And yes, by 1980 the North Sea was producing loads of oil -- Britain & Norway became oil exporters. Even Germany, Holland, and Denmark all had their slice of that North Sea pie, too.
Yet now, some thirty years later, Britain is once again a net oil importer. And in that time they built an economy where one of every five people work in the financial services sector. That is, one in five are managing the monetary affairs of the other four people's money, other four people's labor, and other four people's productivity. That seems quite a racket, don't you think? A sector that ostensibly produces nothing taking in about a fifth of that nation's GDP. We have the same thing going on here, with Long Term Capital Management, Goldman Sachs, each player taking their slice of the national productivity in the form of fees, interest rates, and the like.
But I digress. This graph is a few years old but illustrates how the bonanza of the North Sea (along with Alaska's North Slope) was what helped propelled Thatcher and Reagan out of the early 1980's recession:
Once again, Britain is an importer of oil and will continue to import for as long as it remains a nation. Importing is now a permanent feature of the U.S., the UK, Indonesia, Australia, Germany, and so on.
I'm a simple minded Western American blogger that likely can't digest all the nuances of our modern global economy, our global financial systems, etc -- but I think -- if we emerge from recession and oil stays at $80 a barrel and/or increases more over time, how exactly is our economy going to get going again? And what, pray tell, does "emerging" mean? Back to suburbanized sprawl fueled on cheap credit, the selling of 2.3 cars per housal unit to service the housal unit, and the thousands of new freeway miles and strip mall centers needed to keep our obese, socially impaired citizens tooling along? Is this all our economy consists of? Tire shops, radiator shops, Asian foot massage parlors, Q's sports memorabilia, U-Stor-It storage pods filled to the brim with cheap imported shit you can't live with but you can't live without, cell phone stores and bluetooth kiosks? This is it?
Obama won't have a South Slope and Brown won't have a South Sea to help spur suburbanized oil-fueled sprawlish expansion keeping our unsustainable living model going. They are wishing, really, wishing, for a "green" sector to come along and magically provide for 3,000,000 new jobs on top of the 965,432 coal, oil, automotive and natural gas jobs that would be eliminated for not being "green." Imagine an American force of 625,000 Americans out installing solar panels! Imagine 323,000 Americans building and installing wind turbines!
Can you imagine it? Yes? That's all you're going to do, imagine it, 'cause it ain't gonna happen. These Americans will be too busy selling cheap imported Chinese shit to each other to give a rat's ass about sustainable living. They will be too busy mounting and balancing low profile tires and pimpin' rims on SUVs, too busy trucking Mexican cantaloupes to Montana in February, and burying themselves in the latest Japanese/Taiwan electronic gadgets surfing porn or socially "networking" without the social part.
I might sound like I'm anti-American, anti-Our Way Of Life and all that, but in reality I am a balanced person with fine principles and a good loving family -- I'm someone who wants better but who realizes that Americans are incapable of doing better. I've resigned to accept that our string has been played out -- so I hope for a crash and burn to force us to change because we won't do so voluntarily. That's why I blog, to cheer on our crash and burn. We are crashing socially, economically, and environmentally. I only hope we continue to crash because this is the only way I see us turning ourselves around as a people, as a species. If it means we lose our extraordinary American birthright to consume as much as possible whenever we feel like it, well, so be it.
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