Gore and Picken: Leaders Attacking the Global Crisis

A couple of weeks ago, Andy and I watched a movie called "Crude Awakenings" which portrayed a very bleak future for us. It showed how dependent we are on oil and that we have most likely reached the peak of our supply, meaning - it's all downhill from here and the down-slope will be a lot faster than the up-slope. Basically, if we don't find a substitute for our energy and transportation needs, we won't be flying in airplanes one day and we may go back to a horse and buggy existence. I know it sounds far-fetched but check out the movie and you'll see that it's pretty credible.

Shortly thereafter, we heard about T. Boone Pickens' plan to break our dependence on foreign oil. He says that in 1970 we imported 24% of our oil and now we import 70%. "At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone — that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war." In 10 years that is 10 trillion dollars - the greatest transfer of wealth ever. He wants to combat this by building a ton of wind farms in the west between Canada and our south-western states where there's a lot of wind - more than anywhere else in the world. By doing this, we can use that energy for electricity and divert that natural gas to transportation needs. After being a bit scared by the movie, we checked out his plan at http://www.pickensplan.com/. We listened to his message and now we're part of his growing army of people who will hopefully work together to convince the government to support the project.



Then, Al Gore came out a week later with his plan to fight the global climate crisis - global warming. His plan is to completely stop using fossil fuels for our energy in 10 years, a much more ambitious plan than Pickens. We most recently heard Gore on Meet the Press on Sunday - our weekly news ritual and he had some very interesting and compelling arguments.

Gore said that international scientists studying global climate change say we may have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes to avoid catastrophic effects of global warming. Burning fossil fuels are the heart of global climate change - coal and oil. I have also joined his online group at www.wecansolveit.org/.



The bottom line here is that there is a growing understanding that we need to do something about these problems and in my opinion, it goes even deeper than these.

Tomorrow, check out part 2 of my blog which will give you more of my opinions on this growing issue and what we can start to do about it.