A Midwinter’s Nightmare

If we’re careful we can bridge this shortfall until we find a solution and keep ourselves afloat.

But are we that smart? Are we willing to give up our SUV’s, air conditioning, and winter grapefruit, right now, so that we can have the barest essentials for a few decades? Or will we bury our heads in the sand with what is left of the oil and scream “IS NOT” until the shit hits the fan so hard it splatters us with economic collapse and starvation? Normally I’m a positive thinker. But late at night, unable to sleep, the darkdream takes over …
As oil rises, self serving chimpanzee politicians, the most persuasive among us, will be quick to groom our ever fraying nerves with polished, empty rhetoric. Easy scapegoats will be offered to absorb the blame; Arab-Americans, homosexuals, atheists, Jews, even scientists perhaps; the unfortunate archetypical gamma. They will take the full fury of the pack. References will be made to the 1970s and parallels will be drawn to the chicken littles of that time to ridicule the geoscientists who inform us of the reality. Petro-geologist who try to warn us will be expertly targeted for contempt. A myriad of excuses will pour out of Washington, echoed mostly on winger Blogs and news shows as the White House bears the brunt of the criticism; but make no mistake, this disturbing vision is not the GOP’s sole doing any more than DNC or anyone else. It’s been in the mail for years. This is everyone’s fault, not just a few … But still, certain types are about the last ones you want in power when it happens. Some folks don’t like the inconveniences that reality brings. The darkdream quickens …

In the current US political climate, accurate bad news is punished and false good news rewarded. Noted economists will keep their heads planted firmly in the ground by way of books and data bases rippling with theoretical models reciting a dizzying array of differential equations and colorful graphs, which will ‘prove’ that the price ’spike’ is temporary, blithely ignoring that oil is a finite resource unimpressed with calculus using assumptions of infinite elasticity. Wall Street pundits will project impressive power point presentations onto the darkened walls of board rooms and committees using fancy technical analysis showing why the price of a barrel will ‘trend down’ any day now, to the sound of applause. The professionals who play ball will be promoted to high political advisory positions and congratulated. Those who tell us the truth will be fired, then marginalized, then ultimately exiled from credibility. Speculators will dip in and out of the futures market, adding wildly jagged price fluctuations as surely as they enrich their investor-class clients. And each significant speculative price bottom produced on the way to a thousand dollars a barrel will be presented as the end of the crises to an increasingly anxious public, who will so want to believe it they won’t care about facts. Welcome to the darkdream …

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