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The planet isn’t goin’ anywhere. We are.

For your amusement and abject terror, here is George Carlin, at his best, making fun of those who strive to save the planet, when it is their own species whose demise is inevitable.

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The Grapes of Wrath II

“On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment. . . . In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” (The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939) “What goes around comes around. [...]

RECENT ASIDES

• "Earth’s population is approaching seven billion at the same time that resource limits and environmental degradation are becoming more apparent every day," says Gary Peters on The Oil Drum. "Rich nations have long assured poor nations that they, too, would one day be rich and that their rates of population growth would decline, but it is no longer clear that this will occur . . . . Resource scarcities, especially oil, are likely to limit future economic growth; the demographic transition that has accompanied economic growth in the past may not be possible for many nations today. Nearly 220,000 people are added to the planet every day, further compounding most resource and environmental problems. The United States adds another person every eleven seconds. . . . We need policies and incentives to stop growth now. . . . Those who think it inhumane to control human fertility have apparently never experienced conditions in Third World shanty towns, where people struggle just to stay alive for another day. . . . Writers sometimes confuse population issues. . . . It is true that the rate of population growth worldwide has declined since 1970. However, the base population has grown by more than three billion; thus we currently add 80 million or more people to the planet each year. . . . Population, consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow until we either face up to the fact that there are limits on our finite Earth or we are confronted by a catastrophe large enough to turn us from our current course." #
• My dystopian posts on truthalyzer.com appear optimistic compared to James Howard Kunstler's weekly Clusterfuck Nation, as this excerpt illustrates: "It's sad to be a citizen of a nation that can't do anything right. . . . We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don't even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground -- we're digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster. . . . At the Indianapolis Speedway (or the dozens of Nascar ovals around Dixie) -- the frantic idiocy of America-on-wheels, the fat slobs in beer can hats grilling cheez dogs in the parking lots, letting loose their asinine rebel yells as though this made men of them, and above it all the deafening noise of a people literally driving themselves to death and madness. Meanwhile, the evil plume of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico grows ever-larger by the hour and every living thing in that quarter of the sea faces slow death. That's our memorial-in-the-making to ourselves. . . . Dmitry Orlov is right: this is our Chernobyl. This is the cherry-on-top of all our feckless foolishness. Memorial Day this year is the welcome mat to our hard time. . . . Welcome . . . to Slum Nation." #
• "We . . . are turning our planet into a smoking, glowing, oily mess . . . plundering Mother Earth of her treasures . . . refusing to recognize the growing evidence that our reliance on oil, coal and nuclear threatens our health, our security, our economy, our nation and the world," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives. Referring specifically to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, he continued, "Must we wait until all coastal areas are ruined, all fish, all birds, all animals are injured and killed, before we realize that drilling presents a threat to the fragile ecology of life? We cannot afford to passively witness the destruction of our natural environment, because written in the oily sands of the Gulf is the degrading of all life on the planet. Our world exists through fragile, interconnected systems of life. Our survival depends upon reconciliation with, not exploitation of, the natural world." Kucinich points out that "it is not as though there are no alternatives. Markets and industries have conspired for years to shelve the massive introduction of wind and solar technologies." (As reprinted on The Huffington Post) #
• "The next stage that's coming is political collapse which I believe will be triggered here when the nation realizes how bad the Deepwater Horizon leak really is and how it has been misled. . . . No more deepwater drilling and oil prices will spike for sure. -- Or, it might come when Freddie and Fannie ask for another $50-100 billion, even as the Gulf coast's foreclosure rate goes exponential and banks continue to fail. It might come in a massive cyber attack. . . . It might come with an attack on Iran. . . . With the EU's "nuclear" bailout move having shot its wad in just one day, the writing is clear. It's as clear as Japan's near-to-imploding economy behind a debt that's worse than Greece, with no IMF or EU to fall back on. It's as clear as the explosives residue from a North Korean torpedo found on a sunken South Korean warship. It's as clear as the tail-wagging-the-dog bs propaganda about Times Square terrorists from Pakistan. It's as clear as China's superheated, about-to-implode bubble coupled with its tectonic social problems. It's as clear as the mass of forward-hedged oil purchases from a few weeks ago that blasted through the record of June 2008. . . . I do not know if we have days or weeks until the wheels come off. There can be no more bailouts. Oh, governments in Europe and the US might have to try and sell them, but I agree with the IMF assessment from a few months ago that said another round of bailouts would trigger massive civil unrest. And what we're seeing now is new bailouts cutting into the banking system and bond spreads triggering a rise in rates and... inflation... Inflation. . . . The final blow to industrial civilization will happen no later than the summer of 2010." So says Michael Ruppert on his From the Wilderness Peak Oil Blog. Ruppert also has a book out, "Confronting Collapse," as well as a movie, "Collapse." #
• "Recent weeks have seen an explosion of information on peak oil," writes Matthew Wild on countercurrents.org, "everywhere it seems except in the mainstream media. . . . In February, the UK Industry Task Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security issued a report predicting an 'oil crunch' within five years. It was followed in mid-March by a behind-closed doors energy briefing called by the British government (which heard '2004 was . . . the beginning of the global production plateau for conventional oil.') March also saw a report from scientists in Kuwait predicting that world conventional crude oil production will peak in 2014. Around that time, researchers from Oxford University suggested that oil reserves have been over-estimated by up to one-third, and demand will likely outstrip supply as soon as 2014. In mid-March, French newspaper Le Monde stated that the Energy Information Agency was looking at oil production declining by 2011. . . . In April, the US Joint Forces command dropped a bombshell with its Joint Operating Environment report that . . . 'By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.' . . . Considering this information is timely, with wide-ranging results, and from highly placed sources –- industry leaders, academics, scientists, government and the military –- then why hasn’t there been more media coverage?" #