Blinkers

When was the last time you, my fellow Elk Grovian, vacationed in Pensacola? When was the last time you ate gulf shrimp?

Probably never.

Your shrimp is mostly factory farmed in Vietnam these days. Virtually none of our Elk Grovian shrimp comes from the Gulf of Mexico. And Pensacola? Way too far for us to visit on any sustained basis. The beaches of Mexico or Southern California are much more accessible.

That said, it makes little sense for any of us to concern ourselves with this small 1,000 barrel per day leak in the GoM. So far it only represents a few hours' worth of total U.S. oil consumption, and in the end only represents less than one one hundredth of one percent loss. That's a fair loss rate, yes? I mean, when your housal unit was built the developer easily sustained a 4-5% loss on materials (lumber cut-offs, unusable plywood scraps, dried out sheet rock mud, etc.) so this oil leak is wholly within normal limits.

That is, you can go on consuming gasoline to drive everywhere for everything and you should have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about the economic loss sustained by others due to this leak. You don't rely on them and they don't rely on you.

Fuck 'em.

This should be the mantra of our little city. It's what we say every day, either through our actions or inaction, to all other regions and communities from which we extract either human or natural capital. This city is wholly, wholly, dependent on external sources of energy, external sources of labor, external sources of capital; we depend on them while the same time we care not a whit about what goes on there.

We live in gated communities, we're unable to walk anywhere for anything (except to walk the dog), we don't have any jobs here worth a damn, we don't grow our own food here, we don't have a viable local business environment. And we depend mostly on external sources of energy. I dare say we are going to find out how badly we developed our living arrangement here as cheap energy becomes depleted, as energy becomes more expensive, as we wonder why we've allowed ourselves to build a city so dependent.

Elk Grove will not be able to survive a higher cost energy future in my opinion. I only wonder if I'm wrong about energy being more expensive in the future, which I very well might be, but I'm not holding my breath. Nuclear was supposed to be too cheap to meter. Batterized cars are supposed to wean us off imported oil. We are supposed to create 9,345,000 new "green" jobs building a new energy efficient future while supposing we will still be able to accessorize our ever-larger housal units with ever-larger consumption devices like digital camera chargers, a computer in each room, an always on router, etc. Wind energy is supposed to allow us to continue to drive 90 miles in each direction daily across the Altamont Pass to our Bay Area jobs.

And deepwater drilling was supposed to help stem the falling tide of domestic energy production...but now that future has been called into question. Tell me. What would the standard Elk Grovian vote for? If the choice is to live with oil shortages or risk a disaster along the coasts of the gulf states or Southern California, which do you think she will vote for, huh?

My guess is that if/when energy goes up she'll just say fuck it, and put her blinkers on.