Oil prices and responding to the strange lack of response

$100-a-barrel crude oil is no longer rhetoric but reality. Almost nothing is changing in the life of the consumer or in government policy, so it’s time to assess what the heck is going on. “What is going to happen?” is one worthy question. But it is time we take a break from manufactured distractions to part the curtain of delusion, and ask the more empowering question: What shall we make happen?

Take a moment to ignore the ongoing noise from corrupt commentators tied to our terminal economic system. Do it right and rebuff the seductive feel-goodism from greenies making a living from “sustainability.” The peak oil movement itself has peaked, and it’s worth examining why. The players, especially the mainstream reporters and editors, are compromised by who’s paying the bills: their corporate sponsors and advertisers. Mother Earth shows up as an afterthought in the design of programs and agendas, including among some peak oilists who may anticipate some new energy future as they discount climate change.

But in the main, peak oil and petrocollapse are having a tough time competing for major attention because fears, led by our climate’s scary unraveling, mount with no end in sight. Ironically, the cause of the problem and our real options are hidden and exacerbated by (A) the tendency to compartmentalize ecology and (B) be seduced by the economic advantages of selling so-called “green” solutions to the symptoms. With all this in mind, I offer nine bulleted realizations below that may shock. They are based on my thirty-five year career watching the oil industry and my response up to this moment.

Some commentators still deny peak oil as well as climate change, and get away with being anti-Mother Earth today. Of these, Trilby Lundberg, my former colleague and shipmate, is perhaps the best known in the U.S.. She said in Lundberg Survey Inc.’s new study titled “Speculators” that peak oil is not a factor in high oil prices, but rather they are high simply from consumer demand [FXSteet.com, Nov. 17]. She is half right. As a good oil woman she’s also at least half right about biofuels being no answer for petroleum substitution, although they sure would require a lot of lucrative, subsidized petroleum for the agriculture, tires and asphalt involved. Where I wish she weren’t wrong in the least is in her climate-change denialism, unchallenged in her CNN and Associated Press interviews. Earth to Trilby and Business reporters: “Greenhouse emissions are rising faster than the worst-case IPCC scenarios.” [The Climate Institute, Australia, Nov. 15]

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