The Long Climb Up Hubbert's Peak
By Peter Goodchild
23 January, 2012
Countercurrents.org
There are so many blogs, forums, discussion groups, and so on, discussing the problems of the world's fossil-fuel supply, but so much of the dialogue seems to go nowhere. Back in the 1950s, M. King Hubbert explained that the world's oil supply looked like a mountain, with two sides. One. Two. But when I look at all the verbiage on the computer screen nowadays, I sometimes think I'm being whisked backwards several decades. Climbing Hubbert's Peak is fascinating experience, but not when you get drawn into doing it every weekend.
I was involved in heavy discussions with Jay Hanson, for example, starting a long time ago. The reason I later dropped out of his group called "the_dieoff_QA" (starting merely as a place for Jay to explain any obscurities in his ground-breaking Web site, "The Dieoff") was that there were too many long, drawn-out irrelevancies that people got into. Finally, when three or four people decided to hog the site for a few days in order to discuss how hard it was to live on their (gigantic) pensions, I decided to move on to greener pastures. I don't have time to deal with idle meandering. I long ago stopped paying much attention to a certain well-known Web site specializing in new oil-supplies, for example, because any serious discussion was soon co-opted by a group of technophiles hoping to flog their Miracle Energy of the week.
There are endless venues for discussions of energy nowadays, but I'm always looking for something that isn't a complete time-waster. Conversation for the sake of conversation isn't of much interest to me. Alas, my search is nearly always in vain.
What most annoys me about dialogue on the Internet these days is that it's so utterly lacking in a sense of direction. It's as if it's dominated by some sort of new generation that considers itself the inventors of the term "peak oil." But no matter how hard I bash my head against the wall, trying to get people to move beyond that basic concept, I rarely have much success. In particular, I've tried a thousand times to get readers to grasp the two simple facts that (1) there is no way of changing the fact that industrial society is approaching a massive imbalance between energy supply and population and (2) it's time to start seriously thinking about Emergency Planning.
How much planning has been done, for example, to deal with the massive global famine that is approaching? None.
And I don't like hearing over and over again that "we have to put more money and time into the development of renewable energy." Jay Hanson and many other people have shown clearly, on numerous occasions over the last two decades (e.g., Hanson, "Energetic Limits to Growth," 1999), that it is not possible to run a world with 7 to 12 billion people on windmills and solar panels. How can people be so mindless?
Nothing sinks in. The self-proclaimed experts remain pontifical about their wholly imaginary understanding of the situation. It's hard even to say where all the dumbing-down is coming from. Is it something in the water supply, or can we still blame the Communists? Or perhaps it's just fear --- terror certainly has a way of numbing the mind. Or perhaps we can only blame ourselves. Perhaps it's easier just to talk, and not to think.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is [email protected]
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