Gas Prices - give me a break!

[Ron Nossaman]

>Most scientists agree that, while there will be an initial growth spurt in
>many trees and plants, this growth subsequently flattens and their food and
>nutrition value plummets.  As carbon dioxide stresses plant metabolisms,
>they become more prone to disease, insect attacks and fires.
>
>Del


Last winter was very mild here, and I was fully expecting to be eaten alive
by all the bugs that had such a cozy winter nap instead of being frozen and
killed down to the usual number. Meanwhile, from about mid January on, half
the people I talked to complained that this was the worst year for
allergies, sinus problems and general upper respiratory disfunction that
they had ever had. Come spring, and through the entire month of June, the
front porch light produced virtually nothing in the way of bugs. No moths,
no may flies, no June bugs - nothing. A rural family, tuning customers, who
make a yearly game of harvesting me a bucket of toads for my yard ( toads
are among my favorite things ) reported that there weren't any toads this
spring. Meanwhile, my customers are still mentioning what a miserable year
this has been for breathing. For my little part of the world, global
warming may very well come too late to do us any damage. What ever is up
wind of us will have killed us all before then with the EPA allowable, or
concealable, mix and concentration of atmospheric discharge that apparently
doesn't officially exist. We probably never will know what it was, or is.

That's the problem with living in an unnaturally luxurious style. It
violates a few basic laws of conservation, among which - to make something
clean, something else has to get dirty.

Sure, everyone could cut back and find alternative energy sources, and
sure, the problems almost certainly aren't as they're being represented to
be by the groups that stand to gain short term profit by the public
adoption of their viewpoints and programs. They're probably much worse.
When in our lives have we ever made it through a day without being lied to
by at least one of the sundry factions that ultimately collectively
determine whether we live or die, and in what style? How many times has
some invisible and unreachable someone or something presumed to do our
thinking for us in spite of their total lack of qualification for the job?
Of the number of times we find out about it accidentally, how many more
hundreds of times does it happen without our knowledge or sanction? How
could we possibly gather enough reliably factual information to make
intelligent decisions when we have virtually no means of gathering such
information? Every "fact" we have access to has been generated by request
or decree, under the funding of various factions wishing to filter any and
all information through their own multi level bias before deciding how to
present it for public scrutiny through the most politically expedient
channel. Some of us can see for ourselves what sort of carnage results from
these wheels within wheels and layers upon layers of self serving games,
but the cold fact most likely is that any implemented reforms will be
simply a localized diversion of cash and power resulting from a deftly
played political maneuver more successfully disguised as something intended
for the public good than the previous scam. We won't even be aware of where
the real game is being played, much less being allowed to sit in on a hand,
and will be only vaguely able to follow the results and keep score by the
accumulated damage. We're just the equipment, not the players. Would that
it weren't so, but altruism on a governmental scale simply doesn't exist.
As long as here's a buck to be made, there will be plenty of takers ripping
each other to shreds to make it  at any cost to the rest of the world. 

As a species, we aren't even respectable parasites. A successful parasite
doesn't kill the host, and from what we see around the world, that's what
is happening.

Ron N