Priorities { Budget
Energy dependence is probably the single greatest threat to our ongoing security as a nation and as an economy. Reducing dependence on foreign oil, as well as fossil fuels generally, is probably the single most needed development to secure any future for America. The only reason the world pays any major attention to Southwest Asia and the 12th century cultures living there is oil. If Africa had as much oil as Saudi Arabia, you can bet American soldiers would be knee-deep in the Sahara on some foolhardy empire-building exercise. When things get tough, expect America to consider Canada and Venezuela as potential targets.
Proposed Department of Energy R&D budget for FY2007: $2.7 billion 1
Proposed defense budget for FY2007, including the requested money for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through FY2008, but not counting the interest on the debt that defense spending has been responsible for: $745 billion 2
It is clear by these choices that we have little interest in actually fixing our problems. America's major interest seems to be keeping the oil industry and defense contractors flush with cash while Rome burns.
Cut the military budget by $100 billion. Today. Put half that money into renewable energy research, and the other half into subsidies for communities to work on ways of conserving more and becoming more efficient. We will be both better for it generally and we will be more safe. Our security theater and neocon hawk methods are only speeding the demise of an America that can be salvaged. The promise of easy motoring, a car in every garage and a suburban house with a white picket fence for all is over.
In short, America, put your money where your mouth is and invest in things that give us a future, instead of just incompetently trying to prolong the inevitable.
4 comments:
I don't believe the failure to act when cause and effect are so apparent is because America/Americans are dumb. I think it's because we've been allowed to feel entitled for our entire existence. For example, people I know with gigantic SUVs complain about the price of gas. When I point out how their and millions of other peoples' choice of vehicle contributes to this, they don't gasp in amazement at the connection I just made for them, instead they look a little embarrassed and guilty.
I guess that's what I want to give to America, less pride and more of a sense of responsibility. A sense of ownership for the state of the world. We still are at a point in time where we can change the trajectory of everything. We just need to acknowledge it and take real action - spend money.
The great problem here is a disconnect between what you have and where it comes from. We have done everything to partition our thinking so as to seperate to the greatest extent possible the relationship between a thing and the source of that thing, as well as the consequences that go along with it. The average meal in America travels 1200 miles from farm to factory to grocery store to dinner plate. The oil we get out of the ground came from biomass cooked under the ground for thousands of years, a resource that is quite finite and also large in its effect on the ecosystem when all that carbon is dumped back into the atmosphere in short order. We burn through a year's supply of oil (in terms of replenishment) in about 16 hours.
The policies of the United States government for at least a century have been about getting people to ignore where resources and energy come from, ignore what pollution comes about by consuming them, and ignoring any connection to the natural world that these things have, all in the name of economic growth.
Today, we spend a tiny fraction of money to come up with actual solutions to problems, but most of the money is spent to control the resources and access to them. We're a pathetic empire attempting to control everything and everyone to perpetuate profits and the so called American Way of Life. None of these things are desirable or sustainable in the long run.
Americans are not stupid, and certainly not lazy. They are however generally ignorant and oblivious (thats by design), and if anything they are too active. American policy and business is all about doing, when what we should have done is stop and think and consider and understand. We've built a fabricated fantasy of life up like a house of cards, and now that the connection to real things, to nature, is starting to reassert itself, its likely to get blown down by the windstorm that is reality.
At no point have we considered things that will actually work in any mass public forum. Everything is about maintaining and upholding our sense of entitlements, which in turn leads to a broken infrastructure that will wither and die in the most painful manner when our obliviousness meets the realities of energy and resource acquisition. Further, by continuing with the charade of a lifestyle, we simply tie ourselves more tightly to the regions of the world and people who simply hate our guts or represent a competition for said resources.
In short, we need to pay for what we get and be well informed and intelligent in our choices of what is worth paying for and what is just money and lives wasted.
Our current path is a disaster. Either we find a better way to deal with things or we bring worse collapse down on our own heads in the future.
Crisis is the mother of invention...
Or to quote Simpsons...
Lisa: The Chinese have the same word for crisis as opportunity.
Homer: Yes! Crisitunity!
Crisis is also the mother of food riots and poverty.
I have little doubt that human ingenuity will find solutions to much of these problems, but that our actions will be too little too late to effect the coming collapse. There just is not enough time to come up with a viable solution and get the massive infrastructures in place to dole out such a solution, and we probably won't have the resources to do so in any case. The problems are looming much faster than the solutions can keep up. This will lead to years, if not decades, of ugliness, and that doesn't count the potential multi-century effects like global climate change. Also, what if we come up with solutions, but its only sustainable for a quarter of the present population? Is a huge die off in the cards? Can we live with a dramatic loss of our current standards of living and commerce? I'm worried to say the least, albeit hopeful for good resolutions in the long term.
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