NEWS: Ralph Nader Speaks Out About Katrina, Bush, and Big Oil

POLITICS: Ralph Nader Speaks Out About Katrina, Bush, and Big Oil

Ralph Nader has blasted George Bush and his handling of hurricane Katrina in an essay on his website.

I had almost completely forgotten that when I started driving in 1997, gas was around 80 cents a gallon.

Even up here it's $3.50 for regular. I'm glad I walk to work and take the T into school.

One way to get around town(assuming that there are lawns to be mowed)is to get a riding mower and charge people for mowing there lawn as a way to pay for fuel on the way to were ever you are going This of corse is(almost )just a lame joke.

no one cares ralph, no one, no one ever has, no one ever will.
thats why you will never be pres.

Which is... very unfortunate.

Now a days I enjoy riding my bike to work, while smiling and laughing at the Hummers filling up at the gas stations.

it is very unfortunate. The US is a mess.

Hopefully oil stays high and pushes the American consumer to vote for higher efficiency with their dollars, since we seem incapable of changing our consumption habits with just common sense or scientific knowledge.

It would be nice, wouldn't it? I'm kind of hoping a massive round of inflation doesn't wreck our economy in the process though

We can carry 10,000 songs in the palm of our hand, we can implant fake tits into women (sometimes men), we can take pills that change our brains chemistry, we can fly to the fucking moon, but we are still powering our cars on the black goop that has to be sucked out of the ground. Fucking republicans. Fucking GM.

I think inflation, huge spikes in interest rates, or some sort of massive devaluation of the dollar are inevitable with the current debt load carried by both the US government and the average consumer, completely apart from this disaster. The status quo at the moment seems to be unsustainable.

The value of the dollar has dropped so much so that soon OPEC will request that all oil be purchased with euros.

No they wont, not if they like selling oil to 2/3rds of the world.

Since the entire world economy would collapse.

Remember though, there would have been no difference between Bush and Gore according to Nader

Uhh.. whoops. Not quite.

I've said the same thing, people aren't used to not getting what they want, "I need an Ipod", "I needed a new car", "I didn't feel like cooking". I work in a bank and see people who make 150k a year, and spend just as much, we're an instant gratification society. In the very least we're all a bit spoiled, and my fear is that when things really start to get tight people won't be able to handle it. I've been dirt poor, no water, no electricity, living off chicken and ramen, I'm fine now and I don't want to go back but if I ever had to, I know I could.

I voted for Nader, in his life he's done alot of good for this country, and in the very least I was hoping that in the next election we'd have a third choice. I think in this country our apathy toward the way things are run, if unchecked, will be our ruin, to me he represented a bit of a shake up, a wake up call to the leadership.

I have news for you: up until now, the average US consumer didn't give a fuck about fuel economy. The top 10 fuel-economy cars represented less than 5% of the total market in sales and the best mileage cars in the US from the 1986 - 1998 or so were discontinued for lack of interest, as was the only clean-sheet electric car built by any automaker in the last decade ( a GM product, the EV1 - surprise!).

Blame the Republicans and GM for what they are actually guilty of, but lay the primary blame right where it deserves to be: the US consumer who has bought an SUV when an Accord would have been more than enough.

I'd like to personally thank Ralph Nader here and now for diverting a few hundred votes in Florida from Gore to Nader that would have otherwise resulted ina Democrat victory in 2000.

Maybe the Democrats should look at why they lost the votes to Nader and not blame him for running.

Consumers are going to be forced to use petro for as long as it's still around. Once the last gallon of crude is pumped from the ground, then big oil and big business will get serious about alternatives. Until then, fucking pay up!

I just can't wait for the day when WATER is $3.50 a gallon.

at this rate it's coming soon.

When there are good alternatives the oil companies will just invest in them and keep making money. No big oil company is just oil anymore.

That's about it.

Most of the biggest investors in alternate energy sources are big oil companies. BP Solar is one of the biggest producers of solar cells in the world, for example. They've diversified their holdings across a wide array of options, knowing that oil production will eventually peak and then decline and that something will have to replace it. They want the profits on the replacement, too.

The gradual process of replacing fossil fuel as an energy source has already begun in some places. The EU and Japan offer pretty nice incentives for people to install solar cells, for example. The life and efficiency of solar cells have increased dramatically since the 70s and they are now net energy producers.

Larger scale efforts on the part of corporations will be seen as the price of oil climbs to make the economics of switching to alternate energy sources on par with fossil fuels. Of course, I hope the economic incentive occurs earlier rather than later via artificially high prices for oil because retooling the entire modern world for something other than oil is going to be time consuming and expensive, plus it gives a bigger jump on research and refinement of technologies.

quite an understatement, actually. we're way past mess now.

I would like to thank the voters who were too afraid to "throw their votes away" to vote for a candidate whose values they might actually stand behind, helping to keep us locked hopelessly in our two party system.

And really, although I don't really know the Democratic party well enough to come up with a better choice myself, couldn't you have picked someone better than Al Gore? Maybe you should have given Bill a wig and a fake mustache and had him run again...

So now that Bush is ineligible for reelection, Nader's finally "speaking out"?