Monday March 07, 2005

The Long Road Down : Decline and the Deindustrial Future

energybulletin.net -> oilcrisis.com

For more than three decades now, the world has been on notice that the long afternoon of industrial society is drawing to a close. The Club of Rome's epochal report The Limits to Growth (1973), the first of many persuasive studies, warned that unrestricted economic growth would collide with hard planetary limits sometime in the early twenty-first century, unless expensive and politically unpopular steps were taken soon. Of course those steps weren't taken at all. A failure of vision and political will on the part of leaders and constituencies alike threw away the decades that could have made a difference. Today we live in the shadow of that failure ...

Yet an odd blindness affects attempts to make sense of our predicament. People on all sides of the debate talk as though the future has only two possible shapes: progress or apocalypse, either business as usual for the foreseeable future or a catastrophic slide into savagery and mass death. Whether the topic is global warming, renewable energy, fossil fuel depletion, or anything else, the same claims repeat like a broken record. One side insists that technology will inevitably solve our problems and yield a better life for all, while the other side brandishes worst case scenarios and talks of millions of corpses. It should be obvious that these aren't the only possibilities ...

- In the ongoing debate on the consequences of Peak Oil, we have seen all the extremes of views by now. On one side, the economic cornucopians and the technocracy / singularity advocates, and on the other side, the folks who tell us we'll become a Mad Max society. This article makes a good point, the reality may well be something in between - just muddling along. Actually, you're now living it. History in the making and all that.

(2005-03-07 10:13:04 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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