Why You Suck at Tomorrow
The past holds the future hostage.
Here are a few questions that occur to good people. Should you buy an electric vehicle? Should you convert your home to total electric? Should you promote union membership? Should you buy household items in bulk? Should you install solar cells on your roof? Should you contribute to charities that help the unfortunate?
The qualified answer to those questions is yes. I say qualified because, of course, if you can use public transportation, you shouldn’t use any other vehicle. If you live in an apartment, you probably have no control over the energy source. In general, though, those are all good things to consider in order to live responsibly in an economy that is exploiting the average person at every turn and on a planet that is warming to the point of very inconvenient mass extinctions.
Absolutely do everything that you can to help the world and try your very best to do no harm; but, of course, that is only a tiny part of the entire story which begins in 1858. In that year, in Wietze, Germany, Georg Christian Konrad Hunäus constructed a reasonably modern drill with which he bored deep into the earth hoping to find Lignite. His rig drilled straight down into the ground and was steam powered. When he struck oil, the entire world changed. Over the following years, oil rigs of higher and higher…
