by MrBill » Wed 19 Jul 2006, 03:42:03
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', 'O')ne of the major ongoing debates on the Peak Oil site is between those who insist that technology will save us and those who say it can't, and won't.
Nasdaq has gone nowhere since 1998 (although we had that ridiculous bubble, of course---a major transfer of wealth from the many to the few). Might this serve as a model to suggest that the tech business model can't really hack it and is thus unlikely to rescue us from the consequences of Peak Oil?
It is not realistic to compare returns on the NASDAQ or the dot.com boom & bust to the technology that it spawned. There is no arguing that many useful technologies were harnessed through private & public equity even though some of those returns on investment were negative for those investors.
If you bought Microsoft, Nortel, Intel or any of the others in right before March 2000 you would have lost money. That does not mean that these companies were no bringing important technologies to market or that they were failures.
New technologies are a not a solution to peak oil. Peak oil is a geological fact. No matter how slowly you extract fossil fuels from the earth they remain a finite resource. As to whether some alternatives will be viable afterwards, of course they will be! They just may not be as good as the fossil fuels in terms of energy efficiency, so they may be relatively more expensive and necessitate changes in how the economy works.
To suggest that new technologies can not be part of the solution to dealing with post-peak oil is doomerish to the extreme. To assume that new technologies will seamlessly transition us to a brave new world without changing the underlying economy is also a fantasy. The status quo is so unsustainable in so many ways that as many have pointed out, peak oil is only one of our current problems that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later.
Will all energy alternatives be profitable for their backers and investors? As the dot.com boom & bust showed us there need not be any correlation between profit and utility.
The organized state is a wonderful invention whereby everyone can live at someone else's expense.