With the steady disintegration into a multi-country Middle Eastern war, the only reason the United States is not hysterically running around with its hair on fire is because of the domestic shale gas and oil revolution. The only reason we are not planning to send hundreds of thousands of young men and women into an unwinnable war is because of the sacrifice of California, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio, North Dakota and many other states that can easily understand the logic of locally producing the energy that we as a nation consume.

Or perhaps the expenditure of billions of dollars and the loss of tens of thousands of young lives is more palatable than an adjustment to our comfortable and car-driven lives.

All one has to do is look and see how many people drove their cars to The Weather Project, or watch the endless stream of cars and buses into the Homestead School to understand the gulf between the aspiration of individual energy-use reduction and the reality.

Charles Petersheim

Eldred, NY