Whether the issue is Peak Oil or Global Climate Change, the Iron Triangle cannot integrate information that shows the status quo for what it is: a one-way trip to Ecological and Geopolitical Armageddon.

Some people will insist that Hansen, et al, are simply whoring themselves for bigger grant money.

My guess is that if they wanted to make the most money they would simply hire themselves out to the Heartland Institute or some other propaganda wing of the petroleum industry, the coal industry, the nuclear power industry, or the ethanol industry.

We need radical and immediate culture change. This is not at all likely, and so we will all ride through a violent and volatile time as our species enters the bottleneck of the next 20 years.

Even were we to achieve fast, radical change to a permacultural orientation, times will be difficult.

The Iron Triangle cannot accept the very changes we must make, and so marginalizes those who point out any need for such changes.

We have created a fragile artificial cocoon for those of us who are part of the industrialized nations. We mistake the cocoon for an independent reality when actually it is absolutely dependent upon the planet. Our denial of this relationship is precisely what imperils us, and yet we are so frightened of this that we encourage intentional ignorance.

Scientists are mocked while shrunken men with everything invested in the superstition of traditional economics are idolized.