THE CHILDREN OF ABEL:

The church of Peak Oil: Peak Oil theorist Richard Heinberg doesn’t believe that civilization has gone wrong, but that it was a mistake. He traces the rot back to the invention of agriculture (Peter Foster, 3/23/10, National Post)

One of the intriguing aspects of the doomster mindset is that the more its dark predictions fail too materialize, the more those in its grip insist that The Coming Collapse is going to be all the more terrible. Mr. Heinberg was proud to admit that his original inspiration had been the famously-wrong 1972 Club of Rome study The Limits to Growth (This is the book that projected that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985 and of zinc by 1990). Mr. Heinberg’s next guiding light was Colin Campbell’s 1998 Scientific American article on “the end of cheap oil,” a seminal text of Peaksters. Mr. Campbell suggested that the peaking of oil production also meant “the end of economics.” And of civilization as we know it.

Mr. Heinberg doesn’t so much believe that civilization has gone wrong as that civilization has been a mistake. Indeed, he attributes the start of the rot to the invention of agriculture. Things have been getting much worse since the Industrial Revolution. Mr. Heinberg sees the vast increase in populations, life spans, leisure and material goods as a “problem.” Why? First, because not everybody has “shared” in it (Did you know that a handful of “superbillionaires” control half the world’s wealth?). And second because, well, because it just can’t go on. It obviously never occurs to people like Mr. Heinberg that this take might be a property of their minds rather than a reflection of reality. It is always others who are “in denial.” They do not see how things can go on because they have no idea how things got to where they are. All they see is that resources are finite, and that we are using them at an accelerating rate, so how can we not run out?

Mr. Heinberg cited the plateauing of oil production since around 2005 as evidence of peakishness. Why, he asked, didn’t soaring prices produce soaring supply? Well perhaps because soaring prices also induced flat demand. But Mr. Heinberg just can’t grasp, or accept, that market signals should guide us. The market is getting “the wrong information.” The Invisible Hand is “like a crazed demon.” And so we must countenance, prepare for, and indeed enforce “The End of Growth.” After all, fish stocks are going, topsoil is going, water is going, rock phosphates are going. And “we’re about to lose the tiger.”

According to Mr. Heinberg, the solution “for those of us who do get this” is straightforward: government action “on a wartime scale;” plus “transition” to more local “resilience,” which would include survivalist disaster preparation and “dispersed inventories” for when the eighteen wheelers stop making deliveries to the local supermarket.

We're with Cain.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 23, 2010 8:45 PM