We Were Wrong on Peak Oil. There’s Enough to Fry Us All | Common Dreams.
George Monbiot weighs in on Tar Sands, Fracking, Shale gas, and “the political transformation of (the US’s) northern neighbour”…
We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all A boom in oil production has made a mockery of our predictions. Good news for capitalists – but a disaster for humanity..
We have confused threats to the living planet with threats to industrial civilization. They are not, in the first instance, the same thing. Industry and consumer capitalism, powered by abundant oil supplies, are more resilient than many of the natural systems they threaten. The great profusion of life in the past – fossilized in the form of flammable carbon – now jeopardizes the great profusion of life in the present. There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world’s most powerful nation is again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.
Humanity seems to be like the girl in Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth: she knows that if she eats the exquisite feast laid out in front of her, she too will be consumed, but she cannot help herself. I don’t like raising problems when I cannot see a solution. But right now I’m not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.
