Peak Oil and the Foundations of the Modern World


Over the past hundred and fifty or so years, individuals have internalised two great lessons. One is that the absolute expression of the individual is a key to happiness. Happiness is what everyone, everywhere, has either sought or forestalled. The second is that the economy will grow, because resources are abundant, and that novel ways of doing things are in themselves an expression of individual growth.

That's why most of the people who call themselves conservatives in the english-speaking world are actually liberals, or libertarians. So are most, but not all, varieties of feminist. The schools of thought that embraced an ideology of the market based on maths drawn from discredited nineteenth-century physics, called the 'New Right' are too. So are those on the Left who draw their inspiration from the ideas of progress through growth and the lifestyle politics of choice that flowed, if you are interested, from a combination of the Frankfurt School and Jurgen Habermas.

It has been very easy for these groups to find real and serious disagreements amongst themselves. Communism and liberal democracy, for instance, were both modernist ideas. They achieved their distinctive forms early, in the American and French revolutions that happened only a few years apart and which were both intimately connected with Atlantic imperialism.

However, what will happen if resources run out?

Just ask yourself that question. Many very serious, unrewarded, and unthanked engineers and scientists are doing so already, and are trying to ask others too. My reader from New Jersey who commented previously deserves that description and he knows who he is.

Here is a link to a serious, non loony collection of oil analysts and scientists. if you have ever entertained any notion of 'global warming science', I have to tell you this site is clearer, and tougher, and better sourced. The Oil Drum details the suspicious upratings of reserves, which have either reached a plateau or are actually in global decline. The energy bulletin lays out what oil and gas men are thinking. Peak oil blues tries to set a hardier tone.

They all suggest what the next twenty years or so could hold, starting now. This will impact upon politics and will be enormously disruptive, if it happens. For a start, a greedy and narcissitic public culture fed for a long time by credit and by the liberalism I talked of will demand 'energy solutions' that aren't there. The materialist culture of death, rather ironically, will not die quietly.

That may involve the redevelopment of coal, which I welcome, but its use as a 'dirty' fuel rather than a clean one, which I don't. It may involve resource wars. It may involve crazy trips to the moon to get helium-3 from the regolith, such as the Chinese state is planning. The Chinese have such a necessary demand for energy, food, water, and commodities that the development of the people's republic alone might have tipped the balance. As it is, it probably just quickens the descent, especially since their rearmament into a superpower-sized force is utterly dependent on hydrocarbons.

Of course, I could be wrong. That would be normal. The facts could be subject to the wrong inferences. There could be underlying science that we are not engaging with. The quickening loss of resources and of energy, however, is one of the loudest of the drums which my regular reader will know I have been hearing for some time.

We could put ourselves as a public culture in a position to deal with this sort of thing. Some of the answers might not be welcome. A rediscovery of religion and its capacity for the humane limitation of communities may be one way. Public ownership, to break the untenable link between ever-higher profits and the delivery of social goods, may be another. On a small level, a rediscovery of urban farming, allotments, and the use of gardens for production may be a third. Nuclear power may be a fourth. Even the long forgotten traditions of guild socialism might be revisited, as guilds in themselves could be. I do speak, though, as a member of the Middle Temple, which is a guild I love.

Time is running out however. The headline campaigns of today, for action against global warming and airports, are futile. No action will stop the first; the loss of resources on an individual and global level will stop the second. An awareness of our limits, a rediscovery of models of resource use that are forward looking and that go beyond the logic of the market and deliver long-term benefits would. Get a book on how to grow food, or go and try if you have a garden. If the supermarket trucks can't afford to deliver expensive food to you, you will need to.

The picture below this blog is Jeffrey Smart's 'The Oil Drums', which can be found at Clive James' excellent site.