What if we started spending money on Green Energy instead of Oil Wars?

It's 2am. I'm working on a video for an organization I volunteer with.

I posted on my facebook profile a link to an article in Reuters about how 15% of Americans are on foodstamps, and how wages are so low, and the cost of living so high, that many people cannot afford to live without them.

One of the responses was thus:

" Can you just imagine if gas prices dropped to less then $1.18 a gallon how that would stimulate the economy and create thousands of jobs because we all would have more disposable income. We wouldn't need to be a food stamp nation then would we?????"

Here's the thing:
Gasoline prices are never coming down. Ever. This type of thinking doesn't even begin to tackle the actual problem. Yes, it's true that the increase in the cost of living is largely due to increases in energy prices. And by "energy" I mean "petroleum."

If we had spent as much money on developing renewable energies as we have on oil wars, we could have solved the energy crisis several times over. But we're so stupidly stuck in the old ways of doing things, we may end up sending our species back to the stone age. Petroleum has been a party since it was discovered, but the supply has been decreasing since it started coming out of the ground. Many scientists place Peak Oil, the point at which the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction before terminal decline is reached, at right about now. After this point is reached, it will begin to take more energy to extract the oil than you can get by burning it.

And here's a dirty secret: alternatives to petrol, like Solar and Wind, they require physical infrastructure. You gotta build solar panels out of stuff. You gotta build wind turbines out of stuff. That takes energy too. During this last hurrah of oil, we should be fanatically shifting to solar and wind power, to replace out current energy infrastructure with renewables. If we don't, we may not have the energy infrastructure in place to create the energy infrastructure we will need. Get it?

The only energy input the Earth has is the sun. This is referred to as solar income. Via the fossilization of massive swaths of ancient forests, petrol was created. Petrol was like being given an inheritance by a rich grandfather (who happened to literally be a dinosaur). Now, we're not going to get any more solar income than we ever had in the past. We should be investing that inheritance on the things we need to allow our technology to sustain itself on that solar income. Instead we've been pissing it away on cars, tvs, and cheap plastic toys.

We are at a crucial, and possibly terminal juncture in human history. If we as a species can gather the collective forethought to invest in a rapid and complete transition to renewable energy, and bring our civilization in line with the laws of biological economics, we can continue to flourish and grow and evolve. And so can our technology. In this scenario, we may even achieve that Star Trek future, where we live in peace and explore the infinite vastness of outer space for the rest of eternity.

But if we fail to make the transition to renewable energy during this brief window of time when we still have relatively cheap and abundant oil, there is no second chance. If we decide to do what is cheapest in the short term, the party is over. Thanks to petrol, we've been living beyond our means. Even our food supply is infused with petrol based fertilizers. We have been running up a literal energy bill, and when biology calls in their collections agents, it's not going to be pretty. I'm talking massive death tolls, famine, disease, decay, and our permanent decline as a species.

Forget that Star Trek future. We will be stuck here on earth, and our existence will be erased from the history of the universe when the sun burns out. Just another species of dumb ape, doomed to extinction by our foolish shortsightedness.

Robert Sapolsky - The Uniqueness of Humans

NASA discovers ALIEN LIFE- here on earth!

According toGizmodo.com NASA announced today that they've discovered a new life form that may well have evolved independently of all life here on earth.

Which lends credence to my crazy theory that all life on earth probably DIDN'T evolve from a common ancestor. My thinking: If life really IS due to chemistry and not some direct divine intervention, there's no reason that it should be rare. In fact it should be as ubiquitous as other things caused by chemistry are. In fact, I see no reason why some of the five kingdoms of life could not have evolved separately from unique origins.

---

UPDATE

Okay, yeah, so it's not nearly as cool as Gizmodo initially made it seem:

pbbbbt

We are like Dust Mites

lyrics

You’re like a tiny little dust mite
sitting on a tiny little dirt clod
spinning ‘round a tiny little star
outer space is always where you are

We’re hurtling through space on a dirt ball with an atmosphere
the only world you know of is the thin film of life that’s here
the atmosphere extends only seven miles vertically
the deepest plot of ocean is just seven miles under me

diameter of earth is eight thousand miles wide
the living that we do is only on the outside
our liquid core is spinning and makes a giant magnet
which we’ll lose when the planet cools and becomes stagnant

Then we’ll get blasted with space radiation
which will dry up all our water and kill all of creation
we got limited real estate in which we can around
only seven miles up and only seven miles down

1.8% of Earth’s diameter is air
it’s a tiny thing we’re fucking up as if it wasn’t there
this is rare- life on earth
occupies a tiny sliver
“Put your conscience in the cosmos.”
is the message I deliver

[chorus]

[VIDEO] Evolution and Capitalism

Evolution and Capitalism

by The Punk Patriot



Our society today has largely been shaped by the selfish individualism of Ayn Rand, in ways we won’t fully understand for centuries.

So much so, that nobody growing up in this age knows any different from it. People raised in the post-Reagan world see these drastic changes in human behavior as just being the status-quo.

Individuals are having to change in order to better cope with this new environment that Ayn Rand’s philosophy has created.

Empathy, something born from the communal lifestyle of our ancestry in social mammals, is becoming maladaptive.
To become a member of the most successful elite, one needs to behave in ways that are anti-social, misanthropic, disingenuous, and cold-hearted.

Now average lay people might call such behavior immoral, or they might call such a person a “selfish asshole”, but this type of behavior is actually beneficial to the individual, given the confines and structures of our autistic economics.

The very things we think of as making us human: love, empathy, concern for others, are now in the world we live in, maladaptive behaviors.

The Neo-human, the human evolving to best suit this crazy new breed of hyper-capitalism, has no genetic needs to socialize, to love, to be loved, to care or be cared for. What this Neo-human needs to survive, can be purchased with money.

Emotional currency is useless and worthless to him. With no desire to be loved, and no empathy for others, this autonomous being feels no emptiness, and does not feel lonely. He can kill with out a second thought.

Contemporary psychology will call this person a sociopath, but contemporary psychology is still mired in the mammalian standards of what is normal. Soon, as hyper-capitialism reaches a crescendo, and our social norms are slowly redefined by this dramatic shift, it will turn out that WE were crazy for thinking our systems morality had value.