In "Oil's Well that Ends Well" (Chapter 3 of his latest no.1 best-seller 'Dude, Where's My Country') Michael Moore, born 1954, dreams it's the year 2054 and he's a 100 year old great grand'pa. It's a nightmarish post-apocalyptic, post-hydrogen-hype, fossil-fooled world and he finds himself engaged in conversation with an imaginary, deeply disillusioned and reproachful great grand-daughter named Anne Coulter Moore(see note below).
This dream, writes Moore, "was so real it felt like something right out of Scrooge."
"Scroo'd" / "Screwed" might be a more apt - if less Dickensian title for this haunting little dream sequence.
(But, hey Dude, Michael where's your Lexus 2054? This is clearly a very different 2054, technologically at least, to the 2054 timescape of the sci-fi thriller Minority Report in which Tom Cruise charges round in an all-battery-electric, non-fuel-cell, lithium Lexus 2054 supercar...)
Anyway, the party's over and the game's definitely up in this, Moore's eerie vision of a post-oil era in which bewildered children ask not:
"What did you do in the war, daddy?" but
"What did you do in the battle to save the planet, daddy and mummy?"
And so it is that Michael Moore finds himself chatting to little Anne - anno 2054 - about oil, the 'die-off' and the hydrogen fuel cell wash-out - here's an excerpt:
Anne: What was it like when you couldn't breathe because of the dirty air caused by burning what you called gasoline? ...
Michael: Ooh, ooh, that smell. It was nature's way of telling you something's wrong. What were we thinking?..
Anne: But it was poisoning you. And you didn't have breathing stations like we do now, so what did you do?
Michael: People would just have to suck it up and breathe it in. This caused millions of people to breathe and die. No one wanted to say it was air pollution from burning fossil fuels that was making it hard to breathe..
(......)
A: My sixth grade teacher told us one of your leaders believed "hydrogen fuel cells" would replace gasoline cars but they didn't. That was crazy! Today every kid knows that hydrogen is hard to get.Sure it's in H20, but it takes a lot of energy to break off the hydrogen - and a lot of energy was what you didn't have. Duh!
M: You're right, Anne, we were all hepped up on so much Prozac and cable television 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 realised that hydrogen was not even a fuel at all! It got so bad , most college graduates didn't even know what H20 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.
DUDE, I have a dream...
Related links:
1) Water-to-hydrogen-electrolysis - the green panacea?
Yikes! Don't mention the World Water Shortage and Water Wars! As of 2003 almost half the planet lacks water for drinking, cooking, sanitation and agriculture: see
Water Wars Vandana Shiva plus World Water Forum and World Water Council.
But even in Britain - in these flood-plagued, rain-drenched British Isles, we are now yet again facing the possibility of a nationwide winter water shortage. See Guardian report(Nov' 03) "Save water or risk drought, official warns".
In 2054 headlines could well read: "Water, water all around but not a drop to drink - or drive with!"
2) See earlier EVUK report:
"Two new studies reaffirm: advanced battery vehicles - not fuel cells - are the logical / best way forward."
plus Econogics report."The Hydrogen Economy - An Idea Whose Time Hasn't Come...Again" (..the fuel cell was invented in 1839, folks!)
3) Also highly recommended: Michael Moore thinkalike Al Franken's 2003 no.1 best-seller "Lies, and the Lying Liars who Tell Them" - especially Ch.39 "The Bush Environmental Record". See Al-Franken.com for extracts etc.
4) Ann(sic) Coulter - an extreme right-wing, blond bombshell(how appropriate..) talkshow host and Fox News hot air-head.
Infamously, in her book "Treason", Coulter calls for opponents of Bush's Iraq War to be tried for treason.
Stupid White Men, Michael ?!?
See Ann Coulter.com - if you're up to it.
Otherwise escape quickly to:
5) Michael Moore.com
6) Sustainable Schools/SUSchools & Eco Schools - our favourite UK Schools' websites: colourful, engaging, relaxed, creative - and to our knowledge the only UK schools' eco-sites to mention(..and recommend the use of) electric vehicles & e-bikes.
Final thoughts:
- Moore's Law states that:
"People Power doubles every 18 months - once people wake up to the abuse of power by government, the media and giant corporations."
OK, Michael, we invented this law...it's a lie. But it's quite a Moore-ish white lie and a far-from stupid white lie. (Besides, the 'people-power' principle would surely benefit humanity way more than any ad nauseam doubling of computing power...).
So is Moore just another prophet of doom and disaster?
Well, you may as well ask the same question of Dickens, A Christmas Carol and The Ghost of Christmas Future: sometimes it's the only way to stir the soul - and kick some serious a*se ! (US=a*s !!).
But the moral - the message to the US and the West - is and surely always has been quite simple: free yourselves from your dependence - not just on "foreign" oil, Saudi oil, Middle Eastern oil - but from oil and fossil fuels - period!
Stop waging wars to safeguard "energy security"(aka 'oil') - and start investing urgently and big time (say, 10% of your military budgets) in clean energy innovation and realworld eco-technologies.
And don't toss all your eggs into one big basket of hydrogen-hype!
Please end this nightmare - wake up and just do it - before it's too late. For the sake of any children - or great-grandchildren - you ever happen to have dreams about.
