I had a vision last night after learning of yet another burst tar sands pipeline, this time in Texas. That’s five major pipeline failures this week alone.
I was also reminded of the obscene profits and seemingly unchecked power multinational oil companies currently enjoy; Exxon/Mobil, 122 million dollars a day in profit. Imagine the corruption that is available when companies exceed the GDP of a majority of countries on earth.
Before going to bed I saw another photo of what the Canadian’s are doing to their pristine forest in Alberta just to mine tar sands. I have seen these visuals before and you can too. Just Google, Alberta Tar Sands. Let me prepare you, if it doesn’t make you physically sick, it will most likely give you nightmares. That’s what happened to me last night.
My vision goes something like this. There is a giant standing in the middle of a vast wasteland that was once pristine forest.
As I approached the giant, I noticed the feet and lower legs of the beast were a different, grayish color. Getting closer, I saw in this grey area what looked like millions of tiny moving creatures. When I was finally close enough to view what these creatures were, I was aghast when I recognized them as us! A billion little humans holding up this giant as it wreaked destruction to land, air and sea.
At the mid-point of this grey mass I saw people dying and falling off with new young people near the bottom being integrated into believing their new role as part of the massive grey foundation was critical to everyone's existence. Their participation was critical because of the "freedom" oil provided to everyone and all the wonderful jobs that were bestowed by this "benevolent giant".
These new additions to the massive grey feet drove huge SUV's and giant pickup trucks. They seemed to ignore the tiny voices crying out from the ground around the feet of the giant about the destruction they were a part of. They drove huge vehicles like Hummers, many times a single occupant per vehicle because somehow they were convinced that, to be able to do so was an exercise of their “freedoms”, instead of what it was, slavery to the oil giant and pollution to the earth and sky.
These new people were so blinded they refused to even acknowledge the poisonous air they were breathing, the dirty water all around them, and the diseases they were dying from.
So the destruction continued to all things living at the hands of the giant.
Then I saw something amazing. People who were once part of this giant were leaving the grey mass because they had suddenly become aware that, what they were a part of was evil. They came to understand there was a way to be free from their enslavement to the giant.
Parts of the feet of clay were starting to disappear.
The giant knew what was going on but was so convinced of its mass global, near universal influence that it just kept stomping on.
My vision flashed forward to a time that must have been a hundred years later with a view of a massive mountain range. I was flying above it, my body suspended just below the outer atmosphere of a stunning green planet. The shape of the mountain range seemed strange in its size and shape. As I flew along, it struck me how the mountain range did not have a natural shape like the normal spine like configuration of all the mountain ranges around it.
Suddenly, when I was far enough away, the shape became clear. The mountain range I was looking at with such curiosity was the beast! It had fallen face down with no legs below the knees with no grey mass where the legs and feet had once been. The shape was covered with trees and snow, with beautiful large lakes in its hollow's and rolling mist in its meadows.
The beast had fallen when its feet and lower legs disappeared and the earth had reclaimed it. The people lived in it, and around it, with clean air and water in its upper regions and vast low lying adjacent lands.
My vision was changing. I wanted to know more. Almost as if I could move by my will, I began to descend. After feeling my feet touch the earth, I approached the people and asked them what happened. They told me the story of how their ancestors had suddenly become aware of what they had been a part of and how they decided they would abandon their roles as pieces of the monster.
Along with committing to cease their involvement as the foundation and feet of this destructive force they discovered two distressing but ultimately enlightening things.
First, not only were they the feet and legs as they first thought but they also made up the entirety of the beast. Millions who did not just buy and use the products produced but also worked for and depended on the giant for their livings and sustenance. In the upper levels were complicit governments who worked at the direction of the beast and its vast wealth and power. Even at the top, the head, were the leaders who managed and directed feeding this all consuming force.
The monster was us, through and through, bottom to top.
Second, the monster could be toppled, one soul at a time. But the souls who mattered most were the masses in the feet. These were the hardest to convince as they just wanted to live their lives in as “normal” a fashion as possible. Life, after all was hard and oil, so it seemed, made everything so much more convenient as long as they could ignore all the devastation it wreaked on them and everyone around them.
We were all warned back in the late 1990’s they told me. We were warned about peak oil. We were told when the oil companies started claiming tar sands and oil shale was the answer to the claims of peak oil, that they had come very near to the end of cheap easily recoverable oil.
The monster had to dispel the reality of peak oil, or die. The people at the head of the beast knew that the reality of non-renewable resource recovery was upon them and they had to convince us all it was not really true.
They hid the destruction as long as they could before the word got out about what they were doing. The traditional reserves had hit their breaking point and the destruction of the earth to recover these unimaginable dirty forms of oil had now been transformed to the new normal. They didn’t even bother to contend that tar sands were far dirtier to process, took far more water and energy to produce and left exponentially more waste than any other form of oil recovery in history. They thought they could dangle the temptation of money and economic security to the world and continue to tell the world that we just could never do without oil, no matter how dirty it was to make, or how risky it was to transport.
It worked at first. Having been hit by the Great Recession, states and countries who had these substances within their borders, were eager to attract and encourage these companies to come to their districts and dig up their lands in the interest of economic security.
But the truth could not be hidden forever. Pipelines burst on a regular basis, unable to handle the extreme pressures needed to push the highly corrosive, asphalt like tar sands through without rupturing time and time again. Picture after picture of vast areas of unspoiled land poisoned by the toxic sludge kept flooding into the public consciousness and literally flooding into many people’s streams, rivers, lakes, streets and even their yards.
First a few, then hundreds, then thousands began to see there were technologies that did not require oil for transportation at all. Electric vehicles, many literally charged with solar panels, began to surface all around us. By early 2013, 75,000 plug-in vehicles had been sold in just two years since their re-introduction. It had taken Toyota nearly 5 years to reach the 50,000 unit level with hybrids when they had been introduced a decade earlier. Now nearly all the major car companies were producing or working on electric vehicle technologies.
The auto industry had changed. Before the great recession they were complicit with the oil companies in every way. But then came the crash. When the auto companies needed help from the beast the beast ignored them and left them to die. The tie that kept the beast alive was broken in the minds of the new car industry and it would never be the same again.
The more people talked to those who converted to electric over gas the more they were amazed to hear how many were not going to the gas station at all anymore. It started to hit people. Why am I going to the gas station once or twice a week spending thousands and thousands of dollars every year on gas, oil and maintenance when my electric vehicle counterparts are not shouldering those cost at all anymore? Plus, electric vehicle drivers don’t pollute at all. They couldn’t if they wanted to, they didn’t even have tailpipes! They actually owned cars that had a return on investment, a first in the auto industry.
The imaginations of the gas drivers started to look at the smog filled sky’s over their cities, with a hope that this possibly wasn’t a permanent condition after all. Their imaginations started to challenge them as the evidence began to present itself right in front of them every time they were passed on the freeway by a car that did not use gas. They started to question whether we just needed to live with poisons in the air from a billion cars and trucks producing emissions from burning gas. They started to wonder if so many needed to die in the cases of those who suffered from lung and heart diseases brought on and exacerbated by the poisonous air.
The final blows came as millions and millions turned to the disruptive clean technologies that would ultimately bring down the beast. Natural gas in large trucks, then eventually hydrogen, taking commercial transport completely off gas and oil for good. Solar powered High Speed Rail cutting short hop air travel to near zero levels. Air travel became what it was intended to be, long range flights of 1,500 to 12,000 miles and even that would be done with hydrogen powered aircraft. Hypersonic flight was now possible due to new fuels and technologies that did not pollute while super fast, clean aircraft cruised through the upper atmosphere.
But the beginning of a new era was birthed through the feet. The average person coming to understand that polluting transportation technologies were not only against their best environmental interest but also not in their best economic interest.
They saw that they had been fooled into thinking they were chained to the ever increasing cost of fuel, creating a constant stress on their personal finances. The sacrifice was so great and yet the super wealthy corporations who always demanded more from them had a never-ending lust for more of their hard earned dollars.
Worst of all, they came to realize this giant monster was directing the most powerful military on earth, through oil men in powerful political positions, to send their daughters and sons off to be maimed for life, or killed in wars waged on behalf of the oil monster. Massive escalating wars that served one purpose and one purpose alone, to keep the flow of the lifeblood of an industrialized society flowing unabated, oil.
It wasn’t until the wars paused long enough for people of every political stripe to realize that, had the countries their children were fighting in not had oil, the monster would not have cared on whit about, “threats to the region”.
The trillions of dollars spent on behalf of the monster, the lives changed and lost forever was all to feed the monsters veracious appetite. The monster could never tolerate talk of “the end of oil”. That was the monsters lifeblood that kept the cash flowing that it had to have in ever increasing quantities.
After the last Great War in the desert sands in the early 2000’s the monster had turned it’s attention to tearing up the earth in places where it knew it would only have to wage war on the earth itself, without use of a military. The monster had become somewhat self-aware that the injured and wounded knew why they had been in the desert and it had nothing to do with “protecting anyone’s freedoms”.
Veterans began to drive cars that used very little gas or no gas at all. They told their children to never again fight for any corporation and to always adamantly demand their government never commit its people to war on behalf of a business.
The children’s eyes were opened when they saw the destruction in their families and in the families of those far away in the desert. They saw that the people who were installed in place of a dictator had turned out just as bad or worse than the man their parents were sent to oust.
They saw the determination on their parent’s faces to be free from the blood and structure of the monster…… and the feet accelerated in their disintegration.
Before all the High Speed Rail, the hydrogen planes, the natural gas trucks, it was the millions and millions of people, who like tiny specs of sand, fell from the feet of the monster. It was the individuals who put solar on their homes, demanded and purchased electric cars and trucks by the millions, that brought the monster down.
The monster tried to fight back by cutting the price of oil to all time lows, but the people had seen this trick before and knew the inevitable rise would come once the monster became assured as many people were convinced of it’s inevitability as it took to keep it standing and stomping through the earth.
My vision was coming to a close now. As I reflected I came to understand the strength and determination of the people to never let this happen again.
They committed together that any future technology that came along would be closely scrutinized and evaluated. Careful analysis would be conducted to make sure that new technologies would never be adopted if they were determined to be destructive to the earth or to its occupants, no matter how great the creature comforts they would claim to afford.
Innovation and creativity was encouraged and supported, as long as new endeavors met the simple parameters of not being destructive to life and the lessons of the past were never forgotten.
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