Like a setting Sun
Star-Bulletin politics reporter Richard Borreca laments the lack of vision and action among Hawaii's elected and non-elected leaders in a Sunday editorial.Borreca's arguments are built on those made by our own Jim Dator, and are in-line with the noises the HRCFS has been making for some time.
Says Borreca:
For isolated economies, the first sign that you have flamed out might be that the planes stop flying to your airport on a regular basis.
There is a tipping point to governing. At one point you can grab something before it goes down the tubes. But there is a moment when it is going to slip away no matter how hard you try to pull back.
As James Schlesinger, the first energy secretary, put it: "We have only two modes -- complacency and panic."
and
Three years ago Dator wrote that the Hawaii's actual state plan was "built on the assumption of an expanding global supply of oil."
"A shrinking global supply of oil might be harmful for Hawaii's economy, reducing tourist arrivals, deflating real estate values and resulting in significant economic contraction," Dator and Honolulu engineer Manfred Zapka warned.
...
Dator reports that "things have gotten worse while the state has basically played the fiddle."
When one of the nation's leading futurists is so decidedly gloomy about our own options, the state's leaders might want to start making decisions for real and not for show.
For real though.
