Golly what A Gully and The Ozone Man

This is a shot of the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and is a hole made by nature.

You have all heard the old adage, 'when you are in a hole, stop digging'. Nature has her own way of digging and we cannot control it, though we try. You ask, what has this to do with the Ozone Man? I will endeavor to make the connection.

Man wreaks his own havoc on our environment with digging. I am thinking fossil fuels, of course. Think of the billions and billions of dollars that have changed hands and the wars that have been fought over just one fossil fuel - oil. Our wealth in the form of dollars has gone from our country to the unstable mid- east. Our unquenchable thirst for oil has made billionaires of Sheiks and their ilk. Then oil became an excuse to make our presence secure in this desert land resulting in the Iraq war.

If anyone thinks this war was to topple Saddam or believes any of the other lame excuses for our being there I would ask you, do you think we would have invaded any country if there was no oil there? Why didn't we topple Kim Jong of North Korea, for example. He was, if anything, a worse dictator than Saddam and he possessed nuclear weapons; therefore, a much bigger threat to the world. Oh, 9/11, you say? Well, that reason didn't fly either. But it did provide an excellent excuse to send our troops to oil country.

As Pogo said, "We have found the enemy and he is us." Five administrations ago Jimmy Carter was mocked for warning us that we had an energy crisis looming. People listened when a gas shortage resulted in long gas lines, but as soon as the shortage ended we went back to our old wasteful ways with a ho hum.

Ronald Reagan came in and scrapped all of Carter's rebates on solar and wind devices and Americans were happy to buy bigger and bigger cars and Detroit was happy to supply the demand.

Now I have come full circle with my point about digging. Enter The Ozone Man, aka: Al Gore. He became vocal about the subject and the President, George H. W. Bush snidely nicknamed Gore The Ozone Man. And still people said, "Oh it's much ado about nothing." and kept buying their Hummers and SUV's.

Then The Ozone Man wrote a book, Earth In The Balance and made a movie and some people began to notice. But President Bush II scoffed at the book, although he had to admit he never read it. But George W. did read a novelist's book, Michael Crichton's State of Fear and when that novelist wrote there was no Global Warming (aka: Climate Change) Bush believed it while ignoring the science.

I don't remember much being done during the Clinton administration to encourage the development of wind and solar power, either. (If I'm wrong, please correct me.) And more years were wasted when we should have been working to solve the problem.

Will the politicians finally admit we have a serious problem and do something to encourage alternate energy instead of continuing to dig holes? Stay tuned.