LM writes:
>>IMHO, "The most important thing" is the continued denial by the western world that the oil age is over... sooner, rather than later. My take...and what I tell anyone who listens is: The longer we procrastinate on alternative energy sources AND lifestyles (the thirty minute commute must die an ignomious death) the longer lasting the mayhem that will result at a global scale. It's already begun.>>
Alternative theory: oil gluts and low oil prices cause turmoil and bellicose foreign policy, especially with the interests that want to control the supply and the price of oil--for profits. Overproduction and oil glut in 1999. US military given rising budgets under Clinton and then Bush, and then given control of US foreign policy and much of the world post 9-11 (the entire world came to be looked upon as the US's special zone of influence because the US was the only superpower). Bush invades and occupies Iraq. Iraq oil production is devastated. The price of oil responds nicely. Private-equity-backed speculators more than venture-backed oil producers wade into a literal sea of oil. The physicality of oil supply still says glut and overproduction, but the ideational reality of capital says 'shortage', 'tight supplies' etc simply because there has been enough easy money available to keep driving up the contractual price of oil. They have more capital seeking profits than they do oil and gas, hence the bubble.
Capital and its governments who use war as foreign policy must die an ignominious death. Leftists will simply die a long, slow, painful, isolated and argumentative death expecting capital, its patsy governments, and rigged markets to act on 'peak oil' in order to give us alternative energy sources and alternative 'lifestyles' for the benefit of the planet or the human race. If the collectivity of capital thought oil production had peaked or couldn't meet demand (which has little or nothing to do with the facticity of whether or not production has actually peaked or will meet future demand), why would it be using the current high price of oil to finance, in part, private equity and venture capital to invest in still yet more oil production? Look at how much the industry is putting into new production of oil and gas as opposed to alternative energy. Why is capital investing billions in buying up 'dead-end, peaked' production and reserves held by large companies when clearly, long term, alternative energy investments would make more sense (if they were operating under the assumption that oil production had really peaked)? Why isn't global oil acting like North Sea oil or Gulf of Mexico oil when these regionalised microcosms of global oil reached their peak?
Because capital only makes sense if you stop asking it to make some sort of romantic, humane or planet-preserving sense. It makes more sense within the analytic framework of the historical materialist perspective--without naive appeals to reason over issues of the environment or depleted resources.
F
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