Connecting the Dots

After reading The End of Oil, The World Without Us, House of Bush/House of Saud and Sleeping with the Devil (the book that inspired the movie, Syriana), it's embarrassingly clear why we're in our current mess.

- All nations learn that the key to prosperity is economic growth, and the key to economic growth is access to cheap energy. That energy used to come from wood, now it comes from oil and gas.

- The U.S. learned this right quick. But then it learned that its own hydrocarbon fuel supplies would never be able to meet its own demand, so it had to look elsewhere.

- Starting in the '40s, we learned that Saudi Arabia, with its enormous petroleum reserves, would be the key to our prosperity for the foreseeable future, so we struck a deal with them: oil for security. Not only does Saudi Arabia have the largest proven reserves... it also has more than half of the world's spare capacity. Read: It can minimize the economic impact of oil prices by "turning on the pipes."

- Unfortunately, to keep this deal going, we've had to do business with a government that directly and indirectly funds terrorism to appease its enemies and stay in power. Who has given al qaeda half a billion dollars in direct funding? Hint: not Iraq.

- On a side note, who helped foment the Muslim Brotherhood (of which al qaeda is just a small branch office) by siding with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the name of containing Soviet Communism? Hint: not Canada.

- Also unfortunately, oil is on its decline and will run out this century.

- Also unfortunately, this resource has pushed atmospheric carbon levels to heights not seen since the Pleistocene Era, which is making the planet less and less livable for the 6.5 billion people who exist on it.

- Result: Death by terrorism, death by climate change. Every administration starting with Franklin Roosevelt has been guilty of myopia. At some point, someone had to realize that the formula was a Ponzi scheme, and that we needed to switch our energy infrastructure from oil and gas to something that wouldn't raise temperatures in both the atmosphere and the mosque.

- Nobody did.