Oh dear, is the end truly near?

You would think so, given the doomsday talk about us endangering Planet Earth and I don’t know what all.

The other day, claiming she just wanted to save the planet, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent her congressional minions on an August vacation, precluding any vote to commence offshore drilling hereabouts to help reduce gasoline prices.

How noble.

Or maybe she just feared that folks otherwise might start feeling better about things. She needs to keep everyone feeling blue, like a colleague of hers. "At 300 million [the U.S. population], we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation." ---Dowell Myers, professor of demography at USC.

Degradation? In what respect, Prof, since we keep living longer and healthier lives? Maybe he’s too close to Hollywood’s culture and thinks it’s normal.

If you worry similarly that our population crush is truly overwhelming us, given our nonstop I-95 traffic jams, consider it’s mainly a case of many Americans wanting to live here instead of elsewhere. To gain perspective, visit somewhere like western Kansas, eastern Colorado or the Dakotas. They would dearly love to have more folks in their small towns, which continue dying due to the departures of same.

A related thought on population: Thanks to the crackdowns on illegal immigrants and the building of the border fence, many of these most prolific baby factories are vacating the premises.

But, in view of the banks’ financial troubles and the current tide of foreclosures, are we losing out economically to the rest of the world? No way, according to a paper at the Davos conference this summer by Herbert Meyer (one of the first U.S. officials to have predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union):

“The U.S is in the process of building the world's first 21st century model economy.... The model is fast, flexible, highly productive and unstable in that it is always fracturing and re-fracturing. This will increase the economic gap between the U.S. and everybody else, especially Europe and Japan.“At the same time, ..there is almost no one who can take us on economically or militarily. There has never been a superpower in this position before...this makes the U.S. a magnet for bright and ambitious people. It also makes us a target. We are becoming one of the last holdouts of the traditional Judeo-Christian culture. There is no better place in the world to be in business and raise children.

Naysayers, like Nancy Pelosi, abound. According to an ABC news piece, the time to act is now, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. "The 21st century is going to be the century which determine[s] whether we live or die as a20sustainable species," Gleick fretted.

He sounds as scared as Harvard climate doomsayer John Holdrens: "If we continue on business as usual, we are going to see more floods, more droughts, more heat waves...If we're still dragging our feet in 2015 I think it really becomes at that point almost impossible for the world to avert a degree of climate change that we simply will not be able to manage without intolerable cost and consequences." Hide the children.

I much prefer this expressed concern. "If our fixation with disaster and intolerance of risk continue to grow at the same pace as our overall improvement of the world, the happiest era in the history of humanity might turn out to be the most miserable.”--Speculist blog’s Phil Bowermaster He adds: “ ...everyone who ever predicted that the human condition has peaked, the best days are behind us, the end has begun, and so forth also got it wrong.”

Yet, note this disquieting comment from Frank Withrow, a Stafford resident and friend (and former education official in the Johnson administration):

“Will China or India replace [us] in 2050? I say 2050 because change is taking place at a furious rate. Both nations have invested heavily in education at the elementary, secondary and post-secondary levels. India has some of the best science, technology and engineering institutes in the world. China has a total system from preschool to graduate school ...[and]. has20more high achieving students in elementary and secondary schools than are enrolled in all North American schools.

So there you go. As for me, I say we’ve still got it good and so will our kids. I was musing about our fortunate fates the other afternoon sitting on my front porch, munching on a red apple and sharing it with Lollipop, my Yorkie pup. Long ago I would have been much more careful in eating any apple. Upon discovering a commonly encountered worm-hole after a big bite, we’d wonder where the worm was.

We aren't running out of energy

Read this selective call to action, from Nobelist Al Gore’s recent energy speech, which contained nary a word about nuclear power.

“So I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge – for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years.”

“It's time for us to move beyond empty rhetoric.” (See above). “We need to act now. This is a generational moment. A moment when we decide our own path and our collective fate.”

Well, yahoo, and damn the outrageous cap and trade taxes that would follow.

One of Gore’s dire forecasts drew a rebuttal from Patrick Michaels, National Review writer.. Gore said scientists “...have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire [North Polar] ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.” Yet, responds Michaels, “The Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is now for several millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because there are trees buried in the tundra along what is now the arctic shore.”

Further, Gore’s failure to mention nuclear power continued during a follow-up interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. Tom Brokaw must have been warned in advance not to raise the subject. It was the gorilla in the room. Also, nothing on hydro-electric power (those wicked dams). Brokaw failed to ask Gore why he hadn’t debated any of his many skeptics on global warming despite numerous invitations. Brokaw is no Tim Russert.

Gore’s anti-nuke colleagues abound, even preventing scientific studies of the safety of mining uranium in Virginia, where there’s a huge deposit, in Pittsylvania County..

Unlike Gore, other real world leaders aren’t scaredy-cats when it comes to nuclear energy.
In England, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just commissioned eight new nuclear reactors and says there’s no upper limit to the number they’ll build. GOP candidate John McCain has called for 45 new ones to be built here by 2030. Some 439 nuclear power plants are operating in 31 countries. China plans to build another 100 itself.

But by the way, candidate Obama, like Gore, disses nuclear power, instead claiming, "We could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling if everybody was just inflating their tires.." Wow. Most everybody already does that.

Which reminds me, here’s a take on the presidential race. I read that Julian Bond, a veteran civil rights leader, said Obama's candidacy doesn't "herald a post-civil rights America, any more than his victory in November will mean that race as an issue has been vanquished in America." You see, if that vanquishing does occur, Bond will be out of a job. And if Obama doesn’t win? Well, all the Bonds will be back on their high horses, with living proof that America is still racist after all.

Moreover, Obama has some more skeletons. Catch this quote from AP: When President Bush ordered the surge in January 2007, Obama said: "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." No, that's clairvoyance in reverse.

Back to energy, Al Gore’s apocalyptic utterances have been parroted on the airwaves by T. Boone Pickens, the zillionaire oilman who claims we can’t drill our way out of oil troubles.

Yes, but when you get past his linguistically elegant voice (so refreshing up here for us former plainsmen), his arguments aren’t hugely persuasive. His favorite remedy, wind power, as a big future energy source seems far-fetched.

But his proposal to fuel lots more vehicles with natural gas is right on. They’re economical and time-tested. Here, some 150,000 cars and trucks run on natural gas, and worldwide, more than 7 million. And what a stroke of luck that we can produce loads of natural gas ‘til the cows come home, right here in the USA.

But earlier this year, Bill Clinton concluded that “we just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse-gas emissions because we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.”

Thanks, Bill, but we old guys have already saved the planet, via WWII, Korea, etc. If our grandchildren have to endure a tiny bit warmer environment, they’ll adjust handily. After all, they do have air conditioning now. Many of us as youngsters didn’t, but did all right anyhow--any latter-day effects of Clinton’s youthful deprivations notwithstanding..