Open Letter to US Representative Hooley (OR 5th) About Energy Depletion
by Jan Steinman
Dear Representative Hooley,
You've known of my environmental views since we were neighbors on Parkside Court and Failing Street. You've known my technical credentials since, as a Clackamas County Commissioner, you visited my workgroup at what was then Tektronix Wilsonville.
I hope you will accept the following as not being from some "nut case" end-of-the-world type, but rather as a rational analysis from someone trained and experienced in science and technology.
The United States and the entire world faces a looming crisis that has not been seen since the great wars of the last century. Our burgeoning population, as well as the finer points of our civilization, are completely dependent on a non-renewable natural resource that is going into decline, even as demand continues to increase. We are about to overshoot global oil production.
I have been studying this phenomenon for years, and have been making my own preparations. So far, politicians have ignored it, and the media have ignored it. But as Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R MD) recently stated before Congress, many "rational, professional, conservative individuals... are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon known as global peak oil."
If you missed Congressman Bartlett's presentation, and have not yet read it in the Congressional Record, I urge you to do so now. It is very well researched. Although I disagree with Congressman Bartlett's position on almost every other issue, I was impressed with the depth of his understanding of this looming crisis. It must have taken some genuine soul-searching for an ultra-conservative father of ten, opposed to most forms of birth control, to call for curbs on population growth.
http://www.energybulletin.net/4733.htmlsnip
http://www.energybulletin.net/4792.htmlTime for all of us to focus on holding our representatives accountable about "priorities".