The Enormous Cost of NOT Going Green

OK, today I need a blog called What Devilstower Said.

This is getting ridiculous. ;^) But then, I really enjoy it when everyone else is starting to say all the things I’ve been spouting for years. My husband was really getting sick of listening to my rants. It’s only taken seven years for most people to realize what was obvious to me was going to happen from the beginning. My biggest personal regret is the friends I lost who thought I was crazy and stopped talking to me because they couldn’t accept that Bush and company really would make things this bad. Of course, they won’t bother admitting it now, either.

Americans have needed a wake up call for a long time now, since the seventies when it first really became obvious to some of us that we needed to change the way we live in this country. Going off the gold standard and starting the long downward spiral into debt, cutting deals with the Saudis, could only save us from the reckoning for so long. Unfortunately, we’re about to get it. In spades. Even compact fluorescent lights aren’t going to save us — it’s too little, too late to save us from the choices we made in creating the sprawlconomy.

And here’s yet another great posting on what’s really going down.

Daily Kos: The Enormous Cost of NOT Going Green

It’s impossible to put forward any energy plan, no matter how mild, without facing a deafening chorus of “it’ll cost too much!” That’s the ultimate tool of the burn-everything status quo, the idea that any attempt to limit the damage we’re doing to the world would be so costly that it would sink our economic ship.

But even ignoring the fact that conservative policies celebrating unregulated greed have now brought us to the edge of the biggest economic abyss in a hundred years, there’s something left out of all those dire warnings about the cost of going green. It’s the enormous cost of not going green.

High oil prices are fueling one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history. Oil consumers are paying $4 billion to $5 billion more for crude oil every day than they did just five years ago, pumping more than $2 trillion into the coffers of oil companies and oil-producing nations this year alone.

The total US national debt just hit the $9 trillion mark this week — a value that seems so large as to be incomprehensible. It will take generations to repay even if logical fiscal policies are restored. Yet it’s less than five years worth of what we’re pumping out of our country to preserve the oil industry. $2 trillion is a year is the price we pay for utter cowardice in changing our relationship to energy.

We shy away from changing how we make cars, because we’re concerned about jobs in the auto industry. We hesitate to halt destructive energy extraction, because we worry about trickle of revenue it generates. We never acknowledge that the price of preserving the status quo far exceeds what it would take to break free of the current paradigm. Faced with eminent starvation, we can’t stop fighting over the last can of beans long enough to plant a garden.

Here’s the deal. Terrorism is not the challenge of our lifetimes. Changing our relationship with energy is the challenge we have to face right now.

In the United States, the rising bill for imported petroleum lowers already anemic consumer savings rates, adds to inflation, worsens the trade deficit, undermines the dollar and makes it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to balance its competing goals of fighting inflation and sustaining growth.

Thirty five years ago, energy companies campaigned that we would all “freeze in the dark” if the Clean Air Act was passed. They were wrong. Now they want to tell you that we’ll all be broke if we try to sever their control over our lives. They’re wrong again. Unless we shake our timidity, twenty years from now they’ll be looking down at a ruined world from the top of their mile-high skyscrapers in Dubai. And they’ll be thinking “Lord, what suckers they were to fall for that.”