http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1888
by Patrick Deneen
Recently I’ve given a few talks at which I’ve discussed the basic rudiments of Hubbert’s Peak, including the calculation of a number of leading geologists that we have already, or are currently on the verge of reaching, the worldwide peak of oil production, similar to what occurred in the United States in 1970/71. The first and immediate response of most listeners is to ask what we will use to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3431 these decreasing oil supplies. This response shows the depth of the problem we face.
For many, the instant response to the growing evidence that the era of cheap energy is over is to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3745 upon its replacement with something else. Anything short of that is simply unacceptable, even inconceivable. A few years ago, when I began reading and writing about this great challenge we face as a civilization, I assumed that if I – and many others – were able to show the evidence and implications of peak oil, that people would be awoken from their dogmatic slumber and we would at once begin to arrange that we live together more responsibly and demand that our leaders help us toward that end. What I find instead is the absolute demand that something else be found in order to ensure that nothing has to change. So fully defined are we by our profligate way of life that nothing short of its permanent continuation can be deemed acceptable. I am asked: won’t we simply have to produce more electricity?
I answer: doubtless. But where will it come from? We will be digging and burning more coal or digging and enriching more uranium. And, doubtless we will choose to remain oblivious to the costs of each in order to maintain our wasteful lives. We will, for instance, readily ignore the tremendous costs and dislocation that results from mountaintop removal. The electricity we will generate will provide power enough for innumerable distractions that will allow us to avoid acknowledging the harm and damage we are doing. Already we are entering an new era of soporific self-deception in which we call electricity (or better still, electric cars) “clean.”
I am asked: won’t we instead have to generate more electricity using uranium?
I answer: doubtless. But we will again ignore the costs upon local cultures that the ferocious race to extract ever-more valuable uranium from anywhere it can be found exacts. And we will again – as in the case of oil – seek to extract in full a non-renewable resource, leaving behind for our children a legacy of toxic and undisposable waste and a civilization that cannot be run on anything close to the order as we ran it.
These immediate responses – the desperate wish to avoid, at all costs, the prospect of having to change our behavior – are the definite signs that we are not likely to change one iota until we have extracted every last possible form of energy that can be transformed into our active effort to control and master nature and to avoid the possibility of self-restraint. We do so thinking the alternative must be unthinkable, so awful and horrific to be unimaginable. A world built closer together, with greater stability of communities and requisite cooperation among neighbors in order to live, survive, and thrive, and absent the kinetic and kaleidoscopic activity of our age as well as the vast military empire needed to support and defend fuel supply lines – this is the prospect that we must avoid at all costs. We will accept ignorance of any atrocity we are committing in order to avoid an acceptance of limits, the forging of community and the reality of less. Of course, we only delay that day, and make it more likely that the transition to such a world will be violent, bloody and horrific. So long as we can power our IPODs just one more day…