Ask an Adorable Kitten

Dear Adorable Kitten,

The recent meteoric rise in the price of crude oil threatens the stability of the U.S. economy, and is putting inflationary pressure on key market sectors - doubling the cost pressure on food, with both the direct costs to food producers and shippers in higher fuel costs, as well as the diversion of corn into ethanol and other foodstuffs into oil production. Others attribute the continuing fall of the dollar, which is still the benchmark currency for energy, to the political fallout from the Iraq war, to the position of Saudi Arabia, let alone extraoridinarily vast profits, although modest in terms of percentage returns, for oil companies. Personally, I begin to suspect that investment speculation is the driving factor, although that explanation is a little too convenient, as if the demand pressure on oil is going to suddenly evaporate once the gold rush is over. My question is whether you think Congress should put its efforts into currency stabilization, re-regulation of pension-fund/bank fund swapping, or windfall profits taxes, in order to best help the American consumer, or whether we should allow the commodity price to float in the name of encouraging conservation and the large scale development of alternative energy, even at the cost of allowing vast cash reserves to flow into the hands of authoritarian governments with who we are both competing economically and have a tremendous set of humanitarian reforms to pressure them over.

-Curious Investor


Dear Curious Investor,

Meeeeh! Meeow? Meow? Meow. Meow. Rrreeeow? Meeeh!

- Adorable Kitten.


Dear Adorable Kitten,

Recently, I was outraged to read that the State of Alaska is filing suit to fight the classification of polar bears as a threatened species, in spite of the utterly overwhelming evidence of global warming, the astonishingly rapid retreat of the arctic ice pack, and even an expectation that open water may be present next year at the North Pole. In a world biological environment where recent studies indicate perhaps a one quarter to one half reduction in the population of all wildlife on the earth - of whom polar bears are a tiny part - in the last few decades, how can the State of Alaska blithely suggest that such a modest level of a protective designation as "threatened" is in any way likely to have more than a mild impact on oil development in Alaska, or is somehow a threat to long-term economic development. It seems like a naked play to demonstrate obesience to Big Oil, rather than any kind of principled position. It is Alaska itself which is most dramatically suffering the effects of warming, with the flooding in Shishmaref, the move for federal dollars to relocate villages, the shifts in whaling strategies among aboriginal populations, even the astonishing move northward of Humboldt squid, which are normally native to Baja California. Biologists, if you talk to them, suggest that we are in a species die off comparable to the most castastrophic destructions of life in all of geologic history, and here the State Government is whining about a fairly eviscerated move to kind of protect the kind of charismatic mega-fauna that might capture the imagination of the world's people enough to turn the tide of environmental destruction. My question to you: how can we get Alaska to set aside a little greed and acknowledge the very real risks to one of the most noble and inspiring of mammals?

- Concerned in Fairbanks


Dear Concerned,

Meeeeh? Meow? Meow! Reeow? Reeeow! Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

-Adorable Kitten


NEXT WEEK: The War in Iraq.