Energy's Cauldron: Bubble, Bubble, Toil And Trouble

The Bubble Universe: the bubble-verse

We went through all of this about 30 years ago. There were 2 oil embargoes, caused by conflicts still largely unresolved. These embargoes pointed up a severe weakness in our nation's energy policy, still unresolved. Then came the 1980s, Reagan and reagonomics. This period was fortuitously followed by a series of "bubbles" which created large wealth in their times and large losses of wealth at the end of their times. The bubbles, or the Bubble Economy, created the illusion of Long Term Well being, and combined with Reagonomics to create the illusion of prosperity forever, with little or no effort, all on credit. The Long Term became the Short Term, and what was good for the present - we and our interests - became what was good for the future. This is why we thought, and still think, that it is a good thing that the deficit be passed on to our children and their children. This is why we create arenas of violence in the world with no idea how to resolve them, leaving more violence in Iraq and Afghanistan to our children and their children. The Bubble-Verse, or the bubble universe, is perfectly closed in upon itself, and maintains cohesion along its perimeter of minimal size. It admits nothing outside of itself. It is a paradigm of our economy. It is also a paradigm of our politics, intolerant of anything outside its thin bubble skin. The universe is the bubble and nothing outside. There is no law nor authority which exists outside the bubble, as in the investing bubble when so many people believed "It's ain't never gonna end!", for there were no external economic laws; the laws of the Bubble were the only laws extant, and those laws screamed endless growth. And so it is in politics, when we have seen people believe that History ( with a capital "H" ) had come to an end (i.e., there was nothing outside our bubble), and all history would be what America wished it to be! In essence, history was now the USA's bubble, and no one else's. I have not made this up. Francis Fukuyama said this.

Did not it occur to minds at the time a few years ago that this was terrifically similar to madness?! How did we get to a place where an educated man's ravings were actually construed as insight? How many mad men does it need to solve the energy situation? How long will it take them?