Picture Says It All
Bumped into this excellent info-graphic the other day along with a great question/answer:
Daddy, why are there wars? “Because some people are just plain evil, m’boy! Just plain evil.”
Complete post here. Hat tip to Curt Lindsay over at http://cantseetheforest.org/
While Americans complain about the price of gas, many other nations pay considerably more. If you look at some of the countries with the highest prices like Denmark, Germany and Norway for example, you might also notice that they have very strong economies, rate at the top of most development scales (personal well-being, economic well-being, environmental well-being), and are world leaders in renewable energy technologies. They’ve realized that using taxes from the sale of gasoline 1) sends the right price signal to consumers: “use less; use it efficiently”, 2) provides funds for the development of renewable energy (RE) technologies and RE markets. After all, renewable energy is clearly where the growth will be. Countries that understand this will have the strongest economies, based on growing technologies like RE, as opposed to countries like the US which are still stuck on maintaining old tech like low-mileage vehicles that burn dirty, finite resources. Thomas Friedman, in a recent OP-ED column, noting the Republican petrocheerleaders’ exhortations of “Drill, baby, drill!”, asks a good question:
“Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”
It has been estimated that if Americans calculated the costs associated with foreign wars designed to secure “cheap” oil, the actual costs, due to taxes spent on maintaining the military, are closer to $12 per gallon. But hardly anyone thinks of their tax return or how little they are getting for their money when they’re paying $4 at the pump. The war merchants would love to keep it that way. Some people are evil, just plain evil.
