Kunstler: The Season of the Witch

… Most curious, though, was when the interviewer, Jim Puplava, probed Dent about his views on Peak Oil. Dent said he didn’t believe in it; that when he was in college in the 1970s (remember the OPEC oil embargo of ‘73), he learned to disregard any suggestions that we are “running out of oil.” He stated this, by the way, as a simple assertion, without any further explanation, and Puplava didn’t belabor him with arguments. But it was a weird moment. Of course, it hardly need be said that Peak Oil story has never been about “running out of oil” per se, but rather about declining flows, geopolitical management of flows, and the effects of depletion on industrial economies — in particular the effect on regular, expected, cyclical “growth” of the type that financial markets utterly depend on to power the trade in investment paper.

It is exceedingly odd that this does not factor into Dent’s thinking, because what Peak Oil inescapably does is introduce the very sobering idea of discontinuity — that is, that the game has changed radically, especially where all our assumptions about continued “growth” are concerned. In that brief exchange on Peak Oil, Dent seemed to take the position that the “winter” part of any historical financial cycle always produced “new technology” that invariably saves the day, putting this seemingly very smart man in the camp of so many techno-cornucopian triumphalists all wishing for the same outcome: that some mythical “they” will “come up with” a set of rescue remedies to keep all the cars circulating on the freeways, and all the WalMarts groaning with swag.

Kunstler.com