1-2-3-4- What the Hell Are We Fighting For?

Let's all spell it now: O-I-L!

Ya know, it was pretty transparent when we went into Iraq what our intentions were. We really didn't care that much about deposing an evil dictator - if we did, then why would we be ignoring or even propping up comparable regimes in other parts of the world? And we all know about those non-existant WMD's. But just in case Americans haven't figured out yet why our troops and our economy are dying over there, here's a paragraph for you:

"Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power. "

The rest of the NYTimes article is here.

Here's a couple of telling quotes:

"A total of 46 companies, including the leading oil companies of China, India and Russia, had memorandums of understanding with the Oil Ministry, yet were not awarded contracts. "

“These are not actually service contracts,” Ms. Benali said. “They were designed to circumvent the legislative stalemate” and bring Western companies with experience managing large projects into Iraq before the passage of the oil law." (italics mine)

and finally:

"In an interview with Newsweek last fall, the former chief executive of Exxon, Lee Raymond, praised Iraq’s potential as an oil-producing country and added that Exxon was in a position to know. “There is an enormous amount of oil in Iraq,” Mr. Raymond said. “We were part of the consortium, the four companies that were there when Saddam Hussein threw us out, and we basically had the whole country.”

...and now they will have it again. And probably bring Iraq's big oil fields back online, temporarily offsetting the high cost of gas to American consumers and setting back the fragile and temporary changes that people are finally (and necessarily) starting to make in their lifestyles! After all, Americans FINALLY drove 1.4 billion fewer highway miles in April than they did in April 2007, which is WAY up from the 400 million fewer highway miles from March 2007 to March 2008. The change that needs to happen is happening, but meanwhile the chessmasters elsewhere are moving the bishops and rooks around.

The Best Kind of Traffic Jam.

So the other day I got caught in a traffic jam.... at the doorway of my local bike shop. There were so many bikes going in and out that I just had to stand there for a minute and wait. How's that for a silver lining to the whole oil crisis??? Finally, our bike stores will be doing the kind of business they could only dream about years ago as they were getting edged out all across America. The bike shop guys said they've been just crazy busy for the last few weeks, with people walking in left and right to buy commuter bicycles. Yeah!

And both in real life and online in internet communities, I keep hearing about all the changes people are making in their driving habits. From sticking their kids on the school bus to running all of their errands on one day of the week to walking to the grocery store, it appears that almost $4.00 a gallon was the magic number to get people to actually change their habits. It does leave me scratching my head a bit as to why these things couldn't have been changed before we got into a crisis situation. I wonder what it is that makes people resistant to change for the good of all, but accepting of it when it comes to their own personal agendas. If you could figure that one out, the environmental movement could sure use to bottle it. But since I'd like to feel optimistic about something right now, it's that change is finally happening. Here's to the snowball effect!

The Beauty of Instinct

Not too long ago, we had a very cold and blustery day around here. It was so windy, the gate to the chicken coop blew shut, and when I went to put the chickens up for the night, only five of them were in the coop. So I went out to look around the bigger enclosure and couldn't see them at all. Now, if you know how much like pets these chickens are, you can imagine my terror in thinking that several of them had been eaten by one of the local raccoons or killed by another dog or some other such terrible fate. I went back up to the house for a flashlight and took a closer look around the pen, when I finally spotted them.

There's an oil barrel up against the back wall of the chicken coop, and all five of the chickens had somehow managed to wedge themselves into the space between the barrel and the wall. They were stacked on top of each other, and this space is about the only place in the enclosure with a roof over it, so they were even mostly dry from the rain. When I picked up each of the hens to carry them back to the coop, they were dry and toasty warm from being all stacked up like that. The funny thing about chickens is that when it's dark, they shut down like little robots that have been switched off. I couldn't even get them to walk up into the coop, so I had to stuff them through the coop door one at a time. Once in the light of the coop, they finally woke up enough to flap up to their perch.

I've noticed some other instinctual things about the chickens, like how they're all silent and still on their perch when I go to close the coop up at night, but as soon as the door is closed and they're secure, they all hop down from the perch and go to get some food or water. But until that moment of safety, they all remain perfectly still, you wouldn't even know there were chickens in the building at all from the quietness within.

Now I know chickens are almost as dumb as the boards they perch on. If they're out in the big enclosure and one of them goes back into the little pen, they often can't figure out how to get back out again. The door is, of course, in the same position it's always been in, but they don't seem to remember. They'll pace all around the cage with an expression like "how did that other chicken get out there?". But they have their instincts, and those instincts are pretty good at preserving them in many circumstances.

People, on the other hand, have lots of brains - tons and tons of grey matter that lets them think about all kinds of interesting stuff. But our instincts for self-preservation and benefiting our flock are just about zero. It seems like every day there's another news article that shows that what the "extremeists" have been saying all along (about the energy crisis, global warming, blah blah blah) is probably going to look like a picnic compared to what's really going to go down. Wheat shortages, rainforest mowed over for biofuels, ice melting and sea levels rising, gas prices soaring, jobs diminishing, the "recession" that no one wants to call a recession looming over everyone's heads. A woman (who commutes 90 miles a day) interviewed in an article about rising gas prices says she'll have to cut back on her Starbucks to save money for gas, politicians continue to talk about biofuels as if they'll save us, no one at all mentions the big "C" word - Conservation.

We're headed for the abyss, and unlike a sensible chicken we still fail to do the right thing.