Editor,

From the window of a flight from DC to Oakland yesterday, I enjoyed the
view of Flyover Country from the ruling class perspective. First to appear
through the dirty haze is the National Hydrocarbon Sacrifice Area of southern West
Virginia and eastern Kentucky. The erosional dissection of the Allegheny
Plateau reveals fat layers of coal that are most efficiently mined by blasting
away the ridges and dumping the waste rock into the canyons. From the air one
sees these new rolling prairies, where scrubby grass replaces the forest, growing
closer together as the demolition metastasizes. The local people are
dramatically split between those who earn a living from this obliteration and those
whose poor homesteads end up under hundreds of feet of broken sandstone, while
those who have not yet been buried have their well waters replaced by poisonous
sludge.

Next to appear is the zone where the Illinois, Mississippi, Iowa and Des
Moines rivers have reoccupied their flood plains. Little rectilinear dots,
representing the ruination of thousands of citizens, project above the sea of
dirty water. The farming country around the rivers is clearly washed over by the
heavy rains, and fields that should be green with new crops are barren and
brown. It's not rocket science to understand that a warming atmosphere can hold
more water vapor and that the high and low pressure systems that move this vapor
around are intensified by the added heat energy. But, as the Lush Limpbones
of the world insist, climate change is natural and inevitable, human activity
has nothing to do with this process, and delusional claims of "Global Warming"
are cynically presented by self-interested hysterical scientists in the pay
of the secret satanic conspiracy of global socialists and their anti-freedom
agenda. Today the President swooped into the flooded region to deliver his
moment of fake interest and compassion for the slavish media to fill their fact
and analysis-free programs with. He then rose to the heavens, wherein dwell the
Gods, while those below returned to survival mode in the mud.

The Rocky Mountains emerge, and the land is spotted with mazes of roads
connecting square drill pads bulldozed into the thin biosphere. Some vegetation
is reclaiming abandoned pads, but most are freshly cleared and some have
drill rigs at work in the geological crap shoot. If they could profitably flatten
the Rockies to get the oil and gas, the region would look like what West
Virginia is now becoming. And lo, on the horizon arrives the Hydrocarbon Holy
Grail, the next National Sacrifice Area, the Green River basin. Oil shale deposits
in this vast and remote wilderness are alleged to contain 800 billion barrels
of fuel.

At some point in the not too distant future, the dynamics of mass demand
will lead to the mega-scale demolition of this place. It's easy to imagine from
the air, the cubic miles of dirt and rock being pushed into the deep
tributary canyons flanking the Green. Hundreds of millions of people in need of work
and food will brush aside environmental concerns in the coming struggle for
energy. The Demopublican dictatorship in Washington is a mere tool of the
world's Exxons, which have every incentive to extend and exploit their asset bases
at the highest prices to the last ton and barrel. We aren't going to see any
serious meaningful national policy for alternative energy technology from McCain
or Obama, nor will we see from either of these ruling class stooges an energy
tax policy that could fund these changes. No politican can get elected by
telling us that the Big Party is ending. Jimmy Carter made a feeble attempt,
saying that achieving energy independence was the "moral equivalent of war".
Apparently, Americans prefer the real thing, and as long as the
soldiers-per-barrel price isn't too much for the average fool, the Oil Wars will continue and
spread. But when you listen to politicans who say "Stay the course!", or who
will stay the course, campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, you eventually end up on
the rocks.

Yours, Jay Williamson