Road Trip to the Apocalypse

Chronicle of Doom Fortold, Chapter XX?

Energy Cassandra's have been warning us about this for decades, but now it's here. Oil is no longer cheap, and the long term is likely to get worse. Nelson D. Schwartz has a look at the history in today's New York Times. Like many of our recent disasters (9/11, Iraq, Katrina, Bush tax cuts) this is a calamity that those with minds could see coming for millions, er, trillions of vehicle miles.

Schwartz has some quotes:


“Much of what we’re seeing today could have been prevented or ameliorated had we chosen to act differently,” says Pete V. Domenici, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a 36-year veteran of the Senate. “It was a bipartisan failure to act.”

Mike Jackson, the chief executive of AutoNation, the country’s biggest automobile retailer, is even more blunt. “It was totally preventable,” he says, anger creeping into his affable car-salesman’s pitch.


I will buy the bipartisan failure, but the principal blame goes to the Bush administration, and to the idiots who elected it. Despite plenty of warning, Americans chose to live in a dream world where God would always provide them as much oil as they needed, and never mind the fact that the people who stood to gain the most from high priced oil were running the country.

For big oil, and its (mostly) Republican minions, current prices are a fluke, caused by our failure to drain the last drop of our reserves or maybe by mysterious speculators. Pretty clearly, the markets are unconvinced.

I think that it's pretty unlikely that we really are at peak oil, and even more dubious that oil is likely to rise a whole lot more. Barring disaster (e.g., "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran"), oil is likely to fall in response to world wide recession and a gradual cranking up of supplies. Perhaps it will even reach $60/bbl. again. If so, we will have another chance to blow our opportunity to do something about it.

Energy conservation is the most obvious answer, and that is unlikely to happen without higher taxes on its use. No one will dare touch that unless energy prices suddenly decline, but Americans really do need to move beyond the culture of immediate gratification.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more