We'll Never Even Notice

Yes, the credit crunch of 2007-8 was an anomaly; it was "impossible to foresee." If I were blogging back in 2003 I would have said that the credit/housing bubble was upon us...but of course I would have been wrong, in that I was a full three years premature. I've been blogging about a looming energy crisis for the past two years, and, likely, I'll have also been wrong by about three years.

It's coming.

In my opinion, the supply of cheap and easily exploited oil is already behind us. While we won't "run out" of oil in my or your or our great grand children's lifetimes, I believe that the heady days of easy energy are already past and that going forward we are going to see energy that is much more expensive to extract, to deliver, and to burn.

Although you'd never believe it based on the information delivered from our heads of state. While they profess an affinity towards "green" energy, it's clear it's political suicide to do anything that would hamper the status quo regarding diesel trucking, freeway building, or automobile manufacturing. We've already decreed that diesel emission reductions are on hold until the economy recovers. We've already decreed that any climate change provisions will be on hold until the economy recovers. If the "green" isn't there, then damn the environment.

I've already assumed that we won't do the correct things going forward, that we will attempt to burn every last drop of oil in our cars and trucks, that we won't change a damn thing until we've consumed ourselves into a corner -- we will have lost all our manufacturing capability overseas; we will have less to offer the rest of the world as they themselves rise up both educationally and financially. Consequently I've prepared to live in an expensive energy future, and I will thrive in any energy constrained world. The good news is, if I'm wrong, I will still thrive.

This BP oil leak will only work to constrain that energy future even more:

Disasters such as these are the inevitable byproducts of a nation so beholden to their motorized vehicular prosthetic limbs. We demand hydrocarbons so incessantly we are willing to sacrifice our natural environments to get at more and more of it. This rig represented just a single variable in the gigantic energy equation of progress, but this time the calculation resulted in an undamped oscillation -- a blowout 5,000 feet below its waterline, and a resulting leak? A good half-order of magnitude larger than what BP will admit.


We will reset our ideas on drilling in ANWR and off the California coast, at least for the time being. We will let the Nigerians, the Angolans, the Ecuadorians, the Canadians, the Venezuelans, the Mexicans, and the Iraqis all fucker up their own environments first, out of sight and out of mind from our Elk Grovian strip malls and our subdivisions and our jobs twenty five miles away. We will refuse to extract oil 200 miles away...that is, until those wicked Arabs and their wicked oil company co-conspirators demand $200 a barrel. At that point, we're just gonna say fuck it; Elk Grovians will vote for anything, anything! that brings their costs of commuting and their costs of living the American Dream down...we'll start drilling in those sensitive areas; we'll use predator drones to bomb the next "evil" Venezuelan dictator who chooses to embargo the U.S.; we'll vote to take whatever Angola will contract for, while looking the other way as they rape their women and commit ever more human rights violations. So long as there's gasoline at the pump here in Elk Grove, meh. We'll never even notice.


As Mexican imports fade away with the decline of Cantarell, as the costs of Canadian syncrude increase to accommodate the rise in water and cleanup costs, and as our own U.S. production continues to produce less each hour that goes by, gasoline will inch up three cents, back off two, but it will continue to march upward. We'll respond by buying Priori -- the price will fall -- we'll respond by buying Denalis -- the price will rise. Some of us will buy $32,000 plug in hybrids -- the price will fall -- then others will buy new boats -- the price will rise. All the while, China and India will add another 1,200,000 motor vehicles each year. The Indian Dream; The Chinese Dream; starting to look a lot like our Dream, eh? The dream of perpetual slavery to your car(s).


I believe we are entering, not an energy scarce future, but an expensive energy future. That future is upon us.