Is not running out of oil.

This headline today is not good news: Does shale oil boom mean U.S. energy independence is near? Neither is this one that the US has a “200-year-supply” of coal. Nor these about all the fuel available in the Marcellus Shale, or the Canadian tar sands, or the Green River oil shale.

At this point it’s obvious to the meanest intelligence that burning fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which causes climate change, which causes floods, fire, famine, pestilence, and war. It will kill billions of humans. I’ll repeat that. It will kill us. And I do mean “us.” Anybody who thinks they’ll be unaffected by the social consequences of global disasters is too dumb to last long in the hard new world. We are committing suicide.

We’re doing it right now. Not tomorrow. Not if things get worse. All we have to do is keep on doing what we’re doing.

Can I tell you a secret? Apparently, a lot of people don’t know this. Earth is the only planet we have.

Greenhouse gases are a gun pointed at our own heads. We have pulled the trigger.

But now comes the only good news: Planets work very slowly. The bullet has decades to travel. It’s already been traveling for about two centuries. Who knows how much more time we have? Probably minutes, but at least we’re not dead yet. If we did it very fast, we could move our heads out of the way.

Instead people write pleased headlines that more ways have been found to keep the bullet on track.

The whole species is headed for a Darwin Award. Except in this case it’ll be the planet whose survival is improved after we eliminate ourselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner.

Remember when Bilmes and Stiglitz published The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict in early 2008? There was much discussion about how it wasn’t true, how they’d overcounted this, and undercounted that. (E.g. 1)

Well, it turns out it was indeed not true.

It’s costing four trillion dollars. ($4,000,000,000,000. Actually, with those sorts of numbers, you’re really supposed to use scientific notation: $4 x 10¹².)

That’s just the loss for the USA. It doesn’t count the cost for the troops of other nations. It doesn’t include the costs in Iraq. All told, six or seven trillion dollars’ worth of smoke and rubble is probably a cautious and conservative estimate.

The good news is there was nothing else that needed doing, so it’s not as if it matters.

It’s true of the pill. If that’s not obvious to you, you’re not paying attention. Or you have an agenda. One that does not include making the lives of girls healthier and easier. That’s been made clear by loads of people. Just one example, Violet at Reclusive Leftist in several posts.

What I want to add is: REMEMBER IN NOVEMBER!

Do not vote for the Current Occupant. Do not vote for him, no matter what. Do not enable your own abuse.

Seriously.

Obama does the classic abuse crap. Slam! Oh, quit yer snivelling. Where ya gonna go? (A bit of time goes by.) Gee, honey, I’ll do better, just give me one more vote. Slam! (Rinse and repeat.)

For those of us favored enough to be safe from direct hits, the line is “The other guy will beat the kids up even worse.”

Do you know what that’s called? Extortion.

When it happens to someone else, we’re all super-clear that the victim should leave. Get the hell out. Stop putting up with it. GO!

But when it happens to us, suddenly we’re the ones on the floor with a broken jaw saying to ourselves, “God help me, if I leave, what’ll happen to us? What’ll I do? Somebody else’ll beat us up even worse.”

Never again pretend you don’t know how abuse victims feel.

And for yourselves: Get the hell out. Stop putting up with it. GO!

Do not vote for Obama in November. It doesn’t matter who the Republicans run. It doesn’t matter if one of them becomes President for four years. The only thing that matters right now is not being part of your own destruction.

Get it through your heads that you will not be bullied, and you will not be held hostage, and you will not knuckle under to extortion.

Do not buy the story that you have no choice. Vote for somebody else, anybody else. Or nobody. Follow Plan B and get rid of the lying, two-faced, pandering toady.

Update: I wrote a post pointing it out back when, but BAR puts it more clearly: Obama: the lesser evil or the more effective evil?

But the most lucid summary of all is Vastleft’s: