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404 comments on DrumBeat: July 17, 2006

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Reed on July 17, 2006 - 2:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Exactly! In a nutshell.
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fleam on July 17, 2006 - 3:11pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Global Warming = take measures to protect the environment so your grandchildren can enjoy trees and squirrels and sunsets. Peak Oil = things are going to get rough and you may go w/o a lot of dinners!

The call to "care for the environment" has resulted in a good record of altruistic behavior in Americans, yeah say what you will, but you don't have the kind of "litterbugs" I remember as a little kid, etc there have been changes. If the propaganda is heavy enough, people will change if they figure it's "no skin off my nose, and it's a nice thing to do". And the anti-littering propaganda in the 70s was pretty pervasive as an example - it got results.

Peak Oil on the other hand is just plain fackin' scary. Scary stuff has always resulted in more selfish behavior - exactly what we don't need.

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AlanfromBigEasy on July 17, 2006 - 5:04pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Global Warming = Being able to grow crops where we are used to growing them.

I think GW is scarier than PO, which is why I advocate only PO solutions that help both PO & GW.  We would be better served with a Depression and less GW than with a recession & more GW.

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Reed on July 17, 2006 - 5:31pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ok, Fleam, have it your way. Choose your preferred poison. In your case the article Leanan referenced on the prospective oil bonanza in Greenland must be heartwarming -- keeping the good ol' non-negotiable life style rolling. But the need for wearing "brown underwear" is explained at:

http://www.countercurrents.org/po-church170706.htm

The opening qoute has never been more applicable:

"Down one road lies disaster, down the other utter catastrophe.Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose wisely." - Woody Allen

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alan on July 18, 2006 - 11:58am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it"
Yogi Berra
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Don Sailorman on July 18, 2006 - 2:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Orally.
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Donal on July 18, 2006 - 2:41pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Aura Lee, Aura Lee,
Maid with golden hair
Sunshine came along with thee,
And swallows in the air.
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Mad Maxout on July 17, 2006 - 6:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
GW and PO are both potential disasters. But GW is making itself more obvious to average people due to crazier weather. Meanwhile, the only obvious symptom of PO is the price at the pump or the price of a barrel.

While we are PO-aware here, most people aren't unless one of us manages to talk one-on-one with someone. Lots of people like to scapegoat oil companies, Arabs, etc. for the ever-climbing gas prices.

But there is a critical difference between the two issues: With GW, we can choose to mitigate it and use less, but PO will force us to use less! Big difference. The gas prices (and its trickle-down effects) will force the mitigation. After all, tar sands are hard to extract. And shale is probably a done deal in terms of being too hard to extract.

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HongKong Trader on July 17, 2006 - 9:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I agree, it's as if we have 2 large asteroids heading towards us. One is large and will hit in 2 years, it's called PO and one is absolutely humongous but won't hit until quite a bit later than PO. It's called GW. Because PO is about to hit us if we don't do something it is forcing us to act. So in the short term we need to take agressive and expensive action to deflect PO. Unfortunately we have watched PO approach us for 50 years and taken no action to deflect it. Afterwards (or maybe at the same time) we can work on GW. Hopefully we will learn that relatively small actions now will deflect GW enough to pass us by rather than making the same mistake we made with PO - i.e. allowing it to get close so that it becomes more difficult to deflect. Small actions count more over large distances than large actions over small distances. At the end of the day, we likely will deflect them either way - it's a matter of cost.
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Don Sailorman on July 17, 2006 - 7:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Amen.
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404 comments on DrumBeat: July 17, 2006

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