Peak Oil &mdash; A Wish-Fulfillment Fantasy for Secular Idiots
<p>Secularists and leftists enjoy sneering at conservative Christians who believe in the Rapture and other flavors of millenarianism. Reasonably so: it takes either a drooling idiot or somebody who has deliberately shut off most of his brain, reducing himself to an idiotically low level of critical thinking, to believe such things. The draw, of couse, is that each individual fundamentalist implicitly believes <em>he</em> will be among the saved &mdash; privileged to honk a great big I TOLD YOU SO! at all those sinners writhing in the lake of fire.</p>
<p>It is therefore more than a little amusing to notice how prone these &#8216;sophisticated&#8217; critics are to their own forms of idiotic millenarianism.</p>
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<p>Anybody remember Paul &#8220;Population Bomb&#8221; Ehrlich? This is the guy who predicted that megadeaths from global famine would be the defining feature of the 1970s.  Or Jeremy Rifkin, the guy who told us all in 1986 that the Frostban bacterium engineered to protect plants against cold snaps would mess up the Earth&#8217;s climate?  Or the brigade of self-panickers (Carl Sagan was briefly one of them) who warned us all back around 1980 that an impending Ice Age was about to destroy civilization?  Or, hey &mdash; how about the ozone hole; remember when we were all going to die of UV-B-induced skin cancer?</p>
<p>It&#8217;s easy to laugh at those particular doom-mongers now; there has been plenty of time for their predictions to fail.  But we have plenty of apocalypse merchants peddling equally silly scenarios, on equally thin evidence and bogus reasoning, today.  And the same &#8216;sophisticated&#8217; secularists who lapped up Paul Ehrlich&#8217;s nonsense are swaying to the Gospel shout of global warming and &#8220;peak oil&#8221; &mdash; just as self-hypnotized, and just as stone-stupid, as an Ozark Mountains cracker at a tent-revival meeting.</p>
<p>Rather than getting to gloat over sinners writhing in a lake of fire, the draw is getting to feel superior to capitalists and Republicans and Americans; they will all surely Get Theirs and starve in their SUVs when the Collapse Comes, while virtuous tree-hugging Birkenstock-wearers, being in a state of grace with Gaia, will retire to renewable-energy-powered communes and build scale models of Swedish socialism out of macrame supplies or something.</p>
<p>The hilarious part is how self-congratulatory the secularist millennarians are about their own superiority over the religious ones, when in fact the secondary gain from these two kinds of delusional system is <em>identical</em>.</p>
<p>I could write a book on the amount of fraud and bullshit in the  global-warming-panic industry &mdash; but I have other things to do this month. so let&#8217;s look at an even more recent manifestation of secular  millenarianism &mdash; the peak-oil collapse scenario.</p>
<p>Witness, brothers and sisters, witness.  The oil, it&#8217;s going to run out.  Peak production of the world&#8217;s oilfields has either passed or is about to pass; from here on out it&#8217;s rising oil prices forever.  Now we wave our hands and pronounce that the energy-guzzling capitalist West (and especially Amerikka) is so addicted to cheap oil that its decadent  empire will collapse, <em>collapse</em> I tell you.  Barely concealed gloating follows.</p>
<p>There are so many mutually-reinforcing idiocies here that it&#8217;s hard to know where to start. As I was thinking of writing about this, one of my commenters <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=219#comment-28439'>pointed out</a> that above $32 per barrel it becomes economical to build Fischer-Tropf plants and make your oil out of coal.  This is old tech; the Germans did it during WWI.  At slightly higher price points, MHD generators to burn garbage start to look good.</p>
<p>These are instances of a more general phenomenon: markets adapt to price shifts!  To wreck an economy with oil-price rises, they&#8217;d have to spike so fast and so far that you somehow couldn&#8217;t run the cement trucks to build the Fischer-Tropf plants.  Not gonna happen.</p>
<p>In fact, the long-term trend will be that the amount of oil invested per constant-dollar value of goods produced in the U.S. economy drops faster than the price of oil rises.  This is a safe prediction not because manufacturers have all bought into Green ideology but <em>because they want to make money</em>. This means that they have a market incentive to use their inputs (including oil) a efficiently as possible, and to substitute less expensive inputs for more expensive ones.  It&#8217;s called capitalism, and it works.</p>
<p>(And, by the way, the cheapest input of all is information. Buckminster Fuller pointed out forty years ago that as technologies mature, the products tend to get smaller and lighter and less energy-intensive and <em>smarter</em>.  Your cellphone today weighs less than it used to, and costs less oil to produces than it used to, because its design is smarter.  Information has replaced mass.  This trend will continue and accelerate.)</p>
<p>The peak-oil collapse scenario is not credible for five minutes to anybody who understands market economics.  But the sort of people who believe it are blinded by their own prejudices; fundamentally they think market economics is an invention of the Devil. They <em>need</em> to believe in the collapse, because they need to believe that the wickedness of Americans and capitalists and Republicans will be punished.</p>
