Peak oil - Dec 24 Click on the headline (link) for the full
text. Many more articles are available through the Energy
Bulletin homepage Bill McKibben, Sierra Club Magazine Fossil
fuels burned brightly in their day, but now it's time to make
the leap to safer, cleaner, climate-friendly alternatives
EXPLORERS USED TO AMUSE their European audiences by telling of
heathen tribesmen who would panic when an eclipse rubbed out the
noonday sun. The natives would scream or pray or make ritual
sacrifices to appease the god on whom they had always depended,
a god now acting so irrationally. Our chief deity--the cheap
energy that has made our lives rich and easy--is about to be
eclipsed as well, and the sounds you hear (motorists moaning
about the price of gas, politicians loudly insisting that
sacrificing wilderness in the Far North will save the day) are
no different. Except that solar eclipses pass quickly. This
change is forever; fossil fuel was a onetime gift--and the
sooner we understand that, the sooner we can go a