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Neil Young sings of the Ponzi scheme: “There’s a bailout coming, but it’s not for you” and “Keep on blogging ’til the power goes out” and

I am forced to admit that the Neil Young fan in the family is my wife. But who can’t love a guy who going release in April an entire concept album on electric cars. The picture is of Young with his ’59 Lincoln, which has been converted to an electric hybrid, the Linc-Volt (video here, info here).

You can watch a video of his new single, “Fork in the Road” (here), with the great chorus, “There’s a bailout coming, but it’s not for you.” And it has a lyric that will be CP’s unofficial new tagline: “Keep on blogging ’til the power goes out.”

So perhaps it’s not a surprise that on Thursday, Neil Young News wrote a post, “The secret is now out: We’ve got a job to do” about Shakey the eco-visionary, the Friedman piece, and CP:

Greendale crystallized Young’s career into a single spell-binding album. But, the inconvenient truth of Greendale is that it was “the most important album of 2003 — the musical equivalent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring”….

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And just in case anyone wonders where this is all going, one only needs to take a look at yesterday’s New York Times Op-Ed by Thomas Friedman “The Inflection Is Near?” to understand why if one hasn’t already figured this all out.

There it is. In black and white. In the New York Times. On a Sunday. On the Op-Ed page.

“The global economy is a Ponzi scheme”.

There you have it. The secret is out now. You can read the full details on this startling obvious conclusion on the blog Climate Progress by Joseph Romm, another of our favorite bloggers.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior. But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

Neil Young caused some controversy last February at the Berlin film festival when he said:

I think that the time when music could change the world is past. I think it would be very naive to think that in this day and age.

I think the world today is a different place, and that it’s time for science and physics and spirituality to make a difference in this world and to try to save the planet.

I can’t really argue with that, although I personally believe that everybody needs to — indeed must — contribute to averting the impending energy and climate catastrophe in whatever way they can. Young himself responded to the attacks saying:

Somewhere on Earth a scientist is alone working. No one knows what he or she is thinking. The secret is just within reach. If I knew that answer I would be singing the song.

This is the age of innovation. Hope matters. But not hope alone. In the age of innovation, the people’s fuel must be found. That is the biggest challenge. Who is up to the challenge? Who is searching today? All day. All night. Every hour that goes by. I know I am.

Well there may not be one silver bullet solution, and merely transitioning to renewable energy won’t make our overconsumption sustainable, but who can argue with the basic premise: The people’s fuel must be found.

Keep on blogging ’til the power goes out.