The United States of Blackout

[kaiser soze]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5209276.stm

once again another year of record high temperatures and the energy crisis they "incur".

Either the infrastructure of this country is in some serious disrepair or the energy Dons are playing politics to gain more momentum to go nuclear.

major cities are in states of emergency, getting very volatile, and citizens are suffering. Keep striving for freedom in the middle ea$t, our country can wait for you to pay attention to it. :mad:

"High gas prices are a sign of a failed presidency." - Dick Cheney, 1998
IMPEACH BUSH

[QueenAdrock]

IMPEACH CHENEY!

Because you know, if Bush was impeach and then kicked out, it then goes to the Emperor (http://ffmedia.ign.com/starwars/image/article/609/609854/star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-20050503052403320.jpg) himself.

[Schmeltz]

Either the infrastructure of this country is in some serious disrepair


I don't think there can be any question about that. If you look at the history of the development of the United States - indeed, of the physical infrastructure of most of the Western world along with that of the second-string political entities like India and China - you find out that a lot of the luxuries we take for granted have been provided by gigantic, hugely exploitative economic conglomerates looking to make a quick buck rather than to see to the needs of generations of increasingly densely populated and urbanized human beings. The "infrastructure" of the entire planet is groaning under the weight of our collective energy demands; every year the date at which we pass the point of sustainable global energy use comes earlier and earlier.

It takes a lot of energy to run transcontinental railway and shipping lines. The sheer consumptive force of the framework of modern human society is sustained by a physical network of railways and roads and ships constructed decades ago, if not centuries. Should it fail suddenly - as it has in New Orleans, and again in St. Louis - how will people react? What subsitutions can possibly be made to atone for the sudden gap between provision and consumption?

It's make or break time. Either we find a way to shift onto a completely new system for delivering our energy needs, or we accept a total collapse in the Western lifestyle and the subsequent regression into the gunpowder age. Regression probably means an unimaginably vicious warfare of a type never seen before on this planet, so I think the only way forward is for us to gear our current systems of economic organization and production toward the implementation of vastly more advanced and efficient methods of energy production. We will have to consume an enormous amount of our currently established energy production infrastructure and collective economic ability in order to produce this shift; it will necessitate a humanistic undertaking more colossal than the Manhattan Project, the Three Gorges Dam, and the International Space Station combined.

And what do you think of the prospects for that happening on this planet sometime in the next millennium? I think the smart money's on the Dark Ages.