Bush Advisor: Oil Future “Looking So Ugly Nobody Wants to Face It”

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Do yourself a favor and read the Chicago Tribune’s fantastic series tracing the oil that goes into your tank backward across the globe–to Africa, where more and more of it comes from (causing an affluent superpower to “rattle its half-empty oil can at the world’s poorest continent”), to the Middle East, to places you may not have thought of. Along the way, Pulitzer winner Paul Salopek discovers that kicking oil habit is no longer just a matter of virtue, or environmental responsibility, or even finite resources (as Paul Roberts showed in his Mother Jones piece on “peak oil“) but of getting out of the way of the inevitable collapse:

(The) globe-spanning energy network… today is so fragile, so beholden to hostile powers and so clearly unsustainable, that our car-centered lifestyle seems more at risk than ever.

“I truly think we’re at one of those turning points where the future’s looking so ugly nobody wants to face it,” said Matthew Simmons, an energy investment banker in Houston who has advised the Bush administration on oil policy. “We’re not talking some temporary Arab embargo anymore. We’re not talking your father’s energy crisis.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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