Diary: Petroleum Rex

Get rid of any lingering ideas that the Greek play "Oedipus Rex" has to do with "Freudian psychoanalysis." Sophocles didn't expose our hidden psychological desires. No, Sophocles exposed our dysfunctional relationship to the Powers That Be.

The big ones. Like thermodynamic laws.

1. "They woz warned." At the outset, oracles tell the principle players explicitly what their futures WILL BE, yet they all dare to try to avoid their respective fates. The cursed Daddy and Mommy, Laios and Jocasta, leave Oedipus on a mountaintop to die. Later, the foundling Oedipus flees his adopted father and mother when he learns what the gods have in store for him. He thinks he can outwit the gods! LOL!

Likewise, Petroleum Rex thinks he can outwit entropy, depletion, and decline, no matter what people like M. King Hubbert have told him. (Hubbert showed us the cursed fate of finite resource development - it can't expand forever; it peters out.) Petroleum Rex just swarms upon energy, devours it, shits it out, all the while calling the prophets of depletion "doomers."

2. "Fait accompli." Later, once he has the throne, Oedipus thinks he has successfully outrun the "curse," but he has already killed Daddy and married Mommy. By the time he becomes aware that there's a problem -- Thebes is under a plague because of a "pollution" in their midst, that is, Oedipus himself -- it's TOO LATE.

Sounds like 1980, ten years after the peak in US oil production predicted by Hubbert. Petroleum Rex thought it was "Morning in America." When oil prices fell from record highs to record lows, he went out and bought a fleet of SUVs, becoming more addled than ever.

3. Even when told the truth to his face by the best prophet around, Teiresias ("YOU are the land's pollution!"), Oedipus' response is denial, anger, and paranoia. He refuses to believe the gods' edict, curses the prophet, and even brags about his powers ("I alone answered the riddle of the Sphinx and saved this city!"). Little does he know how impotent he really is.

In contemporary terms, Petroleum Rex says, "You chicken littles don't know what you're talking about. We have Mighty Technology, Market Forces," etc.

4. The closer Oedipus gets to the naked truth, the more strident and confident he becomes. Convinced that he is right, he believes the oracles must be mistaken. He is a comic spectacle: when his foster father Polybus dies, Oedipus and Jocasta nearly dance a jig of relief. "How could I possibly be doomed to kill my father when my father has just died of natural causes?" He doesn't know that Polybus was NOT his father. Laios, whom he murdered, was.

Similarly, Petroleum Rex: "Look! Oil has been discovered by the billions of barrels in deep water Louisiana." Meanwhile, just south of there, in the Bay of Campeche, the largest field in the Western hemisphere, Cantarell, goes into catastrophic decline.

5. The reckoning or revelation--that is, gaining knowledge of his true fate and his part in it--is DEVASTATING to Oedipus. (We're almost there. 2007 should be an interesting year to observe.)

6. Consequences of the curse spiral out uncontrollably and affect ALL INNOCENT PARTIES. Oedipus's family is wiped out. Oedipus wanders around blind. The city of Thebes falls into chaos.

And there is nothing anyone can do about it.