How is it that you live with this outlook?
it makes me live for the moment, or if not the moment, at least for today. strangely, a realistic look at what the future may bring tells me that today must not be wasted. so instead of “driving me to drink” (an understandable reaction) i’d say it drives me to live. better live well now because TWAWKI ain't going to be around forever. i honestly don't think any of our thermodynamically unsustainable consumer culture will be around in a few decades. there's just not going to be the energy to support it if you accept any version of the peak oil argument. one may argue the particulars of the denoument: will it be anarchic like "The Road Warrior" or will we all happily retire to compost-driven hippy communes? i leave this critical debate to the Science Fiction writers...
as for methane hydrates etc, that is just a lot of bullchit for the most part imo. most petroleum alternatives seem to be net-energy-consumptive. e.g., this is likely the case with oil tar sands, which require the physical mining of the bitumen, and then boiling in water (which of course requires water as well as oodles of natural gas for heat), and then further energy-consuming refinement, and then there remains a toxic-goo residue several times greater in volume than the amount mined. i think i have read that replacing oil with tar sands would create an amount of goo twelve times larger than Yankee Stadium EVERY DAY. oh, and we are supposed to rely on the Canadians for this one :)
methane hydrates are even more of a joke for reasons related to their extraction. all sorts of pseudo-solutions of this ilk are destroyed in great detail in books like "The Party's Over" also Heinberg's newsletter has some excellent updated material bashing the hydrogen fantasy.
in the MOST optimistic, yet realistic scenario, there would be some kind of "smooth transition" to non-petroleum energy sources. this is the only rational approach, but it requires that we reduce petroleum consumption NOW (just the opposite of what we are doing) and spend gobs of money on R&D and implementation of new sources (e.g., renewable energies), even as we recognize that all this new stuff is not going to be as easy or as cheap as petroleum: i.e., we are going to have to endure a drop in net per capita energy consumption.
that is the optimistic scenario, in my view, but it is obviously not one we are pursuing. instead, we are pursuing the scenario of denial, so i expect the long-term results of this foolishness will be very bad.
Do you know what 'AutoToxic Memes' are?
now that you have explained them, i do. swell: it's a term. but just because a term exists does not mean it's applicable to what i'm saying. all i'm doing is making an educated prediction based on what is going on in the world (or more precisely, based on my reading of other people who are more educated than i in areas such as petroleum geology--most of the people complaining about peak oil are retired petroleum geologists, perhaps because they don't have to worry about losing their jobs if they say this stuff).
imagine that a meteor is heading toward Earth and will destroy us in 30 years, according to the most precise calculations of astrophysicists. is this recognition of a scientific prediction or is it an “auto-toxic meme”? i’d say it’s just realistic. knowing this prediction, a society could decide to allocate resources for diverting the course of this meteor. but let’s say this is a REALLY big meteor, so if we really want to divert it, we need to tax everyone 50%. a 50% reduction in wealth today based on the prediction of some astro-egghead will not be very popular! people will call the egghead negative and “auto-toxic”.
instead, what they will do is find some shill who says the meteor will not really hit the Earth, and even if it gets close, well, by the year 2032 our technology will be so advanced that we will be able to create the Meteor Destroying rocket ship in a matter of minutes, so we can just have these little token meteor diversion efforts for the next 29 years and 11 months, but we do not really need to change the way we live.
this is somewhat similar to the situation with peak oil (although the analogy breaks down because of course it is not our “fault” that the meteor in this scenario is careering towards Earth, whereas it is DEFINITELY our fault that America consumes more than 20 million barrels of oil a day and is using up the world’s resources in reckless fashion, and is fomenting geopolitical chaos by occupying oil-rich regions to ensure the sustainability of our delusional lifestyles for maybe an extra decade, even as we have had $100,000 tax deductions for Hummers!)
but i’d also say that recognizing one will eventually die (and indeed, our whole civilization will die) is just a recognition of the impermanence which is the nature of things. however, this idea is unacceptable in the US, where we have this widespread delusion that it is perfectly normal to employ the equivalent of 58 human "worker bees" (in horsepower units) 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in the form of fossil fuel extracts for each and every one of our 250 million souls so that we may enjoy our consumer culture.
to me, the REAL auto-toxic meme is the current delusional way of life in America. it is SURE to end, and denial of this fact is the one way to make sure it ends BADLY.
here’s a good place to start learning about peak oil: globalpublicmedia.com |
