New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offered up an interesting piece recently, one I’d encourage you to read.

Echoing a theme I have been drumming repeatedly, Friedman shared a Letter to the Editor written by a friend of his, accepting personal responsibility for playing a role in the ongoing tragedy that is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Interestingly enough, last Monday I came across a similar post by William Rivers Pitt, sharing much the same honest and necessary message about our thoughtless and selfish over-consumption of fossil fuels. Two people are a good start … several billion more to go!

As Friedman’s friend makes so clear, the warning signs and information are everywhere. The choices are clear. The options—ill-conceived though they may be at this moment, if they exist at all—are ours to fashion.

The op-ed reminded us of cartoon character Pogo’s observation: “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

Almost 70% of our fossil fuels usage is to transport ourselves from one place to another. We cannot sustain this pace of oil usage. As I have repeatedly stated (as have many others), we’re not going to be running out of oil any time soon, but changes in how much is available to us—at reasonable prices—are looming, and a steady decline is inevitable. We are not prepared for this.

As I repeatedly urge everyone to realize and accept: we are all in this together. We all bear our share of responsibility for designing solutions and changes in advance of Peak Oil’s direct impact, or for the consequences that we’ll all have to endure because we either denied, ignored, pretended otherwise, or just hoped that someone else would take the reins and come up with some kind of magic solution to our energy challenges. (Good luck!)

I’ll leave you with some excellent advice:

“To implement the essential principles of change, we must reframe the challenges we face. We must approach them not from the compartmentalized perspective with which we tend to frame and separate our many problems, but from a systemic perspective that attempts to identify the common root causes of all of these symptoms of an overarching disease. From that analysis we must work together to develop the holistic, systemic vision of where we need to go as a society and the plan to get there.” [1]

Source:

[1] http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53153:  Creating a game plan for the transition to a sustainable U.S. economy by Solutions