The Oil Drum

Boy, I still regret actually believing in all that stuff, since it has made my life so miserable compared to so many other people who I went to school with, who have houses/mortgages, cars/payments, and so much nice shiny new stuff/nice credit card balances.

The only problem, it wasn't belief, it was the truth.

I will agree on one thing - the late 70s was not a very hopeful time. Luckily, the Alaskan oil pipeline kicked in, Reagan got elected, and since then, everything is just peachy. More people own more stuff with more debt than ever before in American history, and I still can't see how anyone can find fault with that proof that the American Dream didn't become turn into the American Nightmare that people in the late 70s foresaw - you know, a future where corporations would plunder everything they could unless stopped by the will of the people, a future where environmental degradation becomes so commonplace that no one even cares, a world where a government for the people, by the people is one with no respect for any law which would restrain those with power from simply engaging in whatever military or punitive action they see fit, from invading a country to torturing prisoners.

Sometimes, I think not joining the Young Republicans was my biggest career mistake, ca. 1980.

And think about this - instead of living in the country which is the envy of the entire world in its own eyes, I live in Germany, with its dreadful old tired European disadvantages, like free health care for my children, 6 weeks vacation, and a functioning public transportation system. Hell, Germany still hasn't even become post-industrial, to show how far it lags behind America.

All jesting (not really jesting, but not mockery either) aside, we all make choices, and the future is unknown. If you had gone into the oil industry, you would have done great for a while, and then it would have collapsed, and then today, you would be looking at a great future again.

I think the one thing that is true about much of this debate is that human beings still really have a very short term scale when looking at time or complex systems. I make no predictions about the next 10 or 20 years, in the sense of saying what life will be like for my children (colder or warmer? wetter or drier? plant in April, plant in June?). On the other hand, America does seem to look a lot like the society which some people in the late 1970s tried to oppose - filled with crassly selfish materialistic consumers, with no concern about future consequences of their current actions, a place riven by huge disparities in wealth/power, and one seemingly incapable (note the 'seemingly') of actually changing itself. For the more paranoid vision, a society now more capable of making sure it will not be changed by those outside of the current power structure, since it seems as if effectively all that late 70s legislation intended to stop the government from misusing its vast power is either swept away in various PATRIOT measures or ignored with impunity.

Oh, and since so many seem to feel that a classification is necessary - I am just a believer that oil/coal/natural gas are finite resources, and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. From there, the science and engineering is very hard, but as we are all participating in this first truly global scale real time experiment in climate alteration, the results should be clear enough in the next few centuries - and we won't be the ones paying any bills which come due anyways. Well, that is the consensus from ca. 2000, right? Strange how some of the trends don't seem to be following that comforting majority belief - maybe the idea that that awful future will happen after we are all dead will seem as delusional as the late 70s belief that America was heading for a vast fall if it didn't learn how to live within its means?