Q: But Nancy Pelosi has the answer. She said she is only trying to save the planet. Barney Frank is talking with the finance committee and listening to theories about helping some of those people facing foreclosure. Yeh, business as usual. Looks like a crisis to me, folks. But nobody asked me.
A: I don't know which of several national emergencies you're asking about. In fact, I don't even know for sure which nation you're talking about. The biggest emergencies facing every nation, including the one I live in, are the global climate change caused by humans burning hydrocarbons, and the impending economic hardships that will come when we inevitably exhaust the global supply of those hydrocarbons. The former is decidedly more pressing than the latter (by about a hundred years, give or take fifty). But they both only have one legitimately workable solution, and that is a dramatic decrease in global energy consumption - also known as Conservation. And you ask a good question: What will it take to make people wake up to this (inter)national emergency? It won't be enough for us to be confronted by the escalating cost of energy, or the tangible effects of climate change (polar bears drowning, ice-free Arctic ocean, more energy injected into the tropical cyclone systems, etc and so on) because people still believe that there are other solutions that don't require a lifestyle change (such as offshore drilling, solar panels, electric cars, etc). I'm afraid we may have to wait until after all of these solutions are implemented and we still have the same problems, before people will start to realize that a change in our consumption habits is the one and only thing that can save us. Those other things will help, but all of them combined are far less significant than the single issue of conservation. "Oil" represents hundreds of millions of years worth of solar energy that we basically found in a hole in the ground. (Yes, oil comes from plant matter which was grown by the Sun over the ages). We've managed to use up about half of that treasure over the course of approximately 100 years. That equates to a couple of million years' worth of solar energy we've been using each year. When you consider that every "alternative" energy source we have (with the exception of nuclear power) is driven by the sun, you might start to get the picture that this trend is not sustainable. We hope to get significantly better at capturing the solar energy reaching us in real time, but the notion of completely replacing oil with solar, wind, and biofuels is utterly implausible. The only responsible course of action is to reduce our energy consumption significantly. This doesn't have to have a negative impact on our economy though. We can turn our lights off at night, we can drive smaller, lighter vehicles at lower speeds over shorter distances, we can insulate our homes, and we can use technology to improve the efficiency of all our energy-consuming endeavors.