Peak Oil Boy soils his trousers
Torture Girl's husband, Peak Oil Boy, here. I have been incessantly reading books about the upcoming nontemporary energy crisis (Roberts's End of Oil, Kunstler's The Long Emergency, Goodstein's Out of Gas, Heinberg's The Party's Over, et al.) We are so fucked. (By "we," I mean us humans.)
Whether the energy crunch comes in five or twenty years, we are in for a very nasty shock. Worst case: Massive die-out of most life on Earth (due to humans desperately trying to make up for lost oil by burning tons of coal, and damaging the Earth's atmosphere irreparably.) Best case: Massive deindustrialization and depopulation.
Though there are plenty of ancillary effects that I would welcome from a somewhat lower level of industrialization, I don't think any non-religious fanatics would celebrate famines, wars, and plagues on a scale heretofore unseen.
The question is: can we anticipate the end of oil better and make some sort of plans, so that the shocks are somewhat less traumatic? Unfortunately, I don't think we humans are particularly well equipped to do so.
posted by max @ 8/11/2005 08:00:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Ah, Max, you ought to have listened to David Owen, when he wrote, in The New Yorker last fall, that he was saving the books that you're reading until he'd been diagnosed with a fatal disease.
In the same piece, however, he said a few things that got me thinking. I'll make a point of writing up one of my short-term ideas soonest.
Hah. On your recommendation, I did read that article; however, I didn't follow Mr. Owen's example.
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