A Pet Peeve
/Like everyone else, I have been reading about the scramble that nations have been going through to cut themselves off from Russian oil and Russian gas, in support of Ukraine staying free from cruelty and oppression. In reasonable-sounding voices, national leaders point out that it’s very difficult for a country to change its entire energy base over a few short weeks and months. My pet peeve is that we’ve had fifty years to go from oil and gas to energy sources that don’t eat us while we eat them. That was plenty of warning.
Here is Walter Cronkite on the first Earth Day, in 1970, with the bright young things of the time bemused and frustrated that their elders could get the science and the morals so badly wrong…and predictably enough, the Boston police force getting the law and the morals badly wrong.
And here, 16 years after that, is Carl Sagan patiently explaining to Congress that we are on course to destroy ourselves, “by the next century.” A Congress where the bulk of the members are fighting for their two-year terms of office.
Then, the plaintive and achingly youthful voice of Neil Young singing, “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.”
And just to cheer us up, here is Leadbelly singing We’re in the Same Boat Brother, with this prophetic last verse:
Oh, the boiler blew somewhere in Spain
Oh, the keel was smashed in far Ukraine
And the steam poured out from Oregon to Maine
Oh, it took some time for the crew to learn
What is bad for the bow ain't good for the stern
If a hatch takes fire in China Bay
Pearl Harbor's decks gonna blaze away.
It's same boat, brother
We're in the same boat, brother
And if you shake one end
You're gonna rock the other
It's the same boat, brother.