They taught me something else, too: I was one of them, and I was getting out.
Imagine the Adjunct Professor of English/farmer/old time fiddler, walking to his composition class with his clutch of videos and his charts downloaded from The Oil Drum. We're going to do something about this peak oil thing! The vision makes me shudder to this day: But at least, thank goodness, I avoided saying anything outright stupid. In fact, I just tried to give my students the material and not to voice my own point of view about it. Of course, that material was selected by me and so represented my point of view by proxy. The most "doomish" article they read was a chapter of William Catton's seminal 1980 book Overshoot , "The Tragic Story of Human Success," which even today should be required reading for anyone concerned about the fate of humanity.
I am not saying the doomers are completely wrong: The catastrophic view is not implausible. I just don't know. There is no mistake that peak oil is one of the--if not THE--issue of the Twenty-First Century. We've never been to Peak Oil Land before, and we will only go there once.
But predictions are notoriously slippery things. When they seem to come "true," we may be fooling ourselves, because in this dark world and wide, so many predictions are being made in so many quarters that some of them are bound to come true, by chance alone. And if one person launches a whole boatload of predictions, one of those is bound to come true, by chance alone. And if a prediction is sufficiently broad and unspecific enough, many subsequent phenomena can be shoe-horned into the glass slipper to fit the prediction. And if a prediction doesn't come true, all we have to do is say, "Just wait a little longer." And.... Why bother making such predictions at all?
This does not mean I am in any way sanguine about the future. We've hit the global trifecta--peak oil, climate change, and overpopulation--and I fear that the "rewards" are coming in our lifetimes. Glibness, showboating, and pseudo-analysis are the last things we need from commentators. I thought I would continually oppose this din of voices in writing, but I've changed my mind yet again: Who the frig am I but yet another of those voices? I'm hoping future events will eventually drive them out of their bunkers and they'll go away.
In spite of the debased nature of the peak oil discourse, there are still many very intelligent writers and thinkers trying to get the message out, but their voices are being drowned out by the hacks. I leave it to the reader to figure out who those other voices are. That's what every independent thinker must do.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way.... Genesis 3:24.
("Hubbert" in the title refers to Marion King Hubbert, author of the original study the led to the concept of peak oil. This article is not meant to impugn his great work.)
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