Lou’s not here right now, which is just as well. I have something I really need to get off my chest.

What is it with people who are so narrowly focused on The One Big Issue That Really Matters that they can’t see the interconnected nature of our world? You know the people I’m talking about–Lou’s mentioned this a few times in the past–the ones who think that the only problem facing all of humanity is global warming. Or peak oil. Or the sustainability of producing that weird orange dust on Nacho Doritos. Or whatever the hell it is that floats their boat.

Sorry, kiddies, the universe, the world, and economies don’t play by your simplistic rules. The sooner you extricate your head from whatever anatomically questionable location it occupies and take to heart Albert Einstein’s observation that we should make things as simple as possible but not simpler, the better off you and everyone your actions affects will be.[1]

Why am I flying off on this particular tangent? Check out Peak Oil Now? If so, Oil Prices Not Likely to Decline–Ever, which starts off well enough:

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about “peak oil” - defined as the point where the maximum amount of oil that can be recovered is being pumped. After that, oil becomes increasingly scarce and expensive.

If sticker shock at the gas pumps hasn’t convinced you, talk to Dr. Darrel Schmitz, head of the Department of Geosciences, Mississippi State University.

“World oil reserves have probably peaked yesterday, today or tomorrow - literally right about now,” Schmitz said. “Production worldwide will start declining relatively soon. We are right at that point.”

As an oil industry expert told Schmitz a few years ago, unless some other super giant oil fields are discovered, most everything else currently in production or planned isn’t enough and can’t be put online soon enough to prevent increasingly world demand from eclipsing supplies.

“Rest assured that for nearly 100 years people have been looking for super large oil finds, so it is not too likely there will be more of those,” Schmitz said. “We have had booms and busts in the oil industry for almost a century, with each one getting a little bigger. The last bust was in 1980.”

…

How did we get in this mess? Schmitz lays blame at the feet of the federal government because it hasn’t had any true energy policy in place for more than 20 years. What is happening was inevitable, and the U.S. should have had been ready by focusing on conservation and alternative energy technology development.

“As long as crude oil was inexpensive, it was hard to beat,” Schmitz said. “It is like water generated electricity. Put up a dam and let water turn turbines. When other sources of energy are not readily available, the price of oil goes up. Lots of alternative fuels are feasible financially now only because of the current high cost of oil. But technology has not been put in place to take advantage of that situation and rapidly move forward with alternative methods. Almost anything we can do in this country for large-scale energy production will take five to ten years to start delivery on a large scale.”

But in short order, things take a turn for the weird:

He considers it positive that the country has started conserving like it did in late ’70s and early ’80s. That will have an impact. But that alone this time will not have the success it had before.

“Just because we conserve won’t cause the price of oil to magically change because there is increasing world demand,” Schmitz said. “Conserving could help stabilize what is going on, but it is not going to cause a decrease in the cost of oil.”

…

The federal government needs to do something, but that doesn’t necessarily mean taxing high profits from oil companies. Big oil companies are investing profits in more oil exploration and in developing alternative energy.

…

There are other fuel alternatives including coal. The U.S. has sometimes been called “the Saudi Arabia” of coal because it has such large coal reserves. But many people disdain coal because of pollution that includes greenhouse gases.

Schmitz said “clean coal” technologies are being developed such as coal gasification projects. But not enough effort has been placed into developing coal technologies.

“Clean coal technology is tremendously better, but we aren’t there yet,” he said. “We aren’t ready. It is going to take minimum of fivers [sic] 10 years for clean coal technologies to start helping the situation. It is now economically feasible because of oil prices when it wasn’t five years ago. Economics plays a big part. But we needed more proactiveness to it to be ready for what was coming. I blame politicians for sticking their heads in the sand for the past 25 years.”

Another alternative fuel source that some people oppose because of safety concerns and others because of the tremendous cost is nuclear energy. Schmitz said it could be one of the cheapest forms of power out there, but it will take five years to even start construction because of red tape.

Oh, brother. The only reason for conservation, it seems, is to try to reduce the price of oil. At least none other are mentioned by the author, and we have no evidence that Schmitz raised the possibility of other benefits. Lower US trade deficits, fewer CO2 emissions, less money sent to People Who Don’t Like Us, and less need to spend countless billions of dollars and who knows how many lives protecting access to “our” oil in other countries all leap to mind.

We’re also told that the oil companies are spending lots of money on exploration, but with no mention of all the billions at least one of them–ExxonMobil–has spent in dividends and buying back their own stock. But that’s just a nit compared to the rest of the slow-motion train wreck I quoted above.

Clean freakin’ coal??? Seriously–they’re taking the opinion of of a geoscientist (presumably a geologist) about the economics of clean coal? With no mention whatsoever about the Brobdingnagian task of dealing with the 1,500 dirty coal plants already operating in just the US? And no mention of global warming or climate change or CO2 emissions? Why not just call up Lou, who’s an economist, and ask him about the geology of specific oil fields or what a given water cut from Ghawar means for future production, or any other specific issue that he has absolutely no bloody clue about? That would make as much sense as asking a geoscientist about economics.

The fun doesn’t stop there, of course. We then get the opinion from Schmitz, which is at least challenged by the author in passing, that nuclear “could be one of the cheapest forms of power out there”. Has this person seen any of the flood of articles in the last 6 to 12 months about the skyrocketing cost of building nuclear power plants? No, that wouldn’t be convenient; in messaging speak it wouldn’t “fit the narrative.”

But let me return to the global warming thing, since that’s what really frosted my cookies when I read this.

Who on this planet thinks that we can focus on peak oil or global warming or water supply issues or food production issues or whatever, to the exclusion of everything else? Who thinks that the US can “merely” address peak oil by turning vast amounts of coal into liquid fuels, for example? Who thinks that we can “simply” shut down those 1,500 coal plants in the US, and the economy will magically trundle along? Who thinks that the US can turn about 25% of its entire corn crop into ethanol to produce about 7% of our motor fuel without triggering massive repercussions in the world food markets?

When are people going to climb out of their special-interest ditch and realize that “everything is a function of everything else”, and that we can’t afford to squander time or money or, most of all, human impacts by playing whack-a-mole with these very serious, planet-scale problems?

Is anyone out there paying attention to the big picture and thinking in terms of whole-system solutions and not “whatever benefits me, the hell with everyone else” patches?

Mad as hell and not willing to take it any more,
loudGizmo

[1] And just to be clear: The worst offenders in this willful acceptance of a too narrow mindset are the global warming fanatics who think that peak oil is a good thing because it will force us to burn less fossil fuel. The peak oil wackos, the Apocalypticons, are a really close second, though.