[Update: Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare?, by Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin, discusses an excellent example of what happens when religious belief meets scientific data that disproves its pseudo-scientific premises; read the whole thing and keep in mind that what is happening in Australia could happen here, too.]
We all have blind spots, parts of reality that we simply do not allow ourselves to see. Very often our blind spots are obvious to other people who do not have the emotional investment in our blindness that we do. Tom Friedman today writes an article of such penetrating insight that his blind spot, roughly the size of Texas, is all the more remarkable for how obvious it is. He starts his argument with an excellent, though banal, observation:
There has been a lot of worthless chatter about what President Barack Obama should say about Iran’s incipient “Green Revolution.” Sorry, but Iranian reformers don’t need our praise. They need the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people. What’s that? End our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.
Oil is the magic potion that enables Iran’s turbaned shahs — “Shah Khamenei” and “Shah Ahmadinejad” — to snub their noses at the world and at many of their own people as well. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. By coincidence, he’s been president of Iran during a period of record high oil prices. So, although he presides over an economy that makes nothing the world wants, he can lecture us about how the West is in decline and the Holocaust was a “myth.” Trust me, at $25 a barrel, he won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.
He goes on to show how the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union occured when the Saudis used their control of the oil spigot to drive the price of oil down to levels so low that the Soviets could no longer afford their inefficiencies. Clearly, Tom Friedman understands the relationship between drilling for oil and price. Yet, nowhere in the article does he mention the possibility of drilling for more oil and gas in the United States! Instead, he proposes we magically find solutions to our energy needs in technologies that either do not yet exist or have already been to shown to be incapable of scaling up to the size necessary to replace more than a small fraction of our energy needs. (eg, wind)
Tom Friedman, and all those others who fervently believe (or merely assume as unquestioned reality) that we are destroying our planet by our production of CO2 are as non-rational as any other fundamentalist religious believer. Despite the fact that the core arguments of the radical environmentalists remain far from proven by scientific methods, they remain committed to their beliefs. Further, just as religions demand sacrifices from their devotees, those who worship Gaea demand sacrifices, as per Tom Friedman:
Mr. Obama has already started some excellent energy-saving initiatives. But we need more. Imposing an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator.
Such a tax would also destroy any hope of escaping this recession any time soon, which would decrease the money available for all research, including such arcana as energy research, and make it that much more difficult for us to buy those energy efficient cars that Government Motors will magically begin to make.
There are a great many compelling reasons for us to find more efficient, cleaner forms of energy, not least because it would motivate the Muslim world to join the modern world and de-fang many of our enemies. The best way for us to go from our current dependence on oil to the next, thus far unknown, (Solar, Hydrogen, Fusion, Anti-matter, Natural gas???) primary energy source for our economy, is to continue growing a robust economy. People who are wealthier typically become more concerned with the environment and have money to invest in all sorts of research without knowing what will pay off. Unfortunately the only actual, rather than fantasied, bridge from our current oil economy to the post-petroleum economy is the oil in the ground. Those who are blinded to this fact by their religious fervor are doing us all a terrible disservice.
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