Hot, Flat, And Crowded

After reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded. my mind was completely blown. There were so many things that I had no clue of. I was so unaware of the simplest things, it was almost as if I had been living under a rock. One of the things that first shocked me, was the extinction of the river dolphin. How could a species so close to our own have been completely swiped clean off the face of the earth. This is a species that I will never get to see in person, and much less tell those who come after me what this species even was. To think that a mammal, very close to the homo sapiens species, has become extinct is almost as to think, are we next? And if we aren't next, how much time do we have left, and is it even possible to stop it?

Something that I had been aware of was the ever increasing gas prices. Yet I was completely oblivious as to why the prices kept going up and why everyone was so furious. Not only is it affecting our everyday life, but it is affecting everything around us. And the main reason why we as a country are now doing so poorly is because of our dependency on oil. Think, almost everything we use runs on oil, meaning everything we do consumes oil, and increases our need for oil. That in turn increases our demand from foreign countries who actually produce oil, and their ability to make us pay for it. A big eye opener for me was that theory that our addiction to oil was paying for both sides of the war. Not only do we pay our troops and supply them with guns and ammunition, but we are also paying for our opposing country's guns and ammunition. We end up giving them so much money to provide us with oil, that we are giving them a much better opportunity to be armed and ready to fight us. It almost seems like we are paying to lose a battle.