On extraction.

The womb-suckers are trying to eat your children. Poke a soda straw into the future and sluuurp, away they go.  Hopes and dreams, metabolized today into so many dollar bills.

I spend a fair bit of time with drug dealers. Most are ethical people – they wanted to ingest drugs, and they knew some other people who wanted to ingest drugs, so they started selling.

But there’s an unethical way to push – some dealers focus on getting new users hooked.  That way they’ll have a steady income stream.  Most of the guys in my poetry class, if somebody talks about getting clean, congratulate and encourage the dude.  But some dealers would see rehab as a threat to their own livelihoods.

The future-eaters are like the second type of dealer.  They’re trying to kill babies – including babies who haven’t even been conceived yet – while proffering incredibly cynical rationalizations.

Here’s the deal: regions of the Earth’s crust that lie beneath territories claimed by the United States contain rich deposits of hydrocarbons.  These could be dug up and combusted to power our factories, our automobiles, our giant arrays of computer servers that enable the internet.  The average person’s lifestyle in the U.S.gobbles energy, and deep below our lands is solar energy that photosynthesizing plants captured millions of years ago.

But we now know that there is only a limited amount of ancient stored sunlight beneath us.  The world’s oil reserves will eventually be depleted.  And so a smart investor, even if that investor believed that all the hydrocarbons beneath us should be combusted, bringing our planet closer to the hellhole that runaway climate change allowed Venus to become, would decide to wait.  Right now, the price of oil is low.  The total supply of oil is decreasing.  The population is rising.  If oil really is the best energy source, then the price will obviously rise. 

I believe this relationship, lower supply = higher price, is taught within the first two lectures of any undergraduate economics course.

Since we’re rich enough to do it, we would make more money by buying oil now from those foolish countries who need cash right away and are currently selling their buried wealth, then extracting our own oil later when the total supply is lower and each barrel is worth more money.

The womb-suckers love money.  So why isn’t this their plan?

After all, we as a nation are wealthy enough to invest.  Throughout the ages, that’s what people blessed with current prosperity have done. By socking away money now – maybe by lending it to a neighbor and charging interest – you gain a constant source of income for the future.

The usual stereotype is that it’s foolish poor people who eat the future.  When you’re starving, you might eat seeds from the granary.  That’ll help you survive another winter, but next year the famine will hit even worse.  Methamphetamines let you trade away future health to do more today.  So do cigarettes.

The womb-suckers rarely pull drags of nicotine into their own bodies.  But they’ll happily light one for our planet.

The president of the U.S. wants to drill for oil beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  The president of Brazil wants to cut down the Amazon rain forest for gold mines and hamburgers.

But there is a framework in which their urgency to eat the future is rational.  If people will notice what’s happening and stop them later, they need to get it done now. The window for personal gain is closing: slash and burn while you can.

And there is, of course, the comparison to an unethical drug dealer.  You have to keep selling even when the heat is closing in because otherwise your customers could get clean and then you can’t make money off your product anymore.

We’ve reached a point where many people have realized that the future is in peril –most people who get their news from any source other than the state-endorsed propaganda network – but, let’s face it, people are lazy.  I’m lazy too.  Even though I know that disposable diapers are wasteful to manufacture and then ship off to landfills, my family resorts to them during weeks when we’re too overwhelmed to wash another load of excrement-encrusted rags.

Similarly, everyone knows that a vegan diet is better for the planet. But most people still eat meat. The Republican party’s big-government subsidies make hamburgers cheap … and those burgers are already cooked, waiting at the drive through, chock full of delicious fat, salt, and MSG. Being vegan takes more effort.

But we’re well-meaning, most of us.  And lazy, well-meaning people just need a little nudge to start doing the right thing.

The womb-suckers are justifiably worried that a small hiccup in the rate of extraction now might be the final nudge necessary to get the world to change.  Switch to renewable energy.  Recycle and re-use more of what we’ve already dug from the ground.

The womb-suckers need to flood the market, get what money they can before the rest of us sober up.  It’s the best thing for a murderous hedonist to do; with enough money, they can soar the skies in gold-plated airplanes.  With enough money, even boorish, ugly men have a shot at having sex with pornographic film stars.

The future eaters see no contradiction, calling themselves “pro-life” while they frantically strive to make billions of unborn children die.