From Mr. Robert Paulsen:
I spent this past Sunday afternoon at the St. Matthias Episcopal Church in Whittier, California to see Dennis Kucinich speak. After a very eloquent, passionate speech he opened the floor for anyone in the audience to ask him a question. Here is what transpired:
Me: Are you familiar with the Hirsch Report for the Department of Energy on Peak Oil that was one of Project Censored’s top 20 censored stories of 2005, and what would you do as President to prepare America for the global peak of oil production which Robert Hirsch believes could occur within the next ten years?
Dennis: (to me) Of course I’ve read the reports and I’m familiar with it. And Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, who is a Republican from Maryland has done some great work on the Peak Oil issue. (to audience) In a word, what Peak Oil means is it’s a point at which we pass the peak of an oil supply and we start to work on non-renewable resources being depleted. What does this mean? It means that they’ll seek other environments such as in Iraq and Venezuela in the inevitable way some of our leaders like the open markets. It also means there’s an urgency right now to work at conservation, I mentioned this earlier. What we have to make…when I was growing up, President Kennedy created this challenge of wanting to put somebody on the moon. So they organized the whole country, we were competing with Russia at the time, but he organized the country. So we had this great cause, to harness our intellect for our scientific power and to bring this nation together, this great cause to reach for the stars. We need a similar call! And I’m ready to lead this nation in a similar call. To conserve energy, to develop alternative energy and to move away from non-sustainable forms of energy which, by the way, not only jeopardize our politics, but jeopardize the planet. So all this is connected. I spoke earlier about oil being interconnected and interdependent, you know, our energy policies have an effect on our politics. Our politics affects the rest of the world. Our energy policies have an effect on our health. Our health determines what our demands are for health care in this country. All this stuff is bound up together. So we need to have a call where we come together as a nation. There’s a hunger in America right now for coming together! For uniting! But not some kind of false unity, but in a higher purpose that states who we really are and just identify ourselves with something that’s almost transcendent, beyond ourselves. We have this potential right now to be more than we are, dreaded(?) in the world. Americans are ready to call and to participate something in this grand cause, not just to save ourselves but to save our nation and the planet. What a great opportunity this is! What a wonderful time it is to be alive, to realize that we can consciously reconstruct the world! That we are called upon to save the world! That we have the intelligence and spirit to do it and we only have to have the willingness to do it. We only have to believe that our political system is ready for transformation and if we have the courage to take it in that direction, then I’ll take it and I’ll change it. But (we’re) just waiting and testing ourselves as to how far we’re ready to go to bring about the change, and I think there’s a readiness now. I think people have seen enough of the war! I think people have seen enough of the deception! They’ve seen enough of the undermining of our civil liberties! They’ve seen enough to the point that (they’ve) hijacked(?) an entire American agenda!
Does this sound a bit too idealistic, too utopian? Or something that smacks heavily of involvement by the Federal Government? Shouldn't we instead be looking at a realistic solution, one that emphasizes relocalization, the creation of sustainable economies, and individual temperance? Government will need to play a role, but who is going to advocate what is necessary with respect to structure of the political economy (and the curbing of corporations)?
Mitt Romney actually brought up Matt Simmons's name tonight during the debate, but only to echo Simmons's recommendation that more refineries be built. Nothing about peak oil.
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