Mass immigration: energy and the silent lie

By Frosty Wooldridge

“The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial resources. Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool’s game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above.”

                                  James Woolsey, US Director of Central Intelligence 1993 – 1995

What more will it take for Americans to comprehend what it means to add 3.1 million immigrants to the United States annually?  How can we add another 200,000 legal immigrants every 30 days with over 14 million unemployed American workers?  What is Congress thinking?   Why are Americans too apathetic or too stupid to act?  How come no one understands the implications on multiple levels of adding 72 to 75 million legal immigrants to the USA by 2035?   How can we rationally and emotionally accept that number of immigrants added in a blink of time? 

          What is the easiest and most common posture for dealing with our hyper-immigration equation?  Short answer: ignore, deny, discount, pretend, reject or refute!  Push for endless “sustainable growth” in America.  How’s that working out for you folks in California?

         Back in 1860, one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain said, “Almost all lies are acts, and speech has no part in them.  I am speaking of the lie of silent assertion; we can tell it without saying a word.  For example:  It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of emancipation agitation in the North, the agitators got but small help or countenance from anyone.  Argue, plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from the pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society—the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion; the silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.

          “The universal conspiracy of the silent assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity or sham, never in the interest of a thing fine or respectable. It is the most timid and shabbiest of all lies…the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men and women are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”

So what is the lie we’re talking about? 

Stephen Benka, author of “The Energy Challenge” outlined the magnitude of our energy crisis by citing projects from the U.S. Department of Energy from 1999 to 2020, “The world’s total annual energy consumption will rise 59 percent and the annual carbon dioxide emissions will rise 60 percent while the world population increases from 6.5 billion to 7.5 billion.”

          Interestingly, few talk about an immigration moratorium.  Other experts call for—here’s that phrase again—unending ‘sustainable growth’.

          Let’s wake up and smell the coff…er, I mean, consumption addiction!

          Dr. Ernest J. Moniz wrote, “U.S. consumption represents half of that for the industrialized world…with China, Central and South America expecting to triple their usage over the next 20 years.”

          Where does that leave you and me, average citizens of the United States as our leaders shove this immigration juggernaut down our throats?

          Dr. Albert Bartlett,  www.albartlett.org ,wrote a penetrating column for the local Boulder Daily Camera, Colorado on February 3, 2008, page 7B:

          “It’s time to try again to correct the educationally credentialed but innumerate experts (innumeracy is the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy) who say that growth is inevitable.

“They fail to recognize that after maturity, continued growth is either obesity or cancer.  We must remember that “Smart Growth” and “Dumb Growth” destroy the environment in good taste.  Growth is not the answer; it’s the problem.

“The innumerate theme of the growth promoters is, ‘The Front Range of Colorado is going to grow whether we like it or not.’  If this is true, it is because so many leaders are active and successful in promoting growth.

 “Predictably, this will produce more well-to-do people, more  homeless people, more employed people, more unemployed people, higher salaries, more people living below the poverty level, more traffic congestion, higher parking fees, more school crowding, more crime, more unhappy neighborhoods, more expensive government, more taxes, higher taxes, more fiscal problems for state and local governments, more air and water pollution, higher utility costs, less reliable utility service, less democracy, higher food costs and more destruction to the environment.”

Defining future realities of hyper-immigration into the USA

          Please consider three definite outcomes by famous economist Kenneth Boulding.  He offers these three theorems that face our children. Please notice that Somalia’s children are already suffering in the midst of what their parents set up for them:

          “The Dismal Theorem:  If the only ultimate check on the growth of populations is misery, then the population will grow until it is miserable enough to stop growth.

          “The Utterly Dismal Theorem: Any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for so long as misery is the only check on population, the improvement will enable more people to live in misery than before. The final result of improvements, therefore, is to increase the equilibrium population, which is to increase the sum total of human misery.

          “The Moderately Cheerful Form of the Dismal Theorem:  If something else, other than misery and starvation, can be found which will keep a prosperous population in check, the population does not have to grow until it is miserable or starves; it can enjoy stable prosperity.”

          How far will we sell our national soul for more immigration?  When will we direct our solutions to stop mass immigration rather endless growth along with searching for dwindling energy supplies? 

          We don’t need to create one more Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, San Francisco, Dallas or Houston with big city traffic.  We do not need more air pollution nightmares along with millions of miles of highway systems whose diet consists of 22 million barrels of oil daily. 

          Finally, America reached ‘Peak Oil’ in 1970.  Most predictions show the world oil supplies peaking in 2010.  From that point, no matter how many oil wells we sink, the world’s supply declines.  We live in the ‘Peak Oil Descent’ that means every oil-dependent civilization on this planet must contract.

          James Howard Kunstler said, “At peak oil, there will still be plenty of oil left in the ground—in fact, half of all the oil that ever existed—but it will be the half that is deeper down, harder and costlier to extract, sitting under harsh and remote parts of the world, owned in some cases by people with a grudge against the United States, and this remaining oil will be contested by everyone.  At peak and just beyond, there is potential for system failures of all kinds—social, economic and political.  Peak is quite literally a tipping point.  Beyond peak, things unravel and the center does not hold.  Beyond peak, all bets are off about civilization’s future.”

          Kunstler said that by 2030, China will require 98 million barrels of oil per day.  The whole world burns only 84 million barrels of oil in 2011 per day.  It should be interesting to see where they obtain that 98 million barrels of oil in the next 19 years.

          We need a “consciousness shift” and actions to prepare our civilization for a very different future.  We desperately need a national scream for a 10 year moratorium on all immigration.  I have no idea what we are waiting around for or what we think will happen.  You can be darned sure that it won’t be pleasant.

          Whatever you do, avoid becoming a part of the “shabbiest of all lies…silent assertion.”

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