Aniya -- thanks for the additional link to the "Nurtured by Nature" article. You are right, we are maybe a bit off-topic.

However, to bring it back for now: we live in a very multicultural, poor neighborhood in the middle of a city. We do some of the simple things and live amoung some wonderful folks of Mexican Hmong, Somali, Jamaican, African American, and many mixes of heritage. Exactly the wrong place to live, according to most interested in surviving Peak Oil.

We have chickens down the alley and some mighty good gardeners around us.

From my reading here, there is a huge amount of denial that the central story related to energy issues -- and Peak Oil in particular -- is the incredible violence we resort to in order to get oil and keep it from other people who are trying to do the same.

We have a kind of international Mad Max scenario played out, with our soldiers from Iraq referring to it as "Injun Country" with reference to the genocide perpetrated to secure resources which formed the foundation for the establishment of the USA as a world power in the last century.

One of the violent things we do to our kids is lie to them about who we are and what we do in order to maintain and even expand a huge disproportion of wealth for ourselves. George F. Kennan in a US State Department Policy Planning Study was at least honest when he wrote in 1948:

"We have 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population....our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality ... we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization."

We are dishonest about who we are. The multi-racial mix of poor kids in my neighborhood know this in a way that the Corporatists who drone on about "The Top Ten Energy Stories of 2008" still do not get at all.

The top energy story is this: we have declared war upon planet and the poor in order to suck the very lifeblood from them. We hide this with noble lies -- mostly religious and political lies, but also political lies masquerading as economic truisms. In this way, the rape of planet and poor people is carried on with a sense of noble purpose, and even many of the colonized poor -- indeed the best slaves -- are caught up in the lie and give willing consent to the violence.

Don't most professional psychologists and psychiatrists benefit from the status quo of violence to the point that the talk about non-violence is applied only to those who are too poor to act violently with impunity?

Think about this in terms of the violence done to people who have worked and saved and scrimped all of their lives only to have that "energy" stolen from their retirement accounts, from the value of their currency, from the value of their homes lately.

Think about this in terms of only-guessed-at quantity of "energy" that sits under the land of Iraq, which country was carved out years ago in an unatural way by colonial powers who were also fighting over petroleum.

Think about this in terms of the young people who have dreams that are based upon the false premises of the very same Fascist mindset that asks year after year, in dreary fashion, "What Are The Top Ten Energy Stories of the Year" and then answers them in a way that is the very epitome of Sociopathic Indifference. "Screw the planet. Screw the poor. Screw the Iraqis and everyone unfortunate enough to not be as well-placed as we are. What matters is what we know and what we will do. We will create reality, not the planet or the poor." That is what I see happening on a daily basis hewre on TOD, and each year this culminates in the "financial" and "free market" and "Corporatist-technicians-only-need-respond" crap that puts us exactly back where we started, which is:

"Violence is our fundamental strategy. In relation to planet and poor people -- especially in terms of our children, who have no voice at all in this -- we kill for our own short-term benefit. We kill for oil and other resources, and we tell ourselves a bunch of noble-sounding stories to keep us from having to admit it."

We really are about discounting the pain of others far away on the planet or in time -- in the next generation. The changes we need to make are not easy or simple or even mostly technical. The changes we need to make are far more fundamental and involve the way we conceive of ourselves and organize our lives in terms of the next generation and the planet we leave behind.

That fundamental change has been the energy story of the year for decades, but who is talking about it here?

Maybe we need a "The Real Energy Story" discussion here?

I will work my ass off this week in order to try to make a house payment and buy food. In between times I will check in. I'd be glad to contribute to a keypost with you, Aniya, to get such a discussion going.

Will RR or WT or some of the others help out with such a project? The effort I have in mind is state the human relationship to energy at this time in realistic terms rather than in terms that assume that energy or the universe gives a rip about Corporate bottom lines or who kills the most people for oil.

Corporations can make a profit -- actually make money -- right up until the time we destroy our habitat and die off, declaring all along what the real top energy stories are, and can be completely, freaking wrong about it! Nations can make up noble reasons for genocide in the same way, appearing to "Win!" until they lose the ability to even feed themselves.

And a shout-out to Gail the Actuary: can the insurance folks even begin to think about the implications of the violence we are doing to the planet, the poor, and the next generation? My guess is that reality is carefully screened out from the projections related to the blowback from the planet, the poor people around the planet who are being walled off from prosperity, and the young people who know that they have been sold down the river by the previous generation?

My God, folks, do you really think the planet gives a rip how many fewer miles we in the USA drive for a year because we are comfortable with gas prices determined by a market that excludes the planet from its calculations of value?