Kunstler

August 22, 2005
Delusional thinking about oil was everywhere in the media last week -- as thick as advertising. Early in the week, Yahoo Finance ran a story with a headline (I paraphrase): "DOW Up Fifty Points as Oil Prices Plunge." The plunge they referred to was oil going from $63.90 a barrel to $63.30. Some plunge. This was after five days of oil ratcheting up out of the high $50s. (It ended the week around $65.)

NPR's Marketplace show and a separate wire story piece on the web offered similar headlines (or lead-ins) which said (again I paraphrase) "US Economy No Longer Affected By Oil Prices." Of course, this is exactly the kind of magical thinking you'd expect to see in a public on extended leave from reality, despite the ubiquity of "reality television." The accepted idea is that since America outsourced most of its heavy industry to China and elsewhere, we now have an economy that runs just fine on Tic-tacs and Diet Pepsi, and oil is not in the picture anymore.

Wrong. America consumes one-quarter of the world's daily production of 84 million barrels of oil. More than half of our share is burned in cars and trucks. In fact, our economy now amounts to little more than running 200 million motor vehicles around the suburban metroplexes in the service of ever more slapped-together McHousing developments, big box stores, and fried chicken huts. That's our economy. That's all we do anymore.

The New York Times chimed in with a cover piece in its Sunday Magazine titled The Beginning of the End of Oil? by veteran journalist Peter Maas. It presented a story that has been around the Internet for more than a year, based on investment banker Matthew Simmons' frequent public speeches about the apparent weakness in the Saudi Arabian oil industry (which Simmons published in book form last month as Twilight in the Desert). Apparently the Times editors have been mulling over the oil story for months and months, wondering if there is anything to it, and perhaps the movement of oil prices into the $60-plus range finally prompted them to run with it.

Maas's article is full of howling omissions and delusions. For one thing, Maas omits any serious reflection of the consequences of a global energy crisis, any specters of geopolitical blowback, or potential problems for America's non-negotiable easy-motoring way of life. That omission grows out of the delusional assumption that some magical market mechanism will conjure up a menu of just-in-time replacements for the vanishing oil. These are referred to as "alternative technologies," a term that points to a more fundamental delusion now rampant among the public, namely the mistaken belief that technology and energy are the same thing, that they are interchangeable, that you can substitute one for the other. Out of oil? Get new technology.

Note to public: technology and energy are not the same things, and continuing to think that they are may place our civilization in jeopardy.
The bottom line of the Times Sunday Magazine article is that they are still not convinced that global peak oil is for real, or that we necessarily ought to be worried about it, with all that "alternative technology" banging around out there in the innovational ethers of the magical market. They bring a magisterial cluelessness to the issue -- while the back pages of the Magazine are devoted to hawking the glitziest high-end products of the suburban housing bubble.

Finally there was the Sunday Times' editorial, "Foolishness on Fuel," which was really about the editors own foolishness. It essayed to assert that America's oil problem was entirely a matter of vehicle fuel efficiency -- with the presumption that our problems would go away if only congress had the spine to mandate higher gas mileage figures from the car industry. The editorial completely failed to recognize that there was any problem with extreme automobile dependency itself, that maybe we should be making other arrangements -- say, walkable communities, or railroad service on par with what they have in Latvia, or local economies liberated from the despotism of WalMart.

This week's performance by the media on oil issues shows how America will dissemble its way into a dark era.

from www.kunstler.com