true faith
This week's Nation mag features an excellent cover story by Sasha Abramasky on the economic and social ripples of Katrina - specifically, just how hard the latest, nasty spike in gas prices is hitting our rural (and more often than not, red) communities (here's a hint - it's not all that good! Bush-Cheney, bitches!). The piece is chockablock with implications for both the near and distant future, not only on the apocalypse du jour peak oil (or is that Peak Oil?), but for the Katrinas and other unnamed enviro problems that will doubtlessly crop up over the next century as the planet gets warmer, shedding that Kurt Cobain-old-man-sweater for short shorts.
My Wednesday night class on systems theory is open to undergrads, one of whom is running a campus peak oil discussion group, bless his heart (and thanks a whole lot, Kunstler). Invariably, we find ourselves on the topic of peak oil, and how the end's a-comin' and of course systems theory classes won't get you all that much with the guys that run Bartertown.
As much fun as it is to dream the end of the world (and poor Vestal Vespa can attest to my skulking and ranting inre: The Shape of Things To Come after latching onto Kunstler's book), the "converging catastrophes" of the 21st century, to borrow Kunstler's phrase, while hard, won't be all that exciting - ask the woman in Abramsky's story whether or not she feels like Adrienne Barbeau when she borrows gas money from her mother.
We're not an agrarian society. Peak oil won't arrive on Four Horses, but in the mailbox on a pink slip; and you can extrapolate that out to climate change as well. While most people don't or won't understand why the level of deep ocean salinity or drought in the third world may affect them, they'll get hep when they see how much more they'll be taxed for repairs to local infrastructure and emergency spending and no fucking money for Aqua Teen DVDs for fucking Christmas.
More over the next couple of days on what this might mean for mid-terms 2006 and the biggie in 2008.
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