Wild Elephants

Steve Hood is an attorney and political activist living in Bellingham.

Today, the elephant in the room we call the corporate controlled media is the urgency of the human race’s need to wean itself from its addiction to fossil fuels. This problem, this inconvenient elephant, if you will, has fed itself on the two twin crises we face today as a species: global warming and peak oil.

Right now, the elephant is only a growing adolescent, but already it weighs a couple of tons and has broken some furniture. Scientists say that we must cut our use of fossil fuels by as much as 80 percent within about 20 years to prevent worldwide calamity and the deaths of millions of people, due to global warming.

Other scientists say that the Earth has perhaps already hit its peak of oil production, and every day that goes by, the stuff will become scarcer and more expensive, until only the wealthiest people can enjoy it. And the price of gas going up drives up the price of everything else. Permanently.

Unfortunately, most of our political leaders today are ignoring the problem of our need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, because the problem is so big and so apparently insurmountable. The problem is big because all of the alternative energy technologies out there are severely underdeveloped, and we still haven’t figured out a new way to produce the enormous amounts of energy provided today by oil and coal.

About 25,000 man-hours of energy can be derived from one single barrel of oil. Oil is therefore extremely valuable, and many of the world’s wealthiest people are oil tycoons. The oil tycoons are the true masters of the universe; multibillionaires who control the world’s governments like mere string puppets. Unfortunately the wealthiest people tend to be people who don’t care about anything at all besides making more money.

There have been times in history when societies have been able to more or less control the various masters of the universe with laws and regulations, and there have been other times when the laws of the land were slowly undone by the masters’ powerful influence over political leaders. That’s when sociopaths like Adolf Hitler and Dick Cheney can take over.

Our media, owned by a few billionaires, only once in a great while show a glimpse of the elephant when a story is too big to ignore. The fact that the North Pole will be free of ice for the first time in recorded history this summer will be witnessed by too many people to pretend it does not happen. Typically, the major news media will give such a story three minutes or so, and then it’s time to move on to the weather, sports and Paris Hilton’s latest exploit — in-between medicine commercials.

The alarm bells about global warming and peak oil were both first sounded by scientists back in the 1970s, but the powerful kleptomaniacs of the world marginalized them. Today, more scientists shout with more frequency and greater volume, but the media noise machine keeps turning up its volume to drown out the message. And sadly, it has made the vast, vast majority of Americans apathetic and hopeless.

And at this point, it may indeed be too late to stop or even significantly mitigate the coming disasters. Maybe the elephant has grown too big to push it out of the room. Maybe the door is too small.

That’s why we need nothing less than a radical, global revolution. We need to join together to shout down the big media. We need to stop the madness of deregulation and begin again to reign in and control the masters of the universe.

We need to develop wind, solar and hydrogen technologies as quickly as possible. We should invest in fusion research. We need to develop and use mass transit far more than we do today. We need to walk and ride bicycles more. We need to eat less meat. We need to turn our lawns into vegetable gardens. We need to forsake useless products like make up and jet skis and giant screen televisions. Air travel must be curtailed. We must encourage birth control. Our very lives will have to be transformed.

To get this meta-process started, we must do two things. We must first make as many of these changes in our own lives as much as possible. Start with something easy, like meatless Mondays, just as Americans did during World War II. Then, as you get accustomed to that hardship, you realize it wasn’t so tough after all, and then you make another change, like carpooling or bussing to work. After a while, you will find out you enjoy the company of your fellow carpoolers, save some money, and your conscience feels good for a change.

The second thing we all must do is get politically active and push our leaders to change national policies. Call your Congressperson and tell him/her to stop giving tax breaks to ExxonMobil and start giving them to solar power researchers. Campaign for publicly financed elections, so that millionaires and billionaires don’t completely control who gets elected. Donate to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. Vote for leaders who are brave enough to talk about the elephant.

As the planet warms, resources will dwindle, and there will be hardships and sacrifice. There will be famines, floods and droughts, and wars will be fought for oil and for water. But mankind has forever dealt with such adversities.

Changes are coming whether we like it or not, so the sooner we start, the easier the shift will be. And I’m not talking about a return to medieval times here. If we do it right, we can still enjoy much of our modern technology, like electricity, indoor plumbing, computers and telephones. But we do need to change the way we think about everything. For example, we could bring back sailing vessels to transport some nonperishable goods, like steel or auto parts.

We must fight to quickly reduce our use of fossil fuels as much as possible, for the sake of civilization, and for the sake of our children and grandchildren. And for our own sakes. Time is of the essence, because the costs and hardships caused by global warming and peak oil have already begun.

We must not let the billionaire kleptomaniacs ruin all our lives and the planet we inhabit. We must not let our own weaknesses help the wealthiest to destroy the world. We must tear down some of the old traditions and invent a new world.

We must carefully knock down a wall in our house with sledgehammers, and let the elephant out — and then we build a new wall. §