To combat climate change, we need to break our addiction to consuming oil, while developing countries need to break their addiction to selling it. We need a different lifestyle model... -- Thomas L. Friedman

The biggest problem with our bounty of coal is not what it does to our mountains or the atmosphere, but what it does to our minds. It preserves the illusion that we don't have to change our lives. Given the profound challenges we face with the end of cheap oil and the arrival of global warming, this is a dangerous fantasy. -- JEFF GOODELL

The above two quotations are from side by side op-ed pieces in The New York Times of June 23, 2006. They read like an orchestrated effort to make people feel guilty about a way of life in which man-made power eliminates most of the drudgery of life and makes possible light, heat, refrigeration, air conditioning, television, computers, and high speed travel, among many other things. This power, of course, is derived mainly from oil and coal. Much of it could be derived from atomic energy, but that is denounced even more than oil and coal. Man-made power, and the Industrial Revolution that spawned it, is what the pleasure-hating crew at The New York Times wants us to give up, along with years of our lives.

Reisman thinks that the Times, and the elite whom it represents, hates success and the American way of life. But let's cut to the moral heart of the moral heart. Success and the American way of life promote life itself -- as Reisman says, adding "years of our lives." So isn't to hate them to hate life itself?