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Do the media get it, or not?

Here’s an interesting story, if only to me. I submitted the piece below as a guest commentary (i.e., op-ed piece) to the morning daily in this benighted town.
The editors found it absurd, as expected. Actually, the editor who responded wrote, “there are many facts and statements in your article that appear to be wildly exaggerated” (exaggerated facts?), and asked for evidence to support a few of the statements. So I provided him a handful of links from the mainstream media, at which point he ran away. No great surprise there, I suppose. If you’re addicted to economic growth, as required by newspapers, the truth is damned inconvenient.

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Denial, Back in Style

Yesterday I delivered a presentation to a room full of Honors College students, peppered with a few faculty and administrators. The response was overwhelmingly disappointing. Seems nearly everybody in the room — and in the country, for that matter — wants to keep the current game going, no matter the costs. They don’t view civilization as a problem at all, evidence notwithstanding, and they think the solution to our fossil-fuel dilemma is to drive less and bicycle more.

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Location, location, relocation

Jean-Francois Bernier of Quebec asked a couple questions in response to a recent post. It occurs to me that I’ve given hints about my relocation efforts, but I haven’t revealed the whole tawdry story in one place. This post corrects the oversight, if it was one, if you’re interested.

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Destroying demand

People keep asking me why the price of oil has fallen from its recent spike to nearly $150/barrel. Trust me, I’m not responsible for the price decrease. Or the preceding price increase, for that matter.
I’m surprised, too. I didn’t buy oil futures, and yet the price of oil fell.

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Earth: The Sequel

I just finished reading Earth: The Sequel, which was a gift from a bright, thoughtful friend. Subtitled The Race to Reinvent Energy and stop Global Warming and authored by Fred Krupp, President of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and Miriam Horn, a writer who now works for EDF, the book is typically optimistic about Empire. Seems readers only want books with happy endings.
As if life’s like that.

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What shall we call it?

The Arizona Republic ran my lengthy op-ed in their Viewpoint section Sunday and a follow-up Q&A piece in Wednesday’s paper. So far, a few minutes before noon, email responses to me on Sunday are mixed. About half are vile, in-denial buckets of hate. The other half are thankful, fearful, and/or curious to learn more. One respondent indicated the piece was linked to Oil Drum already, but I haven’t taken the time to find it there.

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U.S. economy running on fumes

The hallucinatory economy of the United States, based on the “service” industry and consumption of salad shooters, is starting to drag. Seems the absence of cheap oil, along with the closely related inability to use our homes as automatic teller machines, removes the grease from the skids. The associated friction has the Dow doing its best impression of a man falling down the stairs, lurching and spinning and almost recovering before he falls headlong into the abyss of the black widow-infested cellar he couldn’t even imagine except for the old stories about the previous Great Depression.

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