers: to deal with the abolition of slavery, and to make an equitable accommodation for native Americans. These failures led to catastrophic events later in the history of the republic: the Civil War, and the decimation of the American Indian population through murder, famine and disease. The founders postponed decisions, rather than making a hard but unpopular moral choices. The south's economy was tied to the institution of slavery. Landowners wealthy enough to own slaves lived comfortable lives. Rich lands taken from the Indians allowed for the spread of the plantation system.

We see the same dithering today. Fossil fuels are our contemporary slaves. Their use will lead to catastrophic events. These events are probably already manifesting themselves now. Yet we leave the problem for our grandchildren. The vast majority of climate scientists agree that what is coming is a world that we will not recognize. This moral failure will subject future generations to the privations that the growing American republic inflicted upon the native Americans: death, famine, disease, but also natural disasters, economic and social instability. The reason we don't make the hard choices is obvious - we are comfortable, and comfort leads to complacency, and most of us are ignorant and don't accept the reality, because it would interfere with our leisure.

I know that we can change this. But I also know that I can't change this. I could move to a shack in the woods, walk to town, grow my own food, but that still leaves the rest of the 300 million in the US, and the 6 billion+ in the rest of the world. It takes leadership. It will take unpopular decisions, but these decisions have to be made.

the irrational

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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Anthropology 101

"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication... the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat, and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Cheap

It all comes down to money. Money guides decisions. This country has opted for "cheap." Cheap everything. Michael Pollen, in The Omnivore's Dilemma, talks about how we, as a society, made a decision for quantity of food over quality. And inexpensive as well. Cheap and plentiful. I think that we, as a culture, have made that decision in every sphere of life: cheap food, cheap clothing, cheap energy, cheap houses, cheap stuff. This is particularly evident in our buildings. Houses are cheap and big. Where I am living right now in Mississippi, I see enormous waste of buildings. Repair is usually unheard of, because the houses are small. Doing things well is also unheard of. It costs a lot more money to build something of quality than it does to build BAU (business as usual) buildings .

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Finally caught up to 2009.