on your own
I don't even remember what I was doing Sunday, but somehow I missed the NYT Mag's piece on peak oil, based largely on Matt Simmons' thesis the Saudis gots lots less than what they're letting on. John Tierney, who is like David Brooks' goofy father to Brooks' goofy son, wrote this rebuttal to Simmons.
Tierney misses the whole point, however - his reading of history is exceptionally selective and he ignores the basic facts on the ground: oil makes it all possible. Oil dependency is implicit in every stage of modern resource development, extraction to finished product to delivery of said, and in some cases, disposal.
Tierney also misses the fact that domestic peak production went southways and never came backways in the late 1960s and early 1970s - 1980 should've been viewed as a crisis date, because by that time nearly all of our petrol consumption relied on imports.
This morning I got a cup of coffee, the beans by which it was made more than likely arrived on a plane or a truck. I will leave here shortly to take a bus to work. This week I will pick up a fistful of comics that arrived by a truck from some distant transfer point. This weekend I will shop for groceries that arrived by same, in refrigerated trucks, a lot of it in packaging made with the use of petroleum by-products. The fact of the matter is that oil is the foundation for American society and dominance of the global scene. Replacements will surely come, and no, we're not going to end up eating people, but we're unprepared, socially, for the terrible shocks to the economy that'll follow a drop-off in our chunk of the world's daily 84 million barrels. "Our way of life" - and really, I can only imagine what a kingfish NYT writer's way of life is like - will suffer and undergo changes, so many changes on so many levels.
And I just can't, I can't, trust anybody who poses for their staff picture like that.
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