Freedom and the price of oil

…Our current energy crisis is less immediately dramatic but more ominous in long-term outlook. The price of oil has fluctuated wildly in the past year, tending to obscure the arguments about whether we have in fact reached, or come close to, the moment of peak oil predicted by geoscientist M King Hubbert. But even if oil, by some miraculous dispensation, could be extracted indefinitely from the earth


Of course there are those who maintain that nuclear energy is clean and safe, and that carbon capture and storage will solve everything, but the former argument remains contentious and the latter technology in an embryonic stage.

Writing at the time of the first energy crisis in the 1970s, the maverick Catholic priest, historian and ecologist Ivan Illich exploded the whole idea of energy crisis. Both the problem and the solution, according to Illich, were to be located not in the earth