The Oil Drum

Well, they think we're at peak production this year and next year, something like that, for global energy production, the most that we can ever can really get out; that we've hit the crest and oddly, I think everybody had this feeling - although not a one-to-one relationship -  I think that what we were seeing, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it felt like the trailer of coming attractions, it felt like a preview. Like, holy cow - we are looking into Mad Max. Like, God, that is what it's going to look like. It's going to be racial; 'Us fat White people, we got all the shit we need; fuck you, poor people who happen to be Black or Mexican'; it really felt like you were looking at this Hobbsean future; it was just like he laid out. I don't know; people have been making predictions; oddly, everybody I talked to in 2001, 2002, would have said for sure that Saudi Arabia was going to topple by now, that it was going to go down in flames to the Wahhabists. And weirdly, us going into Iraq, energy prices tripled; it tripled the price of a barrel of crude, which has poured so much money into the coffers of these regimes that they've been able to sustain themselves a little bit longer. They were going down; they were running out of money. And now, they're like so loaded. Imagine if you could triple your Gross National Product overnight. They're like `Go Bush! Go baby! Go Iraq, go Syria, go Iran! Keep it rollin! Let's see if we can quintuple it, sextuple it!'

It's astonishing how good war is for oil companies and oil traders. Anyone in the energy business (will tell you): Chaos is good for the energy business. And that's the first thing they'll tell you. They don't feel good about it; but it's true. I think we will hit a tipping point ... but I also think we're so industrious, so creative ... that there really will be a Manhattan Project-style ... I mean, we're very close to having the writing on the wall for global warming, I believe; we've passed a tipping point and shit is going to start going haywire, and I think we'll start talking in terms of carbon wedges and changing our lifestyles is going to happen very quickly. I don't know if it's going to be five years, 10 years 15 years ... It's definitely in our lifetime; our children are going to have very different lives. The carbon economy is going to shift; I don't know if it's a hydrogen economy, a sunlight economy; you're not going to be flying around on jet planes the way you are now, probably; there are going to be changes. ... I don't know; I'm not a futurist. But I did enough research into human nature, figuring out this one, that I'm absolutely certain that until it's really dire, nothing's going to change.

(The energy crisis of the '70s comes up; specifically, how we didn't seem to learn anything from that.)

It's the same fuckers, man! It's all the same Nixon guys; they got tossed out of office for a while with Carter. They came back with Reagan; they had a bad couple years under Poppy (George H. W. Bush), who wasn't really hip to these guys, and then Clinton ... and they're all back! Just look at them! They're all like a hundred and ten years old, they cut their teeth under the first Nixon administration ... they hang upside down like vampire bats when they're out of power and they wait around. It's the same guys: `Hey, don't conserve energy! There's no problem! Party on!'