The Oil Drum

108 comments on JHK: "The ethanol craze means that we're going to burn up the Midwest's last six inches of topsoil in our gas-tanks."

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WeatherGlass on February 20, 2007 - 1:50pm

I imagine those outrageous corn subsidies will continue, obscuring the unfavorable energetics from the All Powerful, Beneficient Market. So we seem to be observing boondoggle, and progressing economic dysfunction at the gate to the backside of Hubbert's peak.

I find it astonishing that the Powers That Be don't institute conservation measures. Even the most rudimentary calculation of enlightened self-interest should show that conservation has the most immediate, largest, and most enduring benefits for the US capitalist economy, especially for the ruling elites. Instead, we have defunding of our vestigial passenger rail service, ruinous wars, and re-enforced business as usual.

I just don't get it. Anybody got a spare planet out there?

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davet on February 20, 2007 - 3:03pm

Long term vs short term. Short term requires year on year growth, or the natives get restless. Long term ultimately requires recognizing physical realities. It is easier to apply a steep discount rate and say that technology and the Invisible Hand will save us than it is to accept the possibility that some of those limits are here now and that technology and the Invisible Hand may bite us in the hind end instead. If you're a vested interested, you don't want to hear about it; if you're a voter (whose productivity is going up but whose wages are not, and who may have done the irrational exuberance thing in the days of low interest rates) you don't want to hear about it; if you're a politician, you tell the voters what they want to hear. Reconciling the long and short terms will require pain and wrenching effort on the part of the people -- how would you go about doing it?

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WeatherGlass on February 20, 2007 - 3:36pm

There is going to be an economic crunch (to put it mildly) if we attempt to maintain business as usual much longer. There will also doubtless be economic and social pain if we attempt to mitigate peak oil before the fact.

But there is no getting around major economic dislocation in the near-to-intermediate future.

The issue is: do we attempt to manage the transition proactively, or do we just party on the deck of the Titanic while the captain orders steady-as-she-goes, full-speed-ahead?

Capitalism thrives on change, churning and new frontiers of all sorts anyway, so a big redirection to conservation shouldn't be threatening to the current elites. A conservation program would provide ample new business oportunities and growth while energy is still relatively cheap. The history of the US War Production Board in WWII shows us that even stringent measures such as rationing, do not send the economy, or public opinion, into a nose dive. (Wikipedia has a good entry on the War Production Board).

It seems perfectly reasonable to massage public opinion with a marketing campaign; conservation should be a much easier sell than the war in Irag, Afghanistan (and Iran?). The public's opinion has been successfully manipulated for decades to be hostile to its own self interest. With a propoganda machine that powerful, it should be easy to mobilize public support for measures to conserve resources of all sorts, and relocalize the economy.

An augmented social safety net will be established so the public won't be staring into an abyss; that's why the Great Depression left us with the New Deal, instead of a Socialist revolution. And, for better or worse, even the current elites get to maintain their power and priviledge, at least for longer than with present trends.