We need to mature into a post-growth adulthood, in which we can find comfort and grace in a long slow recession—otherwise we will be the only species to move from adolescence to senescence with no maturity in between.

Trust Dale Pendell to forge a metaphor that’s both obvious and unexpected… revelatory common sense. Could the maturity of the species, the only alternative to live-fast-die-young, be anything different from the maturity of the individual? A long slow recession…

Via the Peak Energy blog, I just stumbled upon an absolute gem: Rob Newman’s History of Oil. Newman zips through oil-related global geopolitics, from the first Mesopotamian oil strike to Peak Oil and beyond, in a vaudeville style that’s hugely engaging. This TV adaptation has some brilliantly done additions, too (watch out for the graph plotting Middle Eastern politics against children’s TV from the 1970s).

It’s probably because I arrived at it via a serious energy blog that I saw it as being as much about learning history as having a good laugh. That said, it’s occasionally side-splitting—especially the inspired vision of Tony Blair as Goebbels. The overall effect, though, reminds me of Michael Moore’s genuine bewilderment at the fact that he’d ended up doing what he saw as the job of journalists: informing people about the important facts of the world situation. Newman’s show is worth at least ten times its duration in TV “news”.

Watch it now.

Here I’ll just note an interesting quote she takes from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, from a letter from the devil Screwtape to his subordinate Wormwood. He gives advice on the use of fashion in exaggerating endemic vices:

The use of Fashions is thought to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already near gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere ‘understanding’. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

It had struck me as devilish that at the most critical moment in our collective debate about and response to climate change and peak oil, there should emerge a chorus of voices calling for greater acceptance of consumerism, corporations and infinite-growth economics…

But never fear! This wasn’t some party-pooping blasphemer trying to point out that the last orders bell at the World’s End is about to toll. The story was actually looking at what the (currently) oil-rich Middle East might do to keep it’s good ol’ economic growth festering along, once the oil’s run out. Thus, we were treated to an inside glimpse into the sleek Dubai Internet City, a booming industry hub that’s capitalising on the fact that non-western tech markets aren’t suffering from the after-effects of the dot-com bubble bursting. Did you know that some Arabian mobile phone markets are only at around 10% penetration? This rise in consumer demand, presumably together with ample local skills and investment from foreign corporations, surely points to a thriving Middle East, even when its supplies of oil run dry.

Except… What the fuck will power these technologies?

Somewhere in the background, I’m sure, is the casual assumption that by that time we’ll have completely replaced our dependence on oil as an energy source with something else. It’s scary, though, how casual this assumption is; how restricted our collective awareness of the uniqueness of oil, an irreplaceable planetary store of accumulated solar energy, is; how blithely we’re entrusting our species’ future to technologies which don’t exist yet and show no sign of existing in the near future…

We think: "Yes! Shiny new things!" We fail to see that, to keep more than a couple of billion people going (and we’re at six billion and counting), we need that archaic, finite black stuff from deep beneath the earth.

I recall seeing some US Democrat being interviewed on CNN, an almost hurt expression barely buried in her face, voicing her growing suspicions that (wait for it) the Bush administration—no, really, brace yourself, take a seat and a good, deep breath—may have been less than honest in its appraisal of Iraq’s "weapons of mass destruction"! Or—God rise up from your shame and help us—they could have been outright lying.

I remember thinking about this woman’s position in the world. A large part of her job is to keep a close eye on what them there Republicans are up to in the White House, and to bloody well harangue them if they look like they might be veering off the straight and narrow. As far as I’m concerned, everyone in such a position who stands up now and acts like a betrayed little kid, feigning (I charitably assume) puzzlement at why a fraudulent oil industry dweeb might lie about motivations for attacking a country with vast oil reserves in a world heading for irreversible energy shortages—they should, at the very least, stand down in shame. At best, they should self-destruct in recompense by using what’s left of their power to expose as much of the rot in their profession as possible.

But in the end, it’s not just the politicians. There are the unquestioning masses, too, distracted by comfort or strife, barely able to admit to themselves how far out of control this world is. Why else would anyone believe the words of those who say they’re in control?