Monday, December 21, 2009

Stories, Peak Oil, and Climate Change

This morning I spent some time reading posts over at the Archdruid Report.

This paragraph from this article jumped out at me:

"Still, I find myself wondering if Hagbard’s Law plays a much bigger role here than any deliberate plan. The global warming story, if you boil it down to its bones, is the kind of story our culture loves to tell – a narrative about human power. Look at us, it says, we’re so mighty we can destroy the world! The peak oil story, by contrast, is the kind of story we don’t like – a story about natural limits that apply, yes, even to us. From the standpoint of peak oil, our self-anointed status as evolution’s fair-haired child starts looking like the delusion it arguably is, and it becomes hard to avoid the thought that we may have to settle for the rather less flattering role of just another species that overshot the carrying capacity of its environment and experienced the usual consequences."


I've always wondered why the peak oil issue gets very little press.

1 comment:

Anim Cara said...

Yes, likely that's why one is heard and the other is ignored and anything about something that grows implying it will need a growth industry to takle it will be a bigger story to economists and capitalists than about something that depletes and about which there isn't much that can be done really to keep on with business as usual. Very unpopular idea.