The Elephant in the Room
Good to see this little matter enter the forum of public discussion again. But will anything be done before it's too late?
Labels: peak oil
posted by Steve | 6:08 PM
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2 Comments:
What are the Landmine's illustrious authors' views on this? Have been reading a little into it. It will undoubtedly happen soon, some saying peak oil has already been and gone and the decline has set in.
I just wonder though, surely even if the general Western economic overloards are ignorant (or stockpiling tins and GM wheat for their own STARK adventure to the stars), the powermongers of the US military-industrial complex must be aware of the situation. Which begs the question are they really going to blithely ignore the geological facts and thus relinquish their power stranglehold, which is based on oil-fuelled might? Is it too much commonsense to think they have their own contingencies in place even if they wont share.
I, too, would think that the global elite would likely have some sort of contingency plan in place for after they've drained every last drop of petroleum energy out of the ground and "helped" us to put it into the atmosphere.
Biofuels? Good luck sustaining agricultural yields, never mind actually increasing them, without all those chemical fertilizers that apparently depend on the availability of petroleum to manufacture and distribute. It's questionable whether many people will even be able to feed themselves, much less their vehicles, once the oil panic hits home.
Other forms of alternative energy, like solar, wind and hydro-electric? Maybe. But it seems like huge, fundamental upheavals in urban planning are going to be necessary if those are to be at all effective in minimizing the chaos likely to ensue with the end of readily-available oil and oil-based products. And that could take time and resources we may not have. The change needs to be happening on a wide-scale now - today - but not much appears to be happening.
So what's the plan? Taking a couple of pages from both Dr. Strangelove and Dead Kennedys, I'd suggest our overlords and their friends in the military-industrial complex (oops, they're actually one and the same) might turn to simpler solutions to help make increasingly-limited resources go a bit longer: like the neutron bomb. As then-DK's frontman Jello Biafra once sang, "Away with excess enemy but no less value to property." And Exxon-Mobil may be able to get another 30 or 40 years of profits out of the deal as well.
Whatever happens, some bad, bad things will be going down in the years to come and, as usual, the poor in the LDC's are going to be the first ones at the sharp end of things. Countries that are already poor aren't likely to find the resources necessary to adapt although, paradoxically, they actually have less infrastructure.
Interesting times, indeed!
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