There are real enemies in this war.

To prove the truth of this statement, check out these passages from a New York Times article about Exxon/Mobil.

But while Exxon is slowly unshackling itself from Mr. Raymond’s stance on global warming, it remains faithful to his legacy by dismissing most green alternatives and sticking with hydrocarbons. Although the company’s tone has changed, its strategy has not. Despite growing pressures on oil companies to invest in alternative energy, Exxon’s long-term view remains unapologetically tied to fossil fuels. -NYT, 11/16/08

For the moment, Exxon does not see much business sense in investing in solar, as BP has, or wind, like Shell, or geothermal, like Chevron. -NYT, 11/16/08

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16exxon.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1&th&emc=th

Up until recently, Exxon/Mobil was one of the biggest funders of the global warming deniers (liars) club.  The same scientists who helped the tobacco industry deny the harmful effects of cigarettes are now helping the oil, coal and natural gas industries deny the effects their products have on the climate.

This video from the Canadian Broadcasting Company shows how the global warming “debate” has been kept alive after almost all climate scientists agree that humans have a huge impact on increasing the rate of global warming.  Most of the funding for these efforts came from Exxon/Mobil.

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/video.html

The video is chocked full of information about the game of “hide the science” that the fossil fuel companies have been playing.

As the Orwellian wordsmith, Frank Luntz, the originator of the term “climate change” says at the end of the video when asked about how we can solve the climate crisis (something he now believes in):

“Be honest, do not yell, focus on solutions that will actually make a difference.”

Although Luntz now believes that human causes of global warming are real, he has aided and abetted the real enemies in the War for Endependence.

In all honesty, there is lots of yelling in War, and we are starting a War for Endependence.

Endependence = energy independence that ends dependence on polluting fuels.

Have you noticed that when you see pizza ads on T.V., the bigger the pizza, the lower the price?  You can get a lot of bad pizza for $9.95, but can you survive on lots of bad pizza?

What if you fed the family cheap bad pizza every night for dinner?  It might be good for the budget, but soon the health effects of a lousy diet would start to show.  It wouldn’t be long until everyone decided that the cheap bad pizza diet wasn’t working.

When society was choosing energy sources during the industrial revolution, cheap was good.  Oil and coal were less expensive than whale oil and wood.  But like with pizza, cost is not the best way to judge the value of an energy source.

With energy, we have lots of cheap bad fuel choices. We have coal, oil, oil shale and natural gas.  This stuff is cheap because there is so much of it (especially coal), and the energy yield of fossil fuels is very high.

Here is a good outline of how fossil fuels formed:

http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html

There are a couple of problems with the cheap bad fuel choices.  First of all is the fact that they are non renewable, so eventually we will run out of them (all of the pizza places will close, and there won’t be any frozen pizzas either).  Second is the fact that as with eating pizza for dinner every night, burning fossil fuels has unhealthy side effects.  They release greenhouse gases which are a cause of global warming and they release other toxins into the air.

A scientist friend of mine explained it to me this way - “it took the earth millions of years to trap the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we are in the process of putting it all back into the atmosphere in a couple of hundred years”.

Here is a video about the different types of fuels we are using currently:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-6.html

What we need is a more balanced energy diet.  We can use fossil fuels sparingly.  But we need to add lots more renewable energy to our plates (think of renewable energy as fruits and vegetables).

Renewable energy sources may not be as cheap as fossil fuels, but in the long run we will be much healthier when we change our cheap bad fuel choice diet.