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According to Tardan, the shortage of oil will move mankind past its “adolescent” dependence on fossil fuels toward a glorious adulthood of environmentally friendly methods of energy production. It’s all very much like the science fiction novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, published by Arthur C. Clark in 1968. Clark’s vision begins with our ancestral apes getting some high-level brain stimulation from aliens, then evolving with and through technology into adolescent-human consumerism, eating Big Macs on the moon and rapidly depleting the planet. Meanwhile, the international political competition for resources grows feverish, with rogue third-world nations procuring atomic bombs and threatening Armageddon. But on the very Eve of Destruction the aliens “evolve” another human, morphing him into a godlike being who solves all the problems of humanity.
Give Clarke credit: He was most prescient in his view of the future. Indeed, in 2008, smaller countries with an attitude and a budding atomic arsenal are all the rage. But he and Tardan make the same error regarding evolution: The assumption that all evolution means getting “better,” when all it means, according to the theory itself, is becoming more capable of survival. Some species learn to cooperate, and we sing of the Circle of Life. Others become powerfully predatory: The Circle starts to look unnervingly like a restaurant. But he is so confident of the ultimate betterment of “the human” through our fuel crisis that he writes, “An untold number of people in other countries will die of starvation because food is too expensive to even make it to their shores. And, yet, I still believe that high oil prices are the very best thing that could happen in a very, very bad situation.”
This incredible famine just has to happen as part of the inexorable evolutionary flow — or is it avoidable? If we were to begin drilling in the enormous reserves we know of, all the while seeking more environmentally-friendly energy sources, a great deal of America’s economy could be spared what may prove a horrible set of circumstances here at home.
Thinkers like Tardan, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Al Gore are willing to bear mass starvations, layoffs by airlines and trucking companies, and the whole domino effect high oil and gas prices will bring, as long as the cause of human evolution is served. They prove what George Bernard Shaw said about “self-sacrifice”: “It is the sacrificing of others to yourself.” They even have the right to desire or precipitate crises. We’ve seen such thinking — in Nazi Germany, and communist Russia and China.
And worst of all, Dennis, the leaders who cut off our supplies of evil, “adolescent” oil and gas will still be riding, flying and dining in “adolescent” style while many Americans lose their jobs and “untold numbers” of people overseas die of starvation.
Ralph Nance is a resident of Victoria.