303 comments on XTL: Promise and Peril
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303 comments on XTL: Promise and Peril
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Are the Saudis and other profligately rich Middle East producers going to start giving away some of their oil for free to very poor countries who desperately need it? Are the Russians going to "play nice" and stop their energy-related bullying of the Europeans? Is the United States going to desist from hypocritically bullying the Russians for bullying the Europeans? Are the US and Venezuela going to desist from calling each other the "New Hitlers?" Are China and Japan going to start "playing nice" in the East China Sea anytime soon? Are all of these countries, and others besides, going to desist from their self-serving wrangling about where to build new pipeline routes across Eurasia? Are the rebels in Nigeria going to desist from their terrorism, and is the government of Nigeria going to "play nice" and give in to their legitimate demands? And so on and so forth....
Where is anyone "holding the door" for anyone else here - other than as relatively minor matters in the grand scheme of things? [And those who do "hold the door" for others, like Venezuela, are denounced for doing so on top of it all!!]
I think we've ended up in a different place than we started. Altruism and cooperation exist in societies. In times of national emergency we have had national energy programs (up to including rationing) to deal with it.
If we are sticking to the core, and expectation of human response to peak oil, I'd say that is primarily a national "let's pull together" issue. I expect a mix of competition and cooperation on the international scene, as we have seen throughout the last century. Sometimes that competition is quite unpleasant, as history shows.
I don't expect nations to lie down like lions and lambs, but neither to I expect nations to fall apart uniformly around the world (there is always the unfortunate, isolated, case: Northern Ireland, Lebanon, ...).
Humans, and the societies that emerge when you have a bunch of humans in a group, are quite different beasts. Humans can be, and are, altruistic towards each other but it's not clear that the same is true of societies, nations, corporations etc.
See Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society
"It may be possible, thought it is never easy, to establish just relations between individuals within a group purely by moral and rational suasion and accomodation. In inter-group relations this is practically an impossibility. The relations between groups must therefore be predominantely political rather than ethical, that is, they will be determined by the proportion of power which each groups posesses at least as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of comparative needs and claims of each group."