Peak-oil salesmen
6:28pm, 15th May 2007
Peak oil is a crisis cult, and here’s how you can tell:
- Do they offer an apocalyptic vision of the future that can only be avoided by listening to their advice?
- Is the threat wildly out of proportion to the evidence, or fabricated entirely?
- Are they selling something?
- Do they have any political motivations?
For the Peak Oil movement, the answer to all of these questions is yes.
- Peak Oil is all about the coming mad dash for the last of Earth’s energy before the lights go out for good. From here on out, it’s oil wars, water wars, food shortages, mass dieoffs, and the rollback of Western civilisation as we know it. On the other hand, if we take the advice of the prophets, we can learn how to fight the starving hordes off our vegetable patches in 12 easy steps.
- There is a finite amount of oil in the world, and it’s conceivable that one day we will have burned it all. It is a tremendous logical leap to go from there to doomsday scenarios. Given a relatively free market in oil, a gradually increasing oil price will create incentives to invest in alternatives. If this happens in the next 100 years, those alternatives will probably have to be natural gas and coal, of which there are hundreds of years supply left.
- Check out the calmy named Life After The Oil Crash. The entire left hand side of the website is adverts for Peak Oil books, solar panels and bicycles. From The Wilderness invites you to make a donation, or purchase something from their store. Dry Dipstick is suffering from Adsense Acne, and every Joe Q. Peak Oil Theorist has a blog hawking his books, with scary titles like The Coming Economic Collapse and The End of Suburbia. They are whipping up fear, then selling you comfort - except the books will never completely assuage your fears while there are still more books to sell.
- Peak Oil is a reaction against capitalism, globalisation, George W Bush, and the oil industry, all of which are all highly venned within a political movement self-described as Progressive. When the oil is gone, and war has come, it’s the Bushes of the world who will win, and thus is a conspiracy theory born. The core of the conspiracy seems to be the idea that Bush is in league with the Saudis to dominate the world by cornering the market in rapidly depleting oil supplies, but that they’re too stupid to realise this will destroy the world, or are driven by biblical prophecy to do so. The solution to all of this is political, and entirely Progressive: a planned society in which we abandon globalisation and return to low-tech, protectionist, and even tribal economies.
The world may be facing an energy problem, and it’s certainly facing a clean-energy problem, but a problem does not make a crisis, and the facts do not support the hyperbole.
ah, but yes, you forget to look at the empirically- and reality-based site, The Oil Drum, that is much further beyond reproach than those other sites you mention.
Is it doomer porn? Yes. Is it doomer porn we should maybe listen to and think about? Yes.
The Oil Drum is what inspired this post. Its “empiricism” reminds me terribly of the 9/11 conspiracy nut sites, in that a proposition is advanced, and then evidence is sought. They were convinced of the reality of an inevitable crisis the moment they registered the domain name.
The answer to all four of your questions for peak oil is NO.
1. Some offer apocalyptic futures, but these usually don’t offer any solutions. They say so explicitly.
2. The biggest evidence is US Peak Oil and the resultant decline in US oil production, as well as the ensuing gas crises, in the 1970s.
3. Check out Kenneth Deffeyes ( http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/ ). The only thing he is selling is his own books. Charlottesville peak oil group is not trying to sell anything.
4. If the answer to this is YES, then how come not a single politician, not a single Presidential candidate, not a single congressman is mentioning peak oil? One exception - 81-year-old Roscoe Bartlett of MD.
That is what makes peak oil so scary. It seems to be based on valid science.
Jim,
1. Some do, some don’t. I just read a post on your blog where you say:
So you yourself predict disaster, and offer a solution.
2. US oil production peaked in the 1970s. The world didn’t end, and Americans didn’t get poorer. Whatever problems did occur in the 1970s were not an apocalypse.
3. Selling your own book does not exonerate you from the charge of making a buck out of the idea! :-)
4. Progressive politics is not on the radar for mainstream American politicians. And elsewhere, politicians do talk about Peak Oil! Read the BNP’s take on it (or better still, don’t; they’re fascists).
And yeah, Peak Oil sure does seem to be based on valid science, but it’s not.
I wonder if you would be willing to follow up this topic in light of Matt Simmon’s contribution to the issue — both the information in his book Twilight in the Desert, and his contribution to President Bush’s proposed energy policies.
Precis:
http://globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/212#10
It seems to me that the 4-part cult test is missing a pass/fail legend, which must look like this:
Peak oil is a crisis cult if, and only if, [1. is true in all cases for a defined apocalypse (boolean OR) 2. is true in all cases for a defined criterion of evidence (boolean OR) 3. is true in all cases for defined 'somethings' which can be shown to be snakeoil (boolean OR) 4. is true for all cases in which the political motivation can be shown to be aligned, or at least overlapping.]
Specifically:
If national authorities at many points along the US political spectrum, from communist to moderate to fascist, agree on the existence of the risk, then isn’t the risk less likely to pass cult test 4.?
If the issue produces numerous diversely-credentialed experts whose visions are not apocalyptic, but merely based on historical precedent(s), then doesn’t that endanger cult test 1.?
If some of the evidence of the issue is so technical as to require special training, and if other evidence is in part concealed by those whose interests demonstrably favor concealment, then, in a stipulation to cult test 2., what kind of evidence would suffice?
If selling aids, cult test 3., is a test of a claim’s falsehood, then are prescription drugs, and property and life insurance proof that those who predict risks of illnesses, hurricanes, car accidents and eventual death are selling crisis cults?
Don’t all media-inflamed risk stories attract exploitation-minded wingers as well as vested-interest poo-poo-ers? And is not the relevant truth always somewhere in the middle?
True. See the last paragraph of the original post: it’s an energy problem, not an energy crisis. Equally, it’s not a case of nothing-to-see-here-folks, but I think the most fruitful discussion is occurring without reference to the peak oil theorists, much as the best discussion on evolutionary biology is done without reference to creationists, even ones that claim to be balanced and moderate.