tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post3352490180555381986..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: From Pain to Punish to PerishDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-82470605345481690792011-05-02T09:23:11.007-07:002011-05-02T09:23:11.007-07:00> High gas prices are here to stay. A lot of pe...> High gas prices are here to stay. A lot of people haven't<br />> truly grokked that this isn't a temporary spike but a<br />> seismic shift that will be with them for the rest of their<br />> lives.<br /><br />You know, I remember the OPEC crisis in -- '73, was it? --<br />when the gas stations were actually **running out** of<br />gas and they had to ration it and there were enormously<br />long lines causing people's nerves to get **very**<br />frayed.<br /><br />In '70, the year I graduated from high school, the family<br />bought a '70 Buick LeSabre -- one of the last of the<br />**really** full-sized GM cars, with a 350 cubic inch V8<br />engine (455 cubic inches was an option on that model,<br />but we didn't have it). It was a neat car, I thought,<br />but it got about 8 mpg (much like SUVs today).<br /><br />That car seemed like a **very** unwise purchase in<br />light of what happened just a couple of years later.<br />Those events seemed like harbingers of a tipping point<br />in Western industrial civilization (the first Earth<br />Day had been in '70, Paul Erlich's _The Population Bomb_<br />had come out in '68, and SF author John Brunner wrote his<br />enviro-apocalyptic novel _The Sheep Look Up_ in, what,<br />'72?).<br /><br />It is true that there were some long-term consequences<br />of those times -- namely, the Japanese automakers getting a<br />serious toe-hold in the U.S. marketplace (though they<br />kept and expanded that toe-hold not just because<br />of gas economy, but because of quality and reliability).<br /><br />But if you had told anybody then that, almost **40** years<br />later for God's sake, we'd still be driving 8 mpg gas-<br />guzzlers, and that we'd still be no closer to fusion<br />power or solar power or any of the other alternative<br />energy sources that started being discussed in<br />earnest in the early 70s (I remember that the University<br />of Delaware built an experimental and much<br />ballyhooed solar-powered suburban-style family dwelling<br />called "Solar One" around that time), I think a lot of<br />intelligent and informed people would have called you a crazy<br />luddite, like a moon-landing denialist.<br /><br />The current gas crisis may well end up leaving as little<br />trace as the early-70s OPEC crisis. I hope not,<br />but I wouldn't bank on it one way or the other.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-47045429190564805512011-05-02T05:47:34.614-07:002011-05-02T05:47:34.614-07:00High gas prices are here to stay. A lot of people ...High gas prices are here to stay. A lot of people haven't truly grokked that this isn't a temporary spike but a seismic shift that will be with them for the rest of their lives. I'm not sure how people are going to handle it. There's already a narrative being peddled that environmentalists are responsible for the high price of gas. That and the Trump favourite, use the military to "take" oil. I'd like to think that these memes won't sell widely enough to decide elections but I'm not certain.jollyspaniardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10999141103840765243noreply@blogger.com