Sub-optimist

God, we are so viciously fucked.

I've been reading about peak oil. This was instigated, in part at least, by my friend who pops in from time to time and carries on about all the ways society can, and probably will, collapse. I agree with him. I've never been one to lead an optimistic lifestyle, and everything I see attests to our collective inability to tell our assholes from ground-holes. But oil seems to be at the bottom of so much; it is the fundament of so much of our shit. (It, quite literally, cooks our food for us, harvests our grain, powers our communications, drives our cars and trucks, explores for oil, pollutes our environment but also cleans our environment, brings us our water, heats our buildings, cools our buildings...)

Very quickly (in case you didn;t read the article): peak oil is the idea that when global oil production stops growing and so much as begins to decline, we're in for a world of shit. Once our extraction efforts start becoming less and less efficient, we'll be unable to power our economies, in which demand is growing. Note here that this is not the same as us running out of oil; we'll have some oil for at least a century in the future. The problem here is that our economy is based on this one ridiculous assumption: that we can sustain growth indefinitely. Which team of jackasses accepted this as gospel? You base your growth and peg it to a fucking non-renewable resource! Great fucking move! When armed militias begin forming after the oil crash, I want to line theswe people up in front of a wall and shoot them. (Nothing of the sort will happen, though; these profiteering assholes will be holed up in some fortress somewhere.) Anyway, the point is that peak oil will cause markets to go apeshit, and no human foresight can stop this. The market is greater than the sum of its traders.

But wait, you say. Alernative fuels and lifestyle changes can smooth this crash; something positive can emerge and our eceonemy can go on; morern industrial civilkization would be saved, or at least certain positive aspects of it, like decent individual freedom, tolerance, entertainment, electornics, science, art and so on. Nice thought; I wish that would happen. I'm all for it; I'm living that energy-reducing, recycling, non-car-driving, soon to be non-meat-eating lifestyle. But will most people do that? I maintain that people in large groups will never get their collective shit toghether; and this includes me, as much as I distance myself from it. An example: most people support public transit, but for other people. Responsibility ofr global catastrophes is diffused something fierce, to the point where it doesn't register. Ask yourself: how responsible do you feel on any given day for the old-growth forests that are cut down to bring you your "bathroom tissue"? How responsible do you feel for the brownish cloud of smog over your city? I won't belabour it; the list goes on. The markets--there go the fucking markets again--are not responsive enough to recognize the value of alternative energy until it's too late. Why? Well, partly because people in large groups are incapable of getting their shit together, but also becuase there is a fundamental inversion at work here. (Keep in mind I know practically jack-shit about economics.) It takes the form of this quote (which is in that article I linked to): "you can buy an apple for one euro. If you really want an apple, you might pay five euros. You could even pay a thousand euros, but you would never pay two apples." The apples here are oil. Markets ultimately trade energy and the products of energy consumption. Energy is more fundamental than market value; markets can only reflect the supply-and-demand situation of energy, they cannot shape it in any appreciable way. (I hope there's some fundamental flaw i nreasoning embedded here. It'd be nice.)

Of course, opinions differ on what will happen when we hit peak oil. I like to try to consider the worst: massive social unrest or war on a global scale; Ethiopian-style famine in first-world countries; massive profiteering and hoarding by corporations and the rich; the collapse of whatever egalitarianism we sought. So, when is it coming, this peak oil, this crash? Opinions vary, but even the most optimistic people don't put it much past 2015. That's right: 2015. This will happen in the prime of our lives; we'll have to deal with this shit. Or, more likely, we won't. If it's any consolation, it may already be too late, so the ones that fucked up were really the previous generation.

Consider: "Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. We can do just about anything you can imagine to rats. And closing your eyes and refusing to think about this won't make it go away."