Something caught my attention in our local “green” newspaper. I regard it as disgraceful. The people who put out the paper do not.

The paper serves up the usual scare stories about us running out of oil and gas. And tells us how global warming will have us cooking hot dogs on our rooftops within a decade. I’m sorry, soydogs. It urges us to plant windmills in our back yards. And all that.

It pleads with us to buy only foods produced within fifty miles. That set me to Googling for Bordeaux wines and camembert produced in upstate New York. No luck yet.

The paper’s ideas are not disgraceful. Fanciful perhaps.

The disgraceful parts are articles from two youngsters, one 11, one a year older.

One describes how our lives will fall to pieces when we run out of oil. We will horde plastics because they will be rare. People won’t be able to get to work “because oil won’t be available or affordable.”

We might be reduced to electricity half an hour a day. We will hesitate to cook eggs on a stove or run a load of laundry. Because electricity will cost so much.

Pets will starve. Humans too. If they don’t starve they may freeze to death.

The other student begins with “Now is the winter of our discontent.” He goes into “new problems, new quandaries, and new strife, the most frightening of which is peak oil.” He says bring on wind, solar and hydro, but no more oil or nuclear.

He looks forward to the day when the oil is gone. Because this will mean the end of oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and “most material goods”. This will help local farming.

What seems disgraceful to me is the propaganda these kids spew. These are not their own thoughts. They have been spoon fed this stuff. Often in school.