Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [40]
M: You’re right, Anne, we were all hepped up on so much Prozac and cable television that we always believed what our leaders told us. We even believed them when they said that “hydrogen was the Second Coming—limitless, pollution-free energy that will soon replace oil!” We spent so much money on our military to make sure we had access to oil that our schools were falling apart, making everyone grow up dumb and dumber—and therefore, no one realized that hydrogen was not even a fuel at all! It got so bad, most college graduates didn’t even know what “H2O” stood for.
Soon things really got bad. We ran low on oil, and there wasn’t any hydrogen to run our cars, so people got really mad. But it was too late. That’s when the die-off began.
A: I know, the food ran out.
M: At the time, it seemed like a good idea to use oil to grow food. It does seem funny now that no one seemed to realize that the massive food production needed to keep so many people alive could not be sustained for very long. That was probably our worst mistake of all. The artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, not to mention all the tractors and agricultural equipment, depended on fossil fuels. When oil production peaked, the price of food went up in lockstep with the price of fossil fuels. The world’s poor starved to death first. But, as soon as people realized what was happening, stores and warehouses were attacked, and being rich was little guarantee of having enough food to eat.
To make matters worse, when the die-off began, people could not afford to get to work, to heat their homes, to buy electricity. There were some experts who predicted world oil production would peak around 2015, and they were laughed at—but they were right. Fuel prices began escalating ever more sharply—but it was too late to plan for a smooth transformation to a different way to obtain energy. The catastrophe was upon us.
A: Great-Grandpa, why are you pushing a golfer around in a shopping cart?
M: Oh, sorry. That’s from my other dream. Fred, get the #%&* out of here!
A: I have a theory about what happened. I heard that your generation loved the sun and laid out in it all the time, just sleeping. I think that’s why you used up all the cheap oil, so you could heat up the Earth, get rid of winter, and everybody could get really good tans and look cool.
M: No, actually, we were scared to death of the sun. Most of us worked in buildings with the windows sealed tight, with machines to filter and clean our air and water. When we did venture outside we would slather ourselves in sun-block and put on dark sunglasses and hats to shield our heads. But as much as we hated the sun, we hated the cold even more. Everyone was moving to the hot states where it rarely snowed and then spent their days in air-conditioned homes and offices and rode around in air-conditioned automobiles. Of course this used even more gasoline, and that made the world even hotter, which made people turn up the air conditioning even more.
A: Why did they invent nuclear bombs if they wanted to kill everyone at once when they already had oil-based bombs? When they turned the nuclear bombs into nuclear power plants, didn’t they know one might blow up and burn everyone?
M: A hundred years ago, we were told nuclear fission would produce electricity “too cheap to meter.” Never happened. The second President Bush . . . or was it the third President Bush . . . well, definitely not the fourth President Bush . . . one of those damned Bushes stepped up nuclear plant production, but after a disgruntled nuke plant worker filled his pickup with fertilizer and detergent and smashed it into his place of employment, destroying a small town nearby, the program was quickly dropped.
A: Dad says in your day there were over six billion people in the world. Sometimes I get scared, but I try not to think about the time when so many people died of starvation and disease all over the world. In school, I heard there are now about