Burning it all up

As I sit here in Vegas playing on the internet and rewatching "Crude Awakening", an excellent movie about oil, rather than being in London for the WSOP Europe, it has struck me how relatively good internet poker is for the country. Would be even better if legalized and taxed, but that is a different blog.

On my last trip to play in the Borgata tournament I spent more time in an airplane then I did playing in the event.

Very cheap oil, made even cheaper by subsidies, has made it very easy for us to fly and drive all over the place, for little or no reason, with little thought to the true cost. Our political leaders have encouraged us to binge on this great resource without any concern for the future. We will very soon find oil very scarce and expensive. Our grandchildren may find it so expensive that they are never able to fly in an airplane even once, because we have burned up this resource so carelessly.

One can see this in the chants of "Drill baby drill!" at the political conventions. Even if they don't believe in global warming and other "environmental nonsense", aren't they at all guilty about burning up the entire worlds oil supply in a few generations. How will future generations look back on us? Of course if you are like Sarah Palin or my fiance' Timmi you think this is not a problem because Jesus will be back real soon, but I wouldn't want either one running the country on that assumption.

Just think, what if the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on a war in Iraq to enrich oil producers and defense contractors had been spent on developing alternative clean renewable energy so we didn't have to go to war over oil and weren't dependant on foreign governments.

I won't lie and say this was the main reason I didn't go to London. Other obligations and the long trip, to the most expensive place I have ever been, carried far more weight. It is very hard for individuals to make even small sacrifices when they know that everyone else will be burning up whatever they saved today, tomorrow. That is why we need government to do the exact opposite of what they have been doing now.

It does however make me feel like I am at least taking a little break from doing my part in destroying the planet for future generations by playing internet poker instead of flying my money over to Europe, this one time.