Gas Prices

[leo9]

no politician can do anything about it. no single entitty can. gas prices (as well as rising food prices) are primarily the result of skyrocketing demand from emerging economies.

And every futurologist worth the name has been warning us for fifty years that this was inevitably coming, but people went right on as if every gas price hike was a passing blip. Because any politician who told the truth about what had to be done would have been out of office before the mobs had finished yelling in the street. Now reality is knocking at the door, we have to try to do in a year or two what we should have been working on for decades, and it's not going to work.

Same as global warming: when the sea laps over Long Island people will ask the government "Why didn't you do something?" and the answer will be "Because you voted against anyone who tried."

[js207]

Same as global warming: when the sea laps over Long Island people will ask the government "Why didn't you do something?" and the answer will be "Because you voted against anyone who tried."

Actually, unless Long Island is already within about one foot of sea level, by then all current politicians will be long dead from old age even if nothing at all gets done - most lay people seem to be greatly overestimating the rate of change (approximately one foot per century, with the outer limits of predictions ranging from just over three inches to just under three feet).

I think it much more likely our current bunch will be hated for squandering fortunes on windmills and empty vanity gestures, rather than researching better power sources like fusion and deploying the ones we have now such as fission.

[Thorne]

Same as global warming: when the sea laps over Long Island people will ask the government "Why didn't you do something?" and the answer will be "Because you voted against anyone who tried."

"The more things change, the more things stay the same."
I can pretty much imagine the people of Rome acting the same way as Hannibal came through the passes from the Alps. And the answer would effectively be the same. "Soldiers or Circuses? Give us the Circuses!"