Planning, Policy, Strategy, and Energy – Letters

…”High gasoline taxes, Swedish central planning, Japanese social engineering; you people aren’t libertarians. You are worshippers of big government.”

Oh, come on, Jim. Give us a break. I write an article about how government at every level, and people everywhere, should begin to plan for national survival in the face of Peak Oil, and now we at Agora Financial are somehow “worshippers of big government”? To the extent it matters, I like my government limited, efficient, and, most importantly, honest. That’s another topic entirely.

As for the political labels, don’t get me started on so-called political “libertarians,” who almost never win federal or state elections and are also known as “loser-tarians” in modern American political culture. If anything, I am a “Peak Oil-tarian.” That is more my default political position than anything else, because the Republicans have just plain lost the bubble of governance and the Democrats are all but clueless.

While I am on the subject, though (bear with me), I should say that I still vote in every election. I am what is called a “super voter” in the political world. I do my bit for democracy, sometimes with my fingers firmly holding my nose shut as I pull the lever. But I still participate.

At root, my politics are that I look at the world through the lens of petroleum resource depletion, and the presently occurring irreversible decline in the world’s production of conventional crude oil. Do the politicians, as the saying goes, “get it”? Author James Kunstler (of The Long Emergency fame, among other fine books) and I had a long discussion about this quandary of politics a couple of weeks ago, after he gave a talk here in Pittsburgh.

Whiskey & Gunpowder