Sunday, July 20, 2008

History lesson

Clos had a good post (A Challenge to America ) about America's response to global warming, which prompted me to reminisce about the good old days of Jimmy Carter. Say what you like about the peanut farmer, if we had listened then we wouldn't be in the trouble we're in now. Cynthia Tucker expressed it well in her column, which I link here because she says it so much better than I did.

"What if the nation had stuck to the path Carter laid out? What if we had invested billions back then in public transit and alternative fuels? What if we'd made a national campaign of conservation, similar to the successful no-smoking campaign? What if we'd insisted that Detroit continue pushing up fuel efficiency?"

Water under the bridge now, but I hope we as a nation are ready to make the difficult decisions that lie ahead.

2 comments:

Pvblivs said...

     It's true. We wouldn't be looking at $5/gal gas and energy prices through the roof. At the rate we are using resources, we are looking at a very painful crunch. Of course, I shudder to think what would have happenned if people conserved "to prevent global warming" and the warming happenned anyway.

Milo said...

Why? We went to war to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and that turned out not to be true. If we had conserved to prevent global warming and temperatures still went up we would still be in a better position than we are now. I shudder to think what will happen if don't wake up and make some changes to our disposable consuming society.