No, we haven’t been there before, unless the readers of this PM post were early proponents of recognizing and fighting the climate change problem.

We haven’t been there before unless you honestly believe that we are not closer to reaching peak oil, after 29 years of annually-increasing gasoline consumption (including recent booms in developing countries).

No offense, but the logic in this post, and in many of the comments, is EXACTLY why Obama resonates with so many people. You guys just don’t get that times change, and that the circumstances our country finds itself in are almost never perfectly analogous to situations from recent history.

You guys didn’t get that the debate over whether to invade Iraq was not very similar to the decision to declare war against Nazi Germany in 1941 (despite all the comparisons made by conservative bloggers, commentators, Christopher Hitchens, etc.). And as the country gradually realized how stupid a decision it was to invade, you didn’t get that the mounting frustration with Iraq was very different from leftist/radical opposition to Vietnam during the 60′s.

And you can’t get that the economic and geopolitical forces stemming from the climate change problem and the global long-term energy supply problem are very different from the short-term, largely politically-driven energy crisis we found ourselves in 29 years ago.

This inability to differentiate new circumstances from the past is common among you Baby Boomers; Bill Clinton even had trouble telling the difference between Obama’s campaign and Jesse Jackson’s (despite Obama raising more money, from more individuals, than any other candidate in American history).

Memo to all Baby Boomers: when your 4th grade teacher told you that history repeats itself, she didn’t mean it literally.