Martin Meenagh blog

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 ...

Which London Mayoral candidate do you agree with? Here is a link to the London Mayoral 'vote match' site . It sets out details of policies, asks twenty questions. Then it tells you whom you agree with most. I matched with Ken Livingstone, then I think one of the independents, then rather surprisingly with the 'Left list' and then down until ending up in near total disagreement with the BNP. All a bit of fun but the sort of thing that makes me think. The media agenda in London is clearly 'get rid of Livingstone'. Negative spin is being applied everywhere. Even then, though, London's chippy, nasal Mayor has denied his two contenders their one best shot. During the Newsnight debate the other day, they were awful, he was cool and rational. If they can't get it up--and you can have a look for yourself--for an event as important as that debate, what's going to happen if they get elected? Any of the non-Ken candidates will end up discrediting the whole noti...

Skeptical Science One thing that annoys people about global warming arguments is how the usual suspects, often middle class or troubled or clearly looking for funds or righteous kudos, tend to control information. I've been looking for ages for concrete arguments that try and deal with skeptical or contrarian arguments rather than just dismissing them or taking issue with the logic of particular presenters. I've found this site-- the skeptical science --that may be of interest to you. It seeks to challenge skeptical arguments with arguments of its own. Whilst I am not qualified to pronounce, it is refreshing to see a proper contribution to debate. This is important. There are many, like for instance my friend Neil Clark , who predicted that the war in Iraq would go wrong and who have been proved largely right. I don't always agree with Neil but on this he was right, as were many others. Some people, and many were honourable and also friends of mine, supported the war for tw...

Night Thoughts I'm quite washed out and a bit run down again reader. So it should be on a chilly night near one in the morning. Are we seeing the end of the modern world? I'm not the person to answer the question, of course. It does strike me more and more though that the forces unleashed in the Atlantic world by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and upon world politics by the French Revolution, really are more in the past than the future. Well, goodbye to most of them, not least the pointless division of left and right. In the American revolution, individualism and a form of law governed liberalism was born that brooked no limit on the earth or in the skies. It now seems to be rushing to a confrontation with debt, human stupidity, and the contempt spread by bankrupt war. It isn't the first time. My clever old friend and mentor, Daniel Walker Howe could see such confrontations marbled through US history, even before he wrote his brilliant new book about the b...

A Reader Writes I am becoming more and more convinced of the Peak Oil idea by the day. It has been playing around my head for some years, but we do seem to be entering a period when it's predictive validity is being tested. The theory, which holds that we have used more oil at viable prices than is left, is still largely unknown. This is a pity, since the impact of predicted future oil shocks and of sustained high trend prices for oil will affect all of us. Arguably, the theory is better founded than some of that associated with global warming. Anyway, a reader who wrote in on the comments section after my post about airships has put things better than I did. I wanted to share the comment, from damifino, with you; As we enter this age of limits, the most difficult aspect of 'looking forward projections', airships or otherwise, is coming to grips with our interdependency with oil. It is near impossible to comprehend just how ingrained it is in all we do and produce, and how...

Rocket Men In retrospect, the daring, wasteful, silly moonshot of the mid-twentieth century becomes stranger and stranger. It did not result in many major innovations, and cost around $35 billions. It protected some of the most murderous German slave masters and enemies of humanity of the 1940s, and was funded and conceived out of a military effort to lob bombs in a faster way. 'I dream of the Stars' Wernher Von Braun wrote of himself...'but sometimes you hit London', his NASA colleagues added. And yet, and yet..it has a romance about it. The dreams of travel and development around the solar system of the twentieth century were almost realised before economic disenchantment and spending on preparation for war took over again. I've been reading Gerard DeGroot's Dark Side of the Moon, which is a scales-from-the-eyes history of the moon programme which I prefer to Andrew Smith's Moondust. The latter is different in degree, but not kind. DeGroot's book is fu...

Disconnected Facts? Every ten dollar rise in the price of a barrel of oil costs the United States Air Force some $600 million dollars. It is interesting that the air force are therefore adapting by attempting to develop long-term plans to use coal-to-liquid technology, with plants based in places such as Montana, to deal with their cost worries. Follow the logic. They are projecting for the long term. I become more and more taken by the day with the peak oil theory, and they clearly are too. The oil is running down and the military machine, which is rational by its own lights, is reforming. Peak oil is a theory familiar to you if you have followed some of my many links. Here's a scary one . It is coming into its own as a hard-science idea at the moment. It holds that the world's available supply of oil has peaked or is about to peak. The spillover from the global warming controversies of recent years has been twofold. Firstly, this hardening theory has been lumped in with the...