On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:26:06 -0400 Joel and Sarah Gagnon
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> While the costs will be much higher, I don't see the supply of liquid
>
> petroleum fuels running out on us any time soon. Keep in mind that
> peak
> oil means that half of the oil is gone. It was the easy half, but
> there
> remains a lot of ever-more-expensive-to-extract stuff left. As the
> price
> rises, it will be used increasingly for essential uses -- such as
> developing and maintaining an alternative energy infrastructure.
This optimism rests on a number of dubious assumptions:
1) That the US empire that historically ensured control over oil supplies
will continue as before. In fact the empire is in decline; control is
being lost as I write and competitors for the remaining oil are ever
stronger, including some of the suppliers themselves. US citizens
generally are unaware because we live in a disinformation bubble of
frightening proportions, and because elites are increasingly consuming
natural, financial, social and political capital to prop up the system a
little longer. The empire is like a melon I sometimes find in my garden -
perfectly ripe and ready for breakfast in outward appearance, but when I
turn it over, a little mouse hole, the inside gutted and most of the good
stuff gone.
2) That our financial elites, which historically have chosen short term
private profit over long term public interest, will suddenly change their
ways.
3) That the alternative energy thus produced will not continue to be used
in ways that continue to destroy the planet.
I am persuaded that all attempts to maintain even half of current energy
production/consumption, whether via renewables or non-renewables (like
coal) will only make things worse, if not for us, for our children, who
will already suffer dreadfully from our extravagance. The reason is that
a core problem of our civilization, because it drives many other
problems, is its high energy use, no matter what kind. Global warming,
albeit a serious result, is only one of many problems whose ultimate
cause is reckless energy consumption. The rapid depletion of many finite
resources and many others not technically finite like rain forest and
fisheries and soil and water, the distance economy with its global spread
of disease and invasives, the massive species extinction due to our
endless invasion of other species niches, the loss of community and real
(vs commercial) culture and concomitant happiness, the explosion of
hatred that is the cumulative result of centuries of imperial expansion,
and many other ills all stem from high energy use and would be impossible
without it.
If you run your car engine too long at high RPM, it wears out. The same
with the biosphere.
>From my viewpoint, instead of doom and gloom, the low energy civilization
that, barring technological miracles, lies ahead should be described, not
in terms of sacrifice, but as a welcome solution to many of the problems
people recognize are caused by the way we live now: pollution and other
ecological damage, resource depletion, synthetic environments, unsafe
food, the economic insecurity of the distance economy, and general
unhappiness that consumerism does not cure.
Karl North
Northland Sheep Dairy, Freetown, New York USA
www.geocities.com/northsheep/
"Mother Nature never farms without animals" - Albert Howard
"Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying
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