Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves.

I’m not a global warming advocate at least I don’t believe man is causing a significant amount of climate change. I do however believe that the climate is changing in the same way it has been changing since the earth itself has had an atmosphere. Do I believe we should have clean air and skies- yes absolutely. But I don’t believe we should put birds, whales, turtles, and fish before human beings in our priorities.

That being said I see no real reason to block ways to help maintain our way of life. Surely we will have to scale down how we live with less use of energy overall. But, we shouldn’t simply throw our arms up in disgust and resign ourselves to a 19th century lifestyle. We should do everything we can to maintain our life and liberty. By allowing a few people to dictate and narrow our sight on the horizon we are allowing ourselves to be herded into a cattle car. If we don’t exploit every option we have with energy we will reach the energy bottleneck sooner rather than later. If we reach it soon we will be completely unprepared and our infrastructure will not hold and we will be forced to commandeer energy supplies.

When the state is forced to enact a naked policy of resource war- the public reaction would be extreme distaste and rousing cheers. This is not a place we want to find ourselves in. The extreme distaste would come from our own visceral repulsion to referring to our nation as Pax Americana. The rousing cheers would come from those with no gas, no job, no home and no food. A supposed end to our misery would be the birth of an old world style empire- that is if we won. We would certainly be facing off against other nations with similar problems

Where is the hope? One thing we could do would be to open up every option we have available to us- our national interest is not a suitable forum for partisanship. Though Senators such as Barbara Boxer (D-Ca) refer to off shore drilling as “our ethanol” which I suppose means that she thinks it is worth while to spend political capital on manipulating America’s need for energy for political ends. We need more energy and the congress reacts to this need by standing steadfastly in the way of progress. We should develop every bit of domestic energy we have including off shore oil, oil shale, coal, solar, wind and nuclear- we need all of it because as oil becomes more scarce either because of a physical shortfall or because of increasing demand the cost to function for We the People will increase.