It's amazing how many of our current problems tie back to the environment. Can you imagine where we would be today if we had decided to get off of oil ten years ago? Fifteen years ago? What would have happened if we had taken the environmental view and developed alternative fuels a long time ago?
Climate change would have been drastically slowed, or even eliminated. Polar bears would not be endangered. Gas wouldn't be $4 a gallon. We would have a fraction of the smog we currently have, which has contributed to the explosion of childhood asthma cases and other lung diseases (thus increasing the cost of health care). We wouldn't have coal companies blowing the tops off of mountains and throwing them in our rivers. We wouldn't have to consider spending billions on more nuclear plants and dealing with their radioactive waste. We wouldn't be tied to the oil producing countries that don't like us very much. We wouldn't have to worry about gas shortages due to hurricanes in the Gulf closing pipelines. Our car manufacturers might actually be at the forefront of design and development instead of constantly playing catch-up to the Japanese and the Europeans. We would have had a boatload of new jobs in green technologies. Our economy would be thriving instead of going down the tubes.
And... maybe Bush wouldn't have invaded Iraq, thus saving us over 4,100 soldiers' lives, hundreds of thousands of lives of Iraqi citizens, and about a trillion dollars or so, enough to bail out all these mortgages.
I heard today that the leaders gathered at the UN are wondering why the United States is not taking the lead in the development of alternative fuels. Many other countries (including Saudi Arabia, by the way), are vigorously attacking this problem, knowing that the dominance of oil is coming to an end. The United States can either be on the forefront of this development, or it can lag behind and waste the opportunity of a lifetime. Just think what will happen in ten years' time if we don't.
