Petroleum Rex

1. “They woz warned.” At the outset, oracles tell the principle players explicitly what their futures WILL BE, yet they all dare to try to avoid their respective fates. The cursed Daddy and Mommy, Laios and Jocasta, leave Oedipus on a mountaintop to die. Later, the foundling Oedipus flees his adopted father and mother when he learns what the gods have in store for him. He thinks he can outwit the gods! LOL!

Likewise, Petroleum Rex thinks he can outwit entropy, depletion, and decline, no matter what people like M. King Hubbert have told him. (Hubbert showed us the cursed fate of finite resource development


2. “Fait accompli.” Later, once he has the throne, Oedipus thinks he has successfully outrun the “curse,” but he has already killed Daddy and married Mommy. By the time he becomes aware that there’s a problem — Thebes is under a plague because of a “pollution” in their midst, that is, Oedipus himself — it’s TOO LATE.

Sounds like 1980, ten years after the peak in US oil production predicted by Hubbert. Petroleum Rex thought it was “Morning in America.” When oil prices fell from record highs to record lows, he went out and bought a fleet of SUVs, becoming more addled than ever.

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