Peak Oil Comes of Age

Dmitry Orlov, who is IMHO the world's expert on societal collapse, has lately said that now nearly everyone (who pays any attention to this sort of thing) accepts that "Peak Oil" is real, that is, that the world's oil is running out, and we are on the downhill slope of oil usage. Here is the link to the article he wrote to that effect:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/11/peak-oil-is-history.html

Orlov, who signs his blog "Kollapsnik," was born in Russia but came to the U.S. as a youngster. He returned a number of times "on business" to the former USSR during its collapse and ultimately wrote a book, "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects," in which he maintains that the old USSR was better positioned to go through a collapse than the U.S. now is. It's worth reading. He has also, with wife, gone a huge distance toward setting himself up for the U.S. collapse, which he thinks is coming for sure, by living on a sail boat in Boston Harbor. (Details on his blog.) From his boat-home he bicycles to work in Boston (and flies occasionally to Europe and elsewhere to talk about collapse when invited) and is, just incidentally, a fine and fun stylist of excellent English expository prose. In other words: quite a fellow.

Re Peak Oil: He is predicting a bumpy and dangerous downhill slide as the oil runs out. He seems to think we are already well past the time when we might have prepared societally for the event, and in that he is now where a couple of other people I know about have been for upwards of 40 years. I am talking about James Lovelock and the late Kit Pedler, some of whose books I bumped into in the 1970s. Lovelock has a whole series of books on Gaia, Mother Earth, whom we have savaged rather badly in "industrial times." He is a kind of "master of global warming." Read him and weep, if you are of that mind.

I own only one title of Pedler's, "The Quest for Gaia: A Book of Changes," published in England in 1979, which I have lately been rereading. His focus is the need to "deindustrialize," to stop, one person at a time, speeding up the entropic death of civilization. Both gentlemen are strictly gloomsville if you want to see them that way. For some reason (I am I know confessing weirdness) I find them exhilarating. I believe them both to be exemplary "scientists of the broadview," and to be dealing in the simple truth.

The purpose of this blog is not to convince you of anything, but to put you on notice as to some good writers on vital human affairs. Now, over to you. Soon: a note on Jim Kunstler.