James Kunstler is the current darling of the Peak Oil movement:
The world does not have to run out of oil or natural gas for severe instabilities, network breakdowns, and systems failures to occur. All that is necessary is for world production capacity to reach its absolute limit - a point at which no increased production is possible and the long arc of depletion commences, with oil production then falling by a few percentages steadily every year thereafter. That’s the global oil peak: the end of absolute increased production and beginning of absolute declining production.
Link
|
TNR book reviewer Christopher Hayes worries that many people will dismiss Kunstler as a crank, and will thus throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Still, even if Kunstler is wrong about how much fossil fuel we have left to burn through, and even if his predictions are over the top, his book raises an important question: How does our political system cope with long-range existential threats? The narrow lesson of September 11 was that we were caught napping on terrorism, but the broader lesson is that we do a bad job of anticipating catastrophes in general, focusing on the banal (stained dress) over the apocalyptic (airborne attack on civilian targets). While Congress acted quickly and decisively to end the scourge of telemarketers with a national Do Not Call List, there are still Soviet nukes unsecured, global warming remains unsolved, and resources devoted to researching and preventing global pandemics like avian flu are laughably insufficient. It’s easy (and fair) to blame politicians for a lack of leadership, but if there’s a value to Kunstler’s alarmism, it might be that it forces us to face our own complicity in ignoring long-range threats. After all, how many of us would vote for a candidate whose slogan was, “The end is nigh”?
Link
Get login for tnr here |
|
Related
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.