We collectively in society have a pervasive belief that big problems are someone else's to solve. When someone points out a problem to us our general reaction is to ask what they intend to do about it. I am not sure when it became that he who recognizes a problem has the responsibility to fix it. Where is the responsibility of the person(s) who created the problem in the first place? To me the first responsibility of someone who recognizes a large systemic problem that they cannot fix themselves, especially one not of their own making, is to make others aware of it so they can collectively fix it, or avoid it if it can't be fixed.
I have a confession to make. I cannot fix global warming and climate change. I cannot prevent peak oil. I can not solve resource nationalism. I cannot correct the global freshwater crisis. I cannot rebuild the planet's lost soil fertility. All of these problems are beyond my meagre talents to rectify. All of them will affect me as much as the next person so I very much want to see them corrected but I am powerless, on my own, to do anything significant about them. Does that mean, therefore, that I should just accept them (like the old quote from Anonymous suggests, "Accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.") and wait for someone else to recognize them, speak about them and offer solutions? I am personally very skeptical of anyone promising solutions to large global problems. They are generally simplistic and focused on the symptoms, not the underlying cause. And I do not believe you can effectively solve any problem unless you correct the underlying cause. Fixing the symptoms without fixing the underlying cause just sets up a return visit to fix other symptoms, and then others. The symptoms may change but the problems will persist.
Why do I write about global problems without proposing solutions? The problem with proposing solutions to large problems, especially systemic global problems, is this. What is the next response when you tell someone a solution to a problem? "That's great. Now go do it and don't bother me about it anymore."
Let me illustrate. I could tell you that the underlying cause of peak oil is that we are using far too much oil and have become too dependent on it and have no other alternatives to fall back on when it can no longer satisfy our needs. The solution? Reduce our oil dependence, reduce our oil consumption through greatly improved efficiencies, develop and ramp up the alternatives for us to fall back on so we are ready as the oil supply diminishes. "Great. Now go away and do it and don't bug me." See how it works?
The solutions to our global problems are not simple. They are as complex as the intricate web of underlying causes of the problems. No one can tell you "in seventy-five words or less" how to solve peak oil, global warming or any of the other serious global problems on the horizon. If the primary requirements for any proposed solution are simplicity, brevity and the ability to be done (by someone else, of course) without affecting people's lifestyles then no workable solutions can be put on the table. Period!
Why do peak-oilers wallow in despair? Because people do want brief, simplistic solutions that will not affect their lifestyle. Well, how about this. That lifestyle is the underlying cause of peak oil, global warming, resource depletion, soil contamination, the freshwater crisis, pollution and the rest of the whole long list of global problems we are facing. This planet cannot sustain a massive population of a single parasitic species at the very top of the food chain (we 6.6 billion humans) in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. For starters we have to drastically change and simplify our lifestyles, stop globalization, eliminate our obsession with and dependence on the personal auto, abandon the perpetual growth economy, re-orient our consumption to satisfying needs not wants, oh, and reduce our population to one billion by the the middle of this century. But that does not fit within the criteria that acceptable solutions must satisfy - brevity, simplicity and no changes.
Because there are no solutions that can satisfy those criteria!
Of course there are solutions! But they are complex, intricate, they are going to be painful, and they are going to involve massive changes. At this late stage there is no other option. The time for simple, easy solutions was centuries ago when the contributors to the problems we have created were simple and easy. But the layers of complexity that we have added to those problems are going to require similar layers of complexity in the solutions. And governments and politicians, industry and the media continually telling people what they want to hear - that there are no problems, that life is good, that the American way of life is not negotiable, and that people living beyond their means is acceptable (nay, required) - simply serves to make the proposal of "real" solutions that much more difficult and to be viewed as that much more unacceptable.
Peak-oilers are seen as pessimists and doom-n-gloomers because they won't share in the false euphoria that permeates mainstream society. We wont sing Kumbaya and validate the cornucopean proclamations of society's cheerleaders. Most importantly, and very mistakenly, we are accused of wishing for the collapse of human society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don't shoot the messenger.
Every peak-oiler I know hopes beyond hope to be able to head off some of the disasters they see coming by alerting unaware people to those disasters in hope they will collectively take action and make the necessary changes and sacrifices to prevent them or reduce their impact. The pessimism comes from the constant confirmation that that is unlikely to happen. People do not seem to be interested in saving themselves, their children and their grandchildren if it means giving up or changing anything. So be it! At least we try. You can't force people to unplug themselves from the matrix. All you can do is try to make them aware that they are part of it. If they like it in there and feel comfortable and secure and don't want to come out, all you can do is move on and try to save those that you can. It's very lonely and often times it seems like the easiest course of action is to just give up and re-insert the plug and rejoin the matrix. After all, your chances of survival on your own, while the matrix is still there, are very remote. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?
But enjoy what exactly? What benefits are there to be derived from blissful ignorance of the problems we have created and continue to make worse? It's a little like marching knowingly into the Auschwitz gas chambers blithely joining in the celebration of the wonderfully cleansing shower they have told us we are about to have. You know you are about to be gassed to death but you go along with the pretense and put on your best, silk bathrobe.
How do we solve all of the problems I talk about? With a universal change in attitude. We have to collectively start treating the earth and the environment like we are part of it, like we belong to it rather than it belonging to us. How we achieve that, I do not know. Maybe we need massive, penalizing luxury taxes on all non-essential goods. Maybe we need to build into every item the true environmental cost and compel both the manufacturers and users of those products to invest that money in correcting the environmental damage done by their manufacture and use. I don't know what the answers are. But I do know there are answers. I may know some of them. You may know some of them. Charlie on the next block may know some. But if we never talk about the problems, if we continue to act like they don't exist, we will never solve them.
The solution to any problem starts with the understanding and acceptance that there is a problem that needs solving. And I don't think we have collectively reached that point yet. I believe the majority of people still think everything is fine and life is great. And why wouldn't they? Every mountain of a problem is reduced by the media and politicians to a molehill and every tiny molehill of a solution is built up as a Mount Everest. Black is white, red is green and pigs fly.
I am as guilty as the next person and as much a part of the problem, perhaps more guilty because I already know the things I should be doing but am not. Others can at least plead ignorance, even if selective and voluntary. I can only plead advancing age and ill health. But we do have to fix the problems, if the human race is to have any long-term survivability as a viable species, and the time to do so is rapidly running out. Fixing the problems will not involve more of the same. We cannot continue on with human society as it is presently constituted. There must be a serious change in direction. There simply are not sufficient resources - be that oil, natural gas, coal, water, soil, a wide variety of metals and minerals, or any other resources - to continue on the way we have, especially for these past few hundred years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most controversial and painful subjects of discussion among peak-oilers is the so-called die-off. This is the theory (strongly held belief?) that when we pass peak oil the massive global human population, which has virtually exploded since the Industrial Revolution but, most particularly, since the beginning of the oil age in which time it has more than tripled, will begin to diminish rapidly back to a level, it is believed, approximating global population before the Industrial Revolution. That population was about one billion. This theory or belief is based on an analysis of the amount of energy (most derived from oil and other fossil fuels) required to produce the food and other life essentials needed by a human population, and the close co-relation between population and energy use. (See my article in this blog, Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth).
It is reasonably estimated, for example, that in western industrialized societies it takes about ten calories of energy, again mostly from fossil fuels, to produce every calorie of food. That, to me, despite being a shocking ratio, is a very low, conservative estimate. Why? Because it does not take into account the massive amount of topsoil loss caused by so much human agriculture and the effort, time and energy that will be required to revitalize that soil to the level needed to produce the food needed by the population without modern agricultural machinery, chemicals and practices (See my article in this blog, Post-Peak Agricultural Capacity). It does not take into account the damage done to our lakes, rivers and oceans from agricultural run-off and the effort and energy it will require to recover them. It does not account for the massive depletion and toxification of the planet's underground aquifers, especially non-replenishable fossil aquifers like the Ogallala aquifer in Western U.S. (See my water articles in this blog; The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis, Peak Water, and Mining Water), and the effort, energy and time that will be involved in bringing them back to health. It does not account for the spent and wasted energy that will be involved in crop losses in storage without modern storage techniques. In other words, it is an estimate that has little applicability to human society on the other side of peak oil where, one way or another, the food needed by the population will have to be produced without today's prodigious energy inputs.
Whatever level of population exists on the other side of peak oil, and regardless of all the other "things" that population produces and consumes and surrounds itself with, that population is going to require the same quantities of food per person as today's population. If every calorie of that food requires ten calories of energy to produce where is that energy to come from without those fossil fuels? Obviously if it is to be produced from human power, manual labour, human energy, we will not survive long as a species if we are expending ten calories of human energy for every calorie of food we produce and consume. Food production in our modern, globalized society is perhaps one of the most inefficient uses of energy we are guilty of. There is absolutely no choice but to find greater efficiencies in food production on the other side of peak oil. But we are constantly told, and very incorrectly so, that food production using fossil energy and the practices instituted with the Green Revolution are the most efficient in history. They are the most efficient in one respect only, the reduction of the amount of human labour involved in that food production. We use so much energy in food production because we have replaced human energy with machines, massive, energy-gobbling machines. We produce more food with fewer man-hours of effort than at any time in human history. But we do so, and can do, only because of the massive amount of energy fossil fuels have allowed us to exploit. The practices we use today simply are not applicable to a post-fossil-fuel world. We are going to have to relearn agriculture and food production, and we need to begin now.
Showing posts with label peak oil doomerism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peak oil doomerism. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Monday, September 10, 2007
Negative on Alternative Energy?
An explanation and a Rebuttal
I want to preface this article with a lament. Being a regular writer on the issue of peak oil and the associated implications, the one constant I must deal with is the lack of feedback, of not knowing how my words, opinions, and assumptions are being received. This article deals with a reader who was sufficiently motivated to e-mail me, an act that led to a brief exchange of e-mails. Many people do not wish to have their comments appear in a public forum as they would in posting a comment to the blog. There are two solutions to that. 1) All comments to the blog are reviewed by me before posting. Anyone who wishes to express a comment to the blog but does not want that comment to be shown on the blog need only request that it not be shown and I would be happy to oblige. 2) Those who wish to make comments off-line are most welcome to do so. I can be reached at any one of three e-mail addresses; richard.embleton@sympatico.ca or poilscribe@yahoo.com or poilscribe@hotmail.com . Any comments or feedback are most sincerely welcome and appreciated. Thank you.
A gentleman (who shall remain nameless) who runs a bio-fuel company (which shall also remain nameless) e-mailed me recently to chastise me for being so negative toward alternative energy options like hydrogen, methanol, ethanol, bio-diesel and so on. On the one hand I am flattered that he thinks my opinion on the matter will have enough impact that he feels the need to try to convince me of the error of my ways. On the other hand I am curious why, out of all the voices criticizing these options, he felt a need to e-mail me. Or perhaps he e-mails everyone who expresses a negative opinion on the subject. That I do not know but a quick google seems to suggest he makes a regular practice of doing so.
Essentially, I believe, this gentleman's point was (and I am sure he will correct me if I am wrong) that if one energy option doesn't pan out (while at the same time not accepting that my criticism of them is valid) there is always another one waiting in the wings. I can only assume that in that he means to suggest that we shouldn't worry, that he sees that as a plus. I see it as the core of the problem.
I politely e-mailed the gentleman back and suggested that our different perspectives on the issue legitimately gave us different and irreconcilable opinions and that if he was looking for support the mainstream media was full of much more visible people than myself lauding all of the energy options I am being negative about. I clarified my position that the only viable, long-term objective is powering down and learning to live within the sustainable energy budget of the planet. I reject the continuous, mindless pursuit of one new energy option after another to keep our unsustainable lifestyle running as long as possible. I also suggested that if he had read enough of what I had written to become sufficiently motivated to send me an e-mail he should also have gleaned from those writings what my basic and consistent point of view was.
My suspicion, rightly or wrongly, is that the gentleman and his company are having difficulty finding a market for their particular energy panacea. Again a quick google seems to also suggest that is the case. Under current conditions setting up as a competitor to corn and cane ethanol, I am sure, doesn't get you many financial backers nor the support of many highly-visible politicians. That lack of support, however, is not, in my opinion, the result of the few voices of opposition like myself. It is, more specifically, the result of the powerful, insidious ethanol lobby that haunts the halls of government. The gentleman should save his energies for the real fight he has to win. Convincing me of the legitimacy of his claims (were that remotely possible) would not help in that battle in any way.
To be brutally honest, I don't give a damn if there are a thousand alternative energy options out there and if they are all economically viable. as we approach and pass peak oil economic viability becomes increasingly irrelevant. Economics is increasingly manipulated in support of that increasingly unsustainable global system. "It's the economy, stupid," is increasingly becoming the way cry of those remaining economists who believe we still live in a world of reality. They have yet to recognize that they are programmed EconoTRONS in a man-made, virtual world that is increasingly divorced from and a poor substitute for reality.
In the end the massive energy resources which support our globalized society are truly unsustainable and in the end we shall have no choice but to learn to live without them. In the interim they subsidize the worsening of the REAL problems such as overpopulation, climate change and global warming, infrastructure collapse and more that we are eventually going to have to deal with. They don't eliminate the problems. They just stave off the day when we have run out of options, but continue to make all of these problems worse in the delay.
I we know that our current global lifestyle is unsustainable and the vast quantities of energy needed to support it are soon going into irreversible decline, where is the logic in carrying on "wasting" those precious resources while ignoring that eventuality? Knowing that the problems will be increasingly serious the longer we wait? Especially when we know that our global lifestyle itself, and our profligate energy use, are prime causes of those problems? Especially knowing that a major, but as yet unknown, amount of those remaining energy reserves are going to be NEEDED to prepare for the real world in which we will be obliged to live sustainably?
Our current global lifestyle is unsustainable. Our current global population is already in overshoot. Our global carrying capacity diminishes each year while the population continues to climb. The life-supporting topsoil of this planet is disappearing before our eyes. What freshwater remains is becoming increasingly and severely contaminated. Human-mitigated species extinction proceeds at a faster clip than any natural extinction in earth's history. Countless finite resources are being pushed rapidly toward depletion through our overabuse. We are a species of consumers. Consumers consume! Consumption is unsustainable. We are, as a species, unsustainable.
It does not have to be that way, of course. the negativism that permeates my writing is not meant to convince people that it is hopeless, that all is lost, that we should simply give up, sit down and wait to die. I am not, by nature, a negative person. But I refuse to view the world through elitist-supplied, rose-colored glasses. Throughout my life I have been a roll-up-my-sleeves-and-do-it kind of person. But I can not personally save the world, even if I would like to.
When I paint things in the negative it is my expression of hope. I have always believed that to solve any problem you must first be prepared to admit there is a problem that needs solving. If the mere mention of the problem of unsustainability of the current global lifestyle is perceived as negative, as doom-n-gloom, how are we ever to solve that problem? If not that, then what is the problem that we are trying to solve? If it is how to keep the current, unsustainable lifestyle humming (derivative of the verb "to hummer") along for as many more decades as possible, that is not a "problem" I am willing to address. Let me put it more assertively. It is a problem I refuse to address. the solution to THAT problem simply perpetuates and exacerbates the real problem. It cures the symptom while strengthening the disease.
The problem before the house is this: How do we move the human species toward a long-term, sustainable footing? No qualifiers! No ifs, ands, buts, what-ifs. How do we do it? Period!
How do we best assure that there is a human species, a human society on this planet at the beginning of the next millennium? And the next after that? Because everything we are currently doing as a society, as a species, strongly suggests we believe that to be irrelevant, that the only real goal worth pursuing is a healthy, corporate, financial balance sheet.
Am I negative? Until we start individually and collectively acting like the survival of the human race has some meaning to us and until we start to demonstrate that we are prepared to commit whatever necessary effort it takes to assure that, whatever the personal and collective economic cost, then perhaps I am. There is a very serious problem. When I see that we are collectively and individually prepared to admit that in order that we begin the effort to solve it then I will be the first to climb on to the roof and wave the banner. Until then I will continue in my negative ways of pointing out that the problem is still there.
I want to preface this article with a lament. Being a regular writer on the issue of peak oil and the associated implications, the one constant I must deal with is the lack of feedback, of not knowing how my words, opinions, and assumptions are being received. This article deals with a reader who was sufficiently motivated to e-mail me, an act that led to a brief exchange of e-mails. Many people do not wish to have their comments appear in a public forum as they would in posting a comment to the blog. There are two solutions to that. 1) All comments to the blog are reviewed by me before posting. Anyone who wishes to express a comment to the blog but does not want that comment to be shown on the blog need only request that it not be shown and I would be happy to oblige. 2) Those who wish to make comments off-line are most welcome to do so. I can be reached at any one of three e-mail addresses; richard.embleton@sympatico.ca or poilscribe@yahoo.com or poilscribe@hotmail.com . Any comments or feedback are most sincerely welcome and appreciated. Thank you.
A gentleman (who shall remain nameless) who runs a bio-fuel company (which shall also remain nameless) e-mailed me recently to chastise me for being so negative toward alternative energy options like hydrogen, methanol, ethanol, bio-diesel and so on. On the one hand I am flattered that he thinks my opinion on the matter will have enough impact that he feels the need to try to convince me of the error of my ways. On the other hand I am curious why, out of all the voices criticizing these options, he felt a need to e-mail me. Or perhaps he e-mails everyone who expresses a negative opinion on the subject. That I do not know but a quick google seems to suggest he makes a regular practice of doing so.
Essentially, I believe, this gentleman's point was (and I am sure he will correct me if I am wrong) that if one energy option doesn't pan out (while at the same time not accepting that my criticism of them is valid) there is always another one waiting in the wings. I can only assume that in that he means to suggest that we shouldn't worry, that he sees that as a plus. I see it as the core of the problem.
I politely e-mailed the gentleman back and suggested that our different perspectives on the issue legitimately gave us different and irreconcilable opinions and that if he was looking for support the mainstream media was full of much more visible people than myself lauding all of the energy options I am being negative about. I clarified my position that the only viable, long-term objective is powering down and learning to live within the sustainable energy budget of the planet. I reject the continuous, mindless pursuit of one new energy option after another to keep our unsustainable lifestyle running as long as possible. I also suggested that if he had read enough of what I had written to become sufficiently motivated to send me an e-mail he should also have gleaned from those writings what my basic and consistent point of view was.
My suspicion, rightly or wrongly, is that the gentleman and his company are having difficulty finding a market for their particular energy panacea. Again a quick google seems to also suggest that is the case. Under current conditions setting up as a competitor to corn and cane ethanol, I am sure, doesn't get you many financial backers nor the support of many highly-visible politicians. That lack of support, however, is not, in my opinion, the result of the few voices of opposition like myself. It is, more specifically, the result of the powerful, insidious ethanol lobby that haunts the halls of government. The gentleman should save his energies for the real fight he has to win. Convincing me of the legitimacy of his claims (were that remotely possible) would not help in that battle in any way.
To be brutally honest, I don't give a damn if there are a thousand alternative energy options out there and if they are all economically viable. as we approach and pass peak oil economic viability becomes increasingly irrelevant. Economics is increasingly manipulated in support of that increasingly unsustainable global system. "It's the economy, stupid," is increasingly becoming the way cry of those remaining economists who believe we still live in a world of reality. They have yet to recognize that they are programmed EconoTRONS in a man-made, virtual world that is increasingly divorced from and a poor substitute for reality.
In the end the massive energy resources which support our globalized society are truly unsustainable and in the end we shall have no choice but to learn to live without them. In the interim they subsidize the worsening of the REAL problems such as overpopulation, climate change and global warming, infrastructure collapse and more that we are eventually going to have to deal with. They don't eliminate the problems. They just stave off the day when we have run out of options, but continue to make all of these problems worse in the delay.
I we know that our current global lifestyle is unsustainable and the vast quantities of energy needed to support it are soon going into irreversible decline, where is the logic in carrying on "wasting" those precious resources while ignoring that eventuality? Knowing that the problems will be increasingly serious the longer we wait? Especially when we know that our global lifestyle itself, and our profligate energy use, are prime causes of those problems? Especially knowing that a major, but as yet unknown, amount of those remaining energy reserves are going to be NEEDED to prepare for the real world in which we will be obliged to live sustainably?
Our current global lifestyle is unsustainable. Our current global population is already in overshoot. Our global carrying capacity diminishes each year while the population continues to climb. The life-supporting topsoil of this planet is disappearing before our eyes. What freshwater remains is becoming increasingly and severely contaminated. Human-mitigated species extinction proceeds at a faster clip than any natural extinction in earth's history. Countless finite resources are being pushed rapidly toward depletion through our overabuse. We are a species of consumers. Consumers consume! Consumption is unsustainable. We are, as a species, unsustainable.
It does not have to be that way, of course. the negativism that permeates my writing is not meant to convince people that it is hopeless, that all is lost, that we should simply give up, sit down and wait to die. I am not, by nature, a negative person. But I refuse to view the world through elitist-supplied, rose-colored glasses. Throughout my life I have been a roll-up-my-sleeves-and-do-it kind of person. But I can not personally save the world, even if I would like to.
When I paint things in the negative it is my expression of hope. I have always believed that to solve any problem you must first be prepared to admit there is a problem that needs solving. If the mere mention of the problem of unsustainability of the current global lifestyle is perceived as negative, as doom-n-gloom, how are we ever to solve that problem? If not that, then what is the problem that we are trying to solve? If it is how to keep the current, unsustainable lifestyle humming (derivative of the verb "to hummer") along for as many more decades as possible, that is not a "problem" I am willing to address. Let me put it more assertively. It is a problem I refuse to address. the solution to THAT problem simply perpetuates and exacerbates the real problem. It cures the symptom while strengthening the disease.
The problem before the house is this: How do we move the human species toward a long-term, sustainable footing? No qualifiers! No ifs, ands, buts, what-ifs. How do we do it? Period!
How do we best assure that there is a human species, a human society on this planet at the beginning of the next millennium? And the next after that? Because everything we are currently doing as a society, as a species, strongly suggests we believe that to be irrelevant, that the only real goal worth pursuing is a healthy, corporate, financial balance sheet.
Am I negative? Until we start individually and collectively acting like the survival of the human race has some meaning to us and until we start to demonstrate that we are prepared to commit whatever necessary effort it takes to assure that, whatever the personal and collective economic cost, then perhaps I am. There is a very serious problem. When I see that we are collectively and individually prepared to admit that in order that we begin the effort to solve it then I will be the first to climb on to the roof and wave the banner. Until then I will continue in my negative ways of pointing out that the problem is still there.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Deculturation: Mass Deprogramming of Global Society
This article is a continuation of a series that includes Mud pies and Dunce Caps - Part 2, Give me a Child Until......, and Waking up, Into the Nightmare!
Can the deprogramming techniques used on those rescued from cults or the mass deprogramming suggested in the "Social Reason" program be looked to as a means of achieving mass global deprogramming for the purpose of achieving a mass disassociation from the modern capitalist paradigm and a shift in worldview to stewardship and sustainability?
What is the source of a nation's culture? Who defines it? How is it transmitted through the nation's population such that it becomes so integrated into the individual worldview and mind set that it becomes "common knowledge", becomes the
core of the national identity? There was a reason that large "nations" like China, India, the US, Russia and others did not exist earlier in our history, why nations that did exist were still loose collections of tribal enclaves much like we are finding Afghanistan still is today. The means to create and, most importantly, constantly reinforce a national identity did not exist. People do not inherently identify with "nation" but rather some smaller, more intimate grouping. The key to sustaining a national worldview is media; TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, music and movies. The extension of that reality is the growth of globalization and the establishment of key elements of a global mind set through the agency of global communications; through global television and radio aided through satellites, through globalization in the entertainment industry in music, magazines and movies, and, more recently and far more importantly, the rapid growth of global digital communications that brings into a common technology base not only broadcast media but telephone, the internet, facsimile transmission and image transmission.
One of the first and most important targets of the rebel forces in any revolution since the early part of the twentieth century, and earlier though in more limited fashion, is almost always the communications and media; the radio, TV, newspapers and printing presses. Control of the media, until then in the hands of the government being overthrown, is recognized as a critical part of gaining control of the hearts and minds of the people. Media is always, at least in modern society, at the heart of national culture. It is the means by which government and business mobilize the public support of their goals. As Robert W. McChesney outlines in The Political Economy Of Radio, "As a rule of thumb, if certain forces thoroughly dominate a society's political economy they will thoroughly dominate its communication system, and the fundamental questions of how the communication system should be organized and for what purposes are not even subject to debate. So it is and so it has been with the Communist Party in various "people's republics," and, for the most part, with big business interests in the United States."[(1)] And, in fact, it is the same with business control of the media in every free country on the planet.
We are bombarded by the reinforcing symbols and messages of our culturation and social indoctrination from cradle to grave. But beginning with the various means of mass communication, starting with radio, that culturation and indoctrination has been increasingly and insidiously commercial. Beginning in the 1920s capitalists and business leaders began to recognize the power in radio that they could use to improve their businesses and, more importantly, to "manufacture" and maintain public loyalty to their product and, increasingly, their political agenda. With that recognition, they set out to control these mass communication media. McChesney writes, "It was only in the late 1920s that capitalists began to sense that through network operation and commercial advertising, radio broadcasting could generate substantial profits. Through their immense power in Washington, these commercial broadcasters were able to dominate the Federal Radio Commission. As a result, the scarce number of air channels were effectively turned over to them with no public and little congressional deliberation on the matter."
The dangers inherent in commercial control of broadcast media were the rallying call of a reform movement through the 1920s. They argued that ".....if private interests controlled the medium and their goal was profit, no amount of regulation or self-regulation could overcome the bias built into the system." This reform movement essentially lost their battle with the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, which established the FCC. They did not lose in a fair fight, however. As McChesney explains, "The radio lobby dominated because it was able to keep most Americans ignorant or confused about the communication policy matters then under discussion in Congress through their control of key elements of the news media and their sophisticated public relations aimed at the remainder of the press and the public."
Commercial domination of broadcast media did not end with radio, of course. "When television came along in the 1940s," McChesney says, "the FCC effectively turned it over to the same networks that dominated radio. Almost from the beginning commercial broadcasting has generated criticism that it ignored or downplayed controversial political programming, or entertainment and cultural programming that would not attract huge audiences. In addition, advertisers served as powerful censors of broadcast content, and it was not in their interest to sponsor programming that might undermine their sales messages."[(1)]
After four generations of commercial control and manipulation of the broadcast media that is the central source of our cultural identity, plus two decades of escalating commercial intrusion into our public school systems, we have become so indoctrinated into a carefully orchestrated worldview that we have largely surrendered and lost both our ability and our desire for critical independent thought. In one of the many online sites called Deprogramming, put out by The Center for Human Deprogramming, it is put this way, "Everything we feel and know inside is gradually replaced with values originating from media and education until we have completely lost our ability for independent, creative, or critical thought. After years of this process, we lose our identities and internal equilibrium and become dependent on the external."[(6)] We have as a population largely fallen into a pattern of follow-the-
leader, looking to government and business to solve our problems, satisfy our perceived needs, and to tell and show us where we are supposed to go. To quote myself, from my book Oilephant Down: Canada at the End of the Age of Cheap Oil, "the more you ask your government to do for you the more it will do to you without your asking." Just consider the wholesale erosion of civil liberties in legislation like The Patriot Act passed since 9/11. But we keep asking. As Carolyn Baker says in American Born, Addicted to Happiness, "Americans, even so-called Progressives it seems, appear to be fixated in an eternal adolescence that wants to repair adversity as quickly as possible without living it, or God forbid, learning from it. One facet of maturity is the awareness that the challenges of human existence are rarely simplistic, usually fraught with complexity, and typically last much longer than we ever dreamed we could endure them. ..... Like puerile MTV viewers, we demand that the right politician, the right book, the right motivational speaker, the right spiritual teacher, the right journalist tell us what to do and make it “all better” so that we can avoid suffering."[(2)]
That is not a national mind set and worldview that should give anyone comfort as we rapidly and aggressively push toward the global crises ahead of us, most importantly but not exclusively peak oil and climate change. A problem cannot be its own solution. We cannot expect to avoid, remedy or mitigate these crises with the same government and business leadership that has led us through a global sleepwalk to this cliff and seems to be intent on pushing us off into the abyss with their mindless pursuit of business-as-usual. They are aware of the crises before us. If the average citizen did not realize that with President Bush's "America is addicted to oil" statement in his 2006 State of the Union address, then they simply are not listening. They may, however, simply be incapable of hearing. As Laura Knight-Jadczyk says in Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy?, "...how effective the "official culture" actually is in the US. It isn't just a question of ignorance, but a question of the long-term thoroughness of the propagandizing that began in the early days of the last century. It was proposed that this propaganda is so complete that not only are most people in the US ignorant of what is taking place on the US political scene, and in the world as a direct result of US policy, they are ignorant of the fact that they are ignorant."[(4)] But the solutions consistently put forward by President Bush, his administration, the US government and business leaders is to develop more new technology to solve the problems. It is technology that has brought us to this dangerous point. As Joseph Wilkerson put it in Energy and Psyche: Resource Addiction in the Technological Age, "....if the industrial relationship to petroleum and other energy sources is indeed an addiction, then it will take more than “technology … reliable alternative energy sources and … clean-energy research” (united) to facilitate our recovery." Knight-Jadczyk goes on to say, "...all of us who were raised in the US have been duped via this Official Culture mind control imposed through the educational system and the mass media." [(3)]
As long as those powerful government, institutional and business interests vested in the maintenance of the status quo remain in control of the legislation that creates the laws that govern our lives, in control of the education system that molds the mind and character of our children to their objectives, in control of that national media that creates, manipulates, controls and constantly reinforces the national cultural mind set supportive of their elitist interests, any broad-based, grass roots social movement for change will be very limited in its ability to affect that change. Even the most fervent social movements have been but small blips on the radar of those in control of our culture. Lip service is paid while passions are high and then it's back to business as usual, maybe with a new coat of disguising paint. With the media in the control of such powerful vested interests the opportunity simply will not be "granted" for any popular social change to get off the ground. In a paper titled Seizing the Media put out by a group called Immediast International, the frustration engendered by this reality is clear. "The time has come to veto, overwhelm, and subvert the messages of all airborne commercial broadcast media until they are returned to complete public direction, access, and control. How long should we wait to liberate public spaces from the blister of billboards and advertisements? The air is public domain, and the airwaves are ours to hear our own voices, see our own colors, enjoy our own conversations, and celebrate in the vast community of cultures. Remember: dialogue offsets the hegemony, and intimacy empowers. ..... The time has come to restore the democratic power and public space that have been co opted and colonized by commercial media."[(5)]
If our leaders remain focused on perpetuating business as usual and have no solution to the problems ahead other than ramping up the technology that has been such a key part of our destruction of the planet's biosphere, and if machinery of culturation and information remains firmly in their grasp, how are we to overcome our increasing sense of doom and have any hope of avoiding the crises ahead (Let's call them what they will be, disasters!)? How are we to prepare as a society for the most dramatic and traumatic transition in human history as the impact of peak oil, climate change and other looming global disasters befall us in quick succession? Somehow we have to find a way. This is how it was put in Knight-Jadczyk's article. "A picture is forming of a deliberately contrived society of televised conformity, literate and creative inadequacy, and social unrest and decadence. It is apparent that the media is in charge of propagating these conditions, and the media is controlled by what? ..... Capitalistic, competitive Economics."
Deprogramming is a technique developed and fine-tuned over this past half century originally intended as a program to undo the indoctrination and brainwashing of individuals rescued from cults of various descriptions. It is a very intense, one-on-one process that seeks to supplant inculcated beliefs, "truths", triggers and signals and replace them with a renewed affinity for the mainstream culture. The process uses, out of declared necessity, some of the same techniques of indoctrination and brainwashing that was used to draw the subject into the cult in the first place. Both the strength and the weakness of the technique is that it is one-on-one. If the masses are to be deprogrammed out of the mainstream culture in order to effect a change toward a post-energy sustainable world it is not likely to happen if it relies on intense, one-on-one reculturation of every individual. There is a technique called Social Reason developed by Milton W. Raymond and presented to the Ethical Society of Boston, School for Ethics. This paper purports to be a technique for broad social deprogramming during traumatic social changes such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-absorption of Hong Kong into Communist China and introduction of western Democracy into conservative Islamic states.[(6)] To my knowledge the theory presented in the paper has never been put into practice. Most practitioners and experts on deprogramming are quite insistent that it can only work on an intense one-on-one basis. I remain intrigued, however, whether Raymond's technique has any merit and whether it could be the key to effecting the social transition from our current high-energy, high-tech world into the sustainable world that must follow the collapse of the global energy bubble.
____________________________________________________________________________________
1) The Political Economy Of Radio by Robert W. McChesney
http://www.infoshop.org/texts/seizing/mches.html
2) American Born, Addicted to Happiness by Carolyn Baker / Research on Globalization (CRG)
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/American-Addicted-Happiness30nov04.htm
3) Energy and Psyche: Resource Addiction in the Technological Age By Joseph Wilkerson
http://www.ecopsychology.org/journal/ezine/archive3/addiction.pdf
4) Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy? by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm
5) Seizing The Media: The Immediast Underground Pamphlet Series
Immediast International - New York City / Amsterdam / Seattle (Looks quite good)
http://deoxy.org/seize_it.htm
6) Resolving "Irreconcilable" Differences by Milton W. Raymond
http://www.bostonethical.org/SocialReason.html
Can the deprogramming techniques used on those rescued from cults or the mass deprogramming suggested in the "Social Reason" program be looked to as a means of achieving mass global deprogramming for the purpose of achieving a mass disassociation from the modern capitalist paradigm and a shift in worldview to stewardship and sustainability?
What is the source of a nation's culture? Who defines it? How is it transmitted through the nation's population such that it becomes so integrated into the individual worldview and mind set that it becomes "common knowledge", becomes the
core of the national identity? There was a reason that large "nations" like China, India, the US, Russia and others did not exist earlier in our history, why nations that did exist were still loose collections of tribal enclaves much like we are finding Afghanistan still is today. The means to create and, most importantly, constantly reinforce a national identity did not exist. People do not inherently identify with "nation" but rather some smaller, more intimate grouping. The key to sustaining a national worldview is media; TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, music and movies. The extension of that reality is the growth of globalization and the establishment of key elements of a global mind set through the agency of global communications; through global television and radio aided through satellites, through globalization in the entertainment industry in music, magazines and movies, and, more recently and far more importantly, the rapid growth of global digital communications that brings into a common technology base not only broadcast media but telephone, the internet, facsimile transmission and image transmission.One of the first and most important targets of the rebel forces in any revolution since the early part of the twentieth century, and earlier though in more limited fashion, is almost always the communications and media; the radio, TV, newspapers and printing presses. Control of the media, until then in the hands of the government being overthrown, is recognized as a critical part of gaining control of the hearts and minds of the people. Media is always, at least in modern society, at the heart of national culture. It is the means by which government and business mobilize the public support of their goals. As Robert W. McChesney outlines in The Political Economy Of Radio, "As a rule of thumb, if certain forces thoroughly dominate a society's political economy they will thoroughly dominate its communication system, and the fundamental questions of how the communication system should be organized and for what purposes are not even subject to debate. So it is and so it has been with the Communist Party in various "people's republics," and, for the most part, with big business interests in the United States."[(1)] And, in fact, it is the same with business control of the media in every free country on the planet.
We are bombarded by the reinforcing symbols and messages of our culturation and social indoctrination from cradle to grave. But beginning with the various means of mass communication, starting with radio, that culturation and indoctrination has been increasingly and insidiously commercial. Beginning in the 1920s capitalists and business leaders began to recognize the power in radio that they could use to improve their businesses and, more importantly, to "manufacture" and maintain public loyalty to their product and, increasingly, their political agenda. With that recognition, they set out to control these mass communication media. McChesney writes, "It was only in the late 1920s that capitalists began to sense that through network operation and commercial advertising, radio broadcasting could generate substantial profits. Through their immense power in Washington, these commercial broadcasters were able to dominate the Federal Radio Commission. As a result, the scarce number of air channels were effectively turned over to them with no public and little congressional deliberation on the matter."
The dangers inherent in commercial control of broadcast media were the rallying call of a reform movement through the 1920s. They argued that ".....if private interests controlled the medium and their goal was profit, no amount of regulation or self-regulation could overcome the bias built into the system." This reform movement essentially lost their battle with the passage of the Communications Act of 1934, which established the FCC. They did not lose in a fair fight, however. As McChesney explains, "The radio lobby dominated because it was able to keep most Americans ignorant or confused about the communication policy matters then under discussion in Congress through their control of key elements of the news media and their sophisticated public relations aimed at the remainder of the press and the public."
Commercial domination of broadcast media did not end with radio, of course. "When television came along in the 1940s," McChesney says, "the FCC effectively turned it over to the same networks that dominated radio. Almost from the beginning commercial broadcasting has generated criticism that it ignored or downplayed controversial political programming, or entertainment and cultural programming that would not attract huge audiences. In addition, advertisers served as powerful censors of broadcast content, and it was not in their interest to sponsor programming that might undermine their sales messages."[(1)]
After four generations of commercial control and manipulation of the broadcast media that is the central source of our cultural identity, plus two decades of escalating commercial intrusion into our public school systems, we have become so indoctrinated into a carefully orchestrated worldview that we have largely surrendered and lost both our ability and our desire for critical independent thought. In one of the many online sites called Deprogramming, put out by The Center for Human Deprogramming, it is put this way, "Everything we feel and know inside is gradually replaced with values originating from media and education until we have completely lost our ability for independent, creative, or critical thought. After years of this process, we lose our identities and internal equilibrium and become dependent on the external."[(6)] We have as a population largely fallen into a pattern of follow-the-
leader, looking to government and business to solve our problems, satisfy our perceived needs, and to tell and show us where we are supposed to go. To quote myself, from my book Oilephant Down: Canada at the End of the Age of Cheap Oil, "the more you ask your government to do for you the more it will do to you without your asking." Just consider the wholesale erosion of civil liberties in legislation like The Patriot Act passed since 9/11. But we keep asking. As Carolyn Baker says in American Born, Addicted to Happiness, "Americans, even so-called Progressives it seems, appear to be fixated in an eternal adolescence that wants to repair adversity as quickly as possible without living it, or God forbid, learning from it. One facet of maturity is the awareness that the challenges of human existence are rarely simplistic, usually fraught with complexity, and typically last much longer than we ever dreamed we could endure them. ..... Like puerile MTV viewers, we demand that the right politician, the right book, the right motivational speaker, the right spiritual teacher, the right journalist tell us what to do and make it “all better” so that we can avoid suffering."[(2)]That is not a national mind set and worldview that should give anyone comfort as we rapidly and aggressively push toward the global crises ahead of us, most importantly but not exclusively peak oil and climate change. A problem cannot be its own solution. We cannot expect to avoid, remedy or mitigate these crises with the same government and business leadership that has led us through a global sleepwalk to this cliff and seems to be intent on pushing us off into the abyss with their mindless pursuit of business-as-usual. They are aware of the crises before us. If the average citizen did not realize that with President Bush's "America is addicted to oil" statement in his 2006 State of the Union address, then they simply are not listening. They may, however, simply be incapable of hearing. As Laura Knight-Jadczyk says in Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy?, "...how effective the "official culture" actually is in the US. It isn't just a question of ignorance, but a question of the long-term thoroughness of the propagandizing that began in the early days of the last century. It was proposed that this propaganda is so complete that not only are most people in the US ignorant of what is taking place on the US political scene, and in the world as a direct result of US policy, they are ignorant of the fact that they are ignorant."[(4)] But the solutions consistently put forward by President Bush, his administration, the US government and business leaders is to develop more new technology to solve the problems. It is technology that has brought us to this dangerous point. As Joseph Wilkerson put it in Energy and Psyche: Resource Addiction in the Technological Age, "....if the industrial relationship to petroleum and other energy sources is indeed an addiction, then it will take more than “technology … reliable alternative energy sources and … clean-energy research” (united) to facilitate our recovery." Knight-Jadczyk goes on to say, "...all of us who were raised in the US have been duped via this Official Culture mind control imposed through the educational system and the mass media." [(3)]
As long as those powerful government, institutional and business interests vested in the maintenance of the status quo remain in control of the legislation that creates the laws that govern our lives, in control of the education system that molds the mind and character of our children to their objectives, in control of that national media that creates, manipulates, controls and constantly reinforces the national cultural mind set supportive of their elitist interests, any broad-based, grass roots social movement for change will be very limited in its ability to affect that change. Even the most fervent social movements have been but small blips on the radar of those in control of our culture. Lip service is paid while passions are high and then it's back to business as usual, maybe with a new coat of disguising paint. With the media in the control of such powerful vested interests the opportunity simply will not be "granted" for any popular social change to get off the ground. In a paper titled Seizing the Media put out by a group called Immediast International, the frustration engendered by this reality is clear. "The time has come to veto, overwhelm, and subvert the messages of all airborne commercial broadcast media until they are returned to complete public direction, access, and control. How long should we wait to liberate public spaces from the blister of billboards and advertisements? The air is public domain, and the airwaves are ours to hear our own voices, see our own colors, enjoy our own conversations, and celebrate in the vast community of cultures. Remember: dialogue offsets the hegemony, and intimacy empowers. ..... The time has come to restore the democratic power and public space that have been co opted and colonized by commercial media."[(5)]
If our leaders remain focused on perpetuating business as usual and have no solution to the problems ahead other than ramping up the technology that has been such a key part of our destruction of the planet's biosphere, and if machinery of culturation and information remains firmly in their grasp, how are we to overcome our increasing sense of doom and have any hope of avoiding the crises ahead (Let's call them what they will be, disasters!)? How are we to prepare as a society for the most dramatic and traumatic transition in human history as the impact of peak oil, climate change and other looming global disasters befall us in quick succession? Somehow we have to find a way. This is how it was put in Knight-Jadczyk's article. "A picture is forming of a deliberately contrived society of televised conformity, literate and creative inadequacy, and social unrest and decadence. It is apparent that the media is in charge of propagating these conditions, and the media is controlled by what? ..... Capitalistic, competitive Economics."
Deprogramming is a technique developed and fine-tuned over this past half century originally intended as a program to undo the indoctrination and brainwashing of individuals rescued from cults of various descriptions. It is a very intense, one-on-one process that seeks to supplant inculcated beliefs, "truths", triggers and signals and replace them with a renewed affinity for the mainstream culture. The process uses, out of declared necessity, some of the same techniques of indoctrination and brainwashing that was used to draw the subject into the cult in the first place. Both the strength and the weakness of the technique is that it is one-on-one. If the masses are to be deprogrammed out of the mainstream culture in order to effect a change toward a post-energy sustainable world it is not likely to happen if it relies on intense, one-on-one reculturation of every individual. There is a technique called Social Reason developed by Milton W. Raymond and presented to the Ethical Society of Boston, School for Ethics. This paper purports to be a technique for broad social deprogramming during traumatic social changes such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-absorption of Hong Kong into Communist China and introduction of western Democracy into conservative Islamic states.[(6)] To my knowledge the theory presented in the paper has never been put into practice. Most practitioners and experts on deprogramming are quite insistent that it can only work on an intense one-on-one basis. I remain intrigued, however, whether Raymond's technique has any merit and whether it could be the key to effecting the social transition from our current high-energy, high-tech world into the sustainable world that must follow the collapse of the global energy bubble.
____________________________________________________________________________________
1) The Political Economy Of Radio by Robert W. McChesney
http://www.infoshop.org/texts/seizing/mches.html
2) American Born, Addicted to Happiness by Carolyn Baker / Research on Globalization (CRG)
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/American-Addicted-Happiness30nov04.htm
3) Energy and Psyche: Resource Addiction in the Technological Age By Joseph Wilkerson
http://www.ecopsychology.org/journal/ezine/archive3/addiction.pdf
4) Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy? by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm
5) Seizing The Media: The Immediast Underground Pamphlet Series
Immediast International - New York City / Amsterdam / Seattle (Looks quite good)
http://deoxy.org/seize_it.htm
6) Resolving "Irreconcilable" Differences by Milton W. Raymond
http://www.bostonethical.org/SocialReason.html
Friday, December 08, 2006
The Foundations of Peak-Oil Doomerism
New arrivals to the peak oil discussion/issue are often quickly confused and frustrated by the depth and intensity of the debate between the opposing camps. It is very difficult for people to find the calm, rational middle-ground amid the incessant background noise of extremism. That, unfortunately, is human nature. The more extreme the view is that opposes your own the more extreme you feel you must go in the other direction to counter and balance it. In order for an observer or listener to find the balance between the two extremes it is necessary to understand the motivation behind those extremes. The paradox is that both extremes are, at least partially, motivated by a shared fear of the same event: the approaching decline of oil and other energy resources.
How can both sides fear the same event and, as a result, gravitate toward such extreme opposites? It's a fair question. The simplified answer, in my opinion, rests in how those in the opposing camps view our current global society. Both sides, I believe, are arguing from the perspective of the type of society they want or believe will emerge on the other side of that energy decline. The peak oil optimists argue from a desire and/or belief that our current society is essentially good and that we will do what is necessary to keep it going into the future. The peak oil pessimists largely believe that the technology on which our current society is based is unsustainable, that we do not act to prevent catastrophes but, instead, wait until they happen and then react to them, and most importantly that there are so many converging potential catastrophes that if one doesn't get us another will. Those are, I admit, very, very simplified interpretations of the two extremes but to deal with them properly would take a great deal more space and realistically needs a book, which this is not. Substitute whatever motivation helps you understand the two extremes. And keep in mind that both extremes, generally, honestly believe in the position they adhere to.
I am most often identified with the doomer camp, though I do try to find balance in my arguments. Being in that camp, therefore, I will attempt to use my own motivations to help others understand that pervasive doom-and-gloom that peak-oil optimists like to attack. After all, if you can't shoot down the message then do your best to shoot down the messenger.
Oil is finite! There may be arguments over how much oil there was/is but, regardless of what that number is it is finite, absolute. That being the case, therefore, every barrel of oil we use is one less barrel left for the future. Every barrel we use takes us one barrel closer to eventual depletion. And we are using about 85-million barrels of it every single day. That is a pretty big step every day toward eventual depletion.
Our global society is inextricably bound to and dependent on that flow of oil. It's not just gasoline. There are over 300,000 products in every day use around the world that are made from or derived from oil. The more oil we use the closer we move to the day that those 300,000 products will no longer be available. As soon as the amount of oil produced is no longer enough to satisfy all that demand some of those 300,000 products are going to begin to disappear.
The arguments that we survived without oil before oil was discovered and will do so after the oil is gone are spurious and dangerous. The global human population before the discovery of oil was about 1-billion. Today it is 6.5-billion and rising. That Pre-oil population of 1-billion had and would have a wide variety of energy sources to support them and facilitate continued growth. We are headed into a period of terminal oil and energy decline with a population that cannot be sustained adequately today. The UN estimates that 1-billion people or more today are undernourished. Every day more than 40,000 people die of starvation or nutrition related diseases. We have, over the past century, so damaged this planet's natural soil fertility that once the artificial fertility derived from oil (herbicides, insecticides, pesticides) and natural gas (artificial fertilizer) can no longer be maintained our ability to produce food and feed our massive overpopulation will be severely impacted for generations.
One of the most critical impacts of our high-energy era is human-induced global warming (more appropriately named climate change) resulting from over a century of our burning of fossil fuels. All species have evolved to live in very narrow climate bands. Climate change is already severely impacting species by pushing local climates outside the range in which those local species thrive. And climate change is still accelerating.
Global pollution, most of it derived from fossil-fuel burning and the totally unnatural lifestyle we have developed around those fossil fuels, has so devastated all parts of the biosphere (air, water, soil) is having such a severe cumulative impact that it could take the planet centuries to recover from our impact. And one of the species being so heavily impacted by that is ourselves. There is a strange poetic justice in that, I suppose. We are destroying the life-support capability of the planet but may succeed in destroying ourselves in the process. The alarming rise in childhood diseases is one of the clearest indications that we are destroying our immune systems with our own man-made toxins and pollutants.
The potential for a decimating global pandemic are increasing every year. We have unleashed through our own activity a wide array of new killer diseases in the past half century; SIV/HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Lassa Fever, Mad Cow, Hanta virus, Marburg, Legionnaire's Disease, SARS, Bird Flu, West Nile Virus, and more. This is partly as a result of; our increasing incursion with development into areas where these diseases exist, the ease of spreading these diseases through our ease of global travel, the weakening of our immune systems through the overuse of antibiotics and other modern medicines, increasing urban concentration and more.
And the list goes on. My doomerism, and that of many others in the peak-oil debate, is based not just on the approach of peak oil. It is based on the convergence of so many potential global catastrophes any one of which on its own could be totally devastating to our human population. To have them all on the horizon at the same time, to me, leaves no room for optimism. The denial embedded in the optimistic arguments that are so pervasive in our governments, our media, our industry leadership, strongly suggest to peak oil doomers that we are going to sleep walk right into at least one of those disasters. As I said in the opening line of my book Oilephant Down, "To solve any problem you must first be prepared to admit that there is a problem that needs solving." The denial that supports that optimistic point of view means that an unwillingness to admit there is a problem that needs solving is well entrenched among our leaders. Optimism based in action is one thing. Optimism based in denial and inaction is quite another.
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