I’m eating mine off a paper plate when my buddy points his plastic fork towards the beach and says, “Just think, Charlie’s out there squatting on his haunches in the dark, scarfing down a bowl of cold rice.”

There’s a lot of people out there, dead, alive, and yet to be born, who never got their share.

We did this. I did my part. Still doing it. I accept responsibility.

Carbon capture will not fix it. We’d have to pull out carbon at the same rate we put it in just to break even. Not possible. Sure, try, why not? But we’d need 200 years of pulling more carbon out than we put in.

I just don’t see how that is possible.

From the year I was born, there are now almost three times as many people in this country, on this planet. They all want stuff. Like ER, I always thought we’d find a way to get our energy and stuff from outside the planet.

I was naive.

Instead we spent our resources finding ways to kill each other. Imagine if instead of bombs we’d invested in fusion power, always 30 years away.

Apologies for my cynical mood, but it is not just the oil companies, or the mining companies, or the military industrial complex.

It’s us.

Electric cars will cut back on oil consumption ONLY if the increased electricity demands of the transportation sector are met by increased capacity in power generation. So far, this increased capacity has come from fossil fuels. The energy derived from renewable sources has increased enormously in absolute terms, but not in relative terms. In spite of the increased use of renewables, we still are burning more oil and coal than ever.

The real rightwing talking point here is we don’t have to worry about big energy guzzling SUVs because they’ll all switch to electricity and the windmills will all be online by 2030. In other words, we can continue selling the big, inefficient (but highly profitable) personal transport the American public is addicted to.

Florida would be uninhabitable without air conditioning. But as the planet warms up, its widespread use will be more and more common further and further north. I suspect this alleged bounty of renewable electric power will all be diverted to keeping our buildings livable.

As for that 2030 figure, I don’t believe it. I don’t even see any evidence of a trend in that direction. Every new year shows only an increase in fossil fuel consumption, the benefit from solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and geothermal doesn’t even dent it. The real savings will come from mass transport and conservation, like altering our building construction so it is less reliant on A/C. People lived in Florida without air conditioning for centuries by dressing for it, and building houses and buildings to be naturally cooler.

Renewables will help, but the only way to slow down global warming is to use less energy. Unfortunately, the only way to increase corporate profit is to use more of it.

Second, I grew up in Southern California in the 1970s. I remember getting bused for school from the southern edge of Pasadena 10 miles up to Altadena, to a school only a mile from the San Gabriel mountains. (Just imagine government trying to do a social experiment like school integration today? But that’s another story.) On most days the smog was so bad you could not see the mountains from that school. Catalytic converters are an incredible success story for air quality in the L.A. basin, where everyone has a car. For decades now the air has been magnificently cleaner than when I was growing up.

The auto companies have convinced us electric cars are the answer to global warming, but you have to burn oil to provide the extra electricity to power EVs. Their real goal, of course, is to continue to sell big, profitable cars.

The same thing happened back in the 1970s when they convinced us that the way to combat tailpipe emissions was to retrofit catalytic converters onto big V-8 engines.

In either case, the solution is not high tech add-ons, its to build smaller cars with smaller engines and to discourage automotive traffic by focusing on mass transit and discouraging investment in automotive infrastructure..

We CAN have our cake and eat it too, but we have to be ready to sacrifice something.