Certain things in life truly confound and astound me simply because it is so painfully obvious that we are shitting on ourselves by doing these things. A few examples I can think of are oil, nuclear energy, urea formaldehyde foam insulation and aluminum wiring.
   Is it just me or does it seem totally wrong that you would put a product used to preserve human bodies into the walls of your house as insulation? Or what about using wire that starts life as something resembling dirt? Oil is another one of my favorites. Here we are poisoning the world at an incredible rate yet we keep trying to find more, so that we can burn it in one form or another and create more pollution with which to kill ourselves. Personally it sounds kinda stupid to me. But I forgot to mention the best part, we create all this plastic and other crap from our ‘wonderful’ oil and fill our garbage dumps at a rate faster than at any time in the history of man. Nice product this oil, wouldn’t you say?!
   Last but not least is my personal favorite, the scourge of the planet, nuclear energy. Since the supply of pollution causing oil is being depleted (what else would you expect from a finite resource) we, as a populous decide to embrace the splitting of the uranium atom as our solution to oil for the future. Only one small problem with the whole process, allot of the by-products stay radio active for 10,000-100,000 years. What do you do with a nuclear reactor after its service life has ended or its fuel rods when they are spent? It’s not like you can send it to the scrap yard or recycle it. Instead we and our future generations are stuck with it for basically eternity, because none of us will last that long and neither will our descendants at the rate we are going!
    What kills me is that the brightest and best have not raised a global cacophony for hydrogen fusion power. Hydrogen is about the most abundant element on our planet, and when you burn it you get water. If the containment field for a hydrogen thermo-nuclear reaction were to break down the reaction ceases since the reaction can not happen without the containment field. The worst pollution you get from hydrogen is water, and since almost every life force on this planet needs water I can’t personally see a down side.
   From the time that Albert Einstein first proposed mass–energy equivalence or as its more commonly known, E=MC2 in 1905 to the first nuclear pile on December 2, 1942 was only a matter of 37 years. Since mankind has already been working on fusion reactors for some time I would imagine that we could overcome the technical problems within 10 years if a concerted effort were put forth by the leaders of this world, because if they think that the financial melt down we have witnessed was bad the suffocation of an entire planet is much more dire. That is the fate that awaits us if we fail to act as soon as is humanly possible. I don’t know about you but slow suffocation doesn’t sound like something I want to leave to my future generations as a gift of our inability to look to the future.