Michael Foster wrote:
Just another Chicken Little running around in metaphorical circles shouting, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
I agree, but this is worse, because we really do face a crisis. We may not face rack and ruin but the price of natural gas will go up 60% this winter, and in Atlanta tens of thousands of people will not be able to pay their bills.
A Chicken Little who goes around yelling about problems that do not exist causes no harm, but one who exaggerates real problems or denies that there are practical solutions misguides society, and causes people unnecessary angst. At worst they may trigger what FDR called "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
Take the Y2K problem. As I said before, it was quite real. It was a financial disaster. Society was forced to spend billions of dollars in emergency repairs that should have been taken care of cheaply during routing maintenance 20 years earlier. Yes, it was a genuine problem, but programmers knew how to deal with it. The people who went around making hysterical claims that civilization was going to collapse on January 1, 2000 were fools, and they did nothing to help fix the problem. Kunstler resembles them.
Again, as FDR put it, "Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment." The energy crisis is real, and it is hard upon us. It seems clear from developments during last year that we really do face global warming, which is probably caused by fossil fuels. You can tell it is real because big companies are scrambling to exploit the resources being uncovered as the ice melts in the Arctic and Antarctic. They investing billions of dollars. They are not fools, and they think the ice is gone for good. Among other things they are drilling for oil and mining coal, which will make the problem worse.
The crisis is real, but so are the potential solutions, and anyone who denies that does not understand engineering or economics.
(The FDR first Inaugural speech is here: http://www.hpol.org/fdr/inaug/. Compare it to recent speeches by politicians such as Bush and perhaps you will conclude that society is degenerating and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.)
- Jed
