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My take on global warming is intuitive rather than scientific, based on information readily available from my brain. It goes like this:

A) There is a fixed amount of carbon on the planet.

B) Burning stored, high-carbon materials releases carbon into the atmosphere.

C) Petroleum is basically the world’s carbon bank — compressed biomatter from jungles that existed on earth hundreds of millions of years ago.

D) In the past 100 years, a very large percentage of all the petroleum that our planet has ever produced has been burned, and ALL that carbon has been released into the atmosphere.

E) Release of that much carbon into the atmosphere has to be unprecedented in at least the last several million years.

F) It’s simply counterintuitive to believe that 100 years of heavy industrial production based on the burning of petroleum would not affect the behavior of the earth’s atmosphere.

G) The way things are going, we will easily burn up every last drop of oil on the planet in the next century or two. In the next century or three after that, historians will call us the most selfish, short-sighted humans in the planet’s history because we were borrowing all that oil from future generations — with no prospect, no plan, no earthly idea of paying it back.

H) We can adapt to life with different weather, but adapting to a world without petroleum will be the far greater challenge.

I) Given all these considerations, the mandate to save petroleum by not burning it all wastefully yields the same result: less carbon in the atmosphere and reduced global warming, and more petro-chemicals for future generations, giving us more time to develop more sustainable energy sources.

Conclusions:

• Billions of humans burning highly concentrated, carbon-based materials are bound to screw with the weather when all that carbon is released into the atmosphere.
• Petroleum is the most powerful, practical component of industrial society. It is, literally, the grease on the wheels. Without it, industry stops. We don’t want that.
• As a matter of moral principle, each of us should reduce our petroleum consumption to ensure there will be some oil left for our great-great-great-grandchildren and their great-great-great grandchildren.

Al Gore overstates the extent to which the Earth is in the Balance. If anything, Earth is looking forward to the day when we foolishly burn all the oil and resort to massive warfare and bioterror and whatever else it takes to cleanse our species from the planet’s surface. Earth gets back into balance when we’re not mucking up the place anymore.

We’re flying through resources under the mass delusion that we have a say in how things turn out, when the best we can hope for is learning to play by the planet’s rules. Cheaters get to sleep with the dinosaurs.

Doctor King mastered the art of using non-violence as a weapon to get what he wanted (and, more critically, what our country needed). A more conventional weapon killed him in Memphis 40 years ago today. It wasn’t the rifle, or the slug, or even the presumably racist motivation of the man who shot him dead on that motel walkway, that cost King’s life.

I think it was the truth — a truth self-evident and yet fundamentally counterintuitive to human nature. Which was: violence is unnecessary and even counterproductive. We’re so captive of our violent nature that the idea of being willfully non-violent — particularly for political means — doesn’t compute.

King wasn’t the first to come up with this idea: Gandhi used it to kick the British out of India; today Indian companies are buying up British carmakers. Gandhi was murdered, too, which might’ve been on King’s mind when he said he’d seen the promised land but didn’t think he’d make it there with his people.

The genius of King and Gandhi was to use non-violent civil disobedience to provoke the inner violence of so-called civilized people. It worked because it created a “shooting an unarmed man” image that exposed how unjust these supposedly just people could be.

I’ve often wondered if the Palestinians would’ve had better luck following King’s model. Can’t say because it’s never been tried (at least not explicitly), but it sure seems to me that every act of Palestinian violence against Israel convinces the Israelis they’re justified in continuing to make life miserable for the Palestinians. Strikes me that if the Palestinians tweaked the conscience of the Israeli nation without killing and maiming its children, they might have a shot at ending the oppression (though that would render the fire-eating fanatics who run things irrelevant, and who wants to be irrelevant?)

Imagine what would’ve happened to King’s followers in Alabama and Mississippi if they’d have fought back at the bigots with baseball bats and firebombs. The lynchings would probably still be going on to this day.

King’s truth exposed the lie that America was a free country in the middle of the 20th century, when skin tone determined which schools people could send their kids to, which fountains they could get a drink from.

The truth got King killed, but he breathed life into an ideal that made America a more truthful country. We all owe him a thank-you for that.