The long-time-coming crisis


Steven Grant has a sharp, if bleak, take on the US’s prospects as far as fuel goes. It’s about half way down the page.

If I appear to have no sympathy for this, it’s because I don’t. For a minimum of 30 years, we’ve known the energy crisis was the coming state of things, not just a brief blip during the Carter years.

This is also why I have no sympathy for tobacco companies or tobacco growers. There’s an 1888 medical textbook that directly links tobacco to cancer, specifically lung cancer so the terminal health risks of the weed were known long before the ’50s. Did tobacco companies expand into other areas and divest themselves of tobacco? No. Did tobacco farmers phase out tobacco crops in favor of other cash crops? No. If you have decades to deal with a problem, and you don’t, when someone comes along and says “Take care of it right now!” do you have the right to bitch there’s not enough time? Of course not.

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