Dear editor:

T. Boone Pickings says we are paying $700-billion per annum for foreign oil. We’ve spent $1-trillion prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The net effect is that we’re footing the bill for both sides of the wars we are fighting.

We’ve been confronted by an energy crisis for 40-years with no one willing to risk the political capital required to provide effective leadership in meeting it. Bush’s neo-conservative agenda of winning Iraqi oil is an interim, and to date, failed stopgap that doesn’t advance our transition to a post-fossil fuel era that must be based on new forms of energy.

Our population and that of the world will grow over the next 40-years by 25- to 30-percent: from 300- to 400-million and from 6- to 9-billion people respectively.

This projection in concert with the rapid industrialization of Asia and its subcontinent renders one factor a certainty. 20th Century estimates for the depletion of existing fossil-fuel resources are advancing at an accelerating rate with consequent exhaustion now scheduled to occur sooner than previously calculated.

A U.S. declaration of energy independence to be achieved in the next decade can develop the “know how” to reconstitute the basis for our material civilization. This would replace the now skeletal wealth-generating engines of the smoke-staked industrial age with means of many magnitudes greater productive and wealth-building potential. That poses the prospect of meeting not only each of our individual needs, those of our nation, and all that fits within the criteria of our common cause, but can restore American leadership to an increasingly global civilization as a byproduct.

We will lead in the 21st Century only by continuing to take each next step required in building the systems and structures that meet these needs, and the expectations of a world much of which is still struggling to loosen the strictures binding them in ignorance to a lost past.

We will lose that initiative only by failing to take a stand for the progress required by this challenge. That failure isn’t an option. If we don’t take the initiative, we can be certain that others will not hesitate in taking it.

As a people, we are 5-percent of the world’s population. We daily consume 25-percent of the world’s available energy resources. The cost for them is increasing at a time when our capacity to expand our economy and generate new wealth is diminishing. The logical progression in this equation is already underway with a downward leveling of the buying power of every American, of corporate America, and of every level of government.

The late Bucky Fuller observed as early as the 1960?s that relying on fossil fuels to run our power grids was tantamount to spending $1-million dollars every time someone turns on a light switch. If you discount that as fantastical, do the math on the research and development, and the industrial gearing up required to deliver one barrel of synthetic oil just to keep the internal combustion and jet engines viable for our mobility needs.

We can prepare a solid footing for ourselves in meeting the future, or keep our focus exclusively on the rearview mirror for a surprise head-on collision with it.

I trust the American spirit will prevail not to privilege ourselves by symbolic gestures deemed charitable toward others, but because we still know how to translate an ideal vision into the real world for practical application and use. That example can still provide a living demonstration for others to follow or not as they will.

To presume more would be arrogance. Anything less would be a crime.

Wayne Bloodworth