Editorial: The End of the Cheap Energy Party - Closing Time

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Watershed Sentinel, June July 2009

Whether it comes from disastrous climate change or from fossil fuel energy so expensive that it can no longer drive this profligate civilization, the end of the cheap energy party is indeed near, within a decade or at most two. For 900 million humans on our planet who are hungry now, for the species being snuffed out at lightning speed, the end is now.

Yet we continue to fiddle: with carbon taxes, with corrupt market mechanisms to control emissions, with bombast, delusion, ego, and more ego, and ponzi schemes. We will desperately try anything at all, from nuclear roulette to elaborate constructions to the latest high tech gimmick, to keep business as usual functioning for one more fling. We lie.

What we need is emergency measures from governments as in full wartime action. We need to re-design our supply systems – water, food, transportation, information – to function in a world without oil, a world with less coal, a world of hard physical work, a world like our grandparents knew. We need to start now.

For both climate and supply reasons, BC needs to leave its coal in the ground, and save its natural gas for urgent uses in the public interest. The sacrifice of the Commons to individual greed must end.

And still the party goes on, with extravagance and circuses, a medieval debauch, right up to closing time.

Comox BC, May 2009