BushCo’s peak-oil plan

The lamestream, corporate media are finally beginning to spread the news about peak oil, though they’ve been remiss in pointing out the ramifications. And, as with global climate change, they’re too late to this party to do much good, if any.

If you’re paying attention, though, you’re nervous when the CEO of General Motors starts pushing peak oil as a reason to buy electric cars, as he did at the massive Detroit auto show earlier this month. (Talk about irony: Didn’t GM kill the electric car, not so long ago?) Not to mention George W. Bush’s admission, from Saudi Arabia last week, that we’ve passed the world oil peak:
“I would like for them to realize that high energy prices affect the economies of consuming nations. And that if these economies weaken, those economies will eventually be buying fewer barrels of oil. And having said that, there is not a lot of excess capacity in the marketplace. What’s happened is, is that demand for energy has outstripped new supply. And that’s why there’s high price.”
BushCo has a backup plan, though. The military is preparing for the end of the electrical grid, as well as gearing up for the occupation in Iran. And Dubya can declare martial law at any time, for any reason he invents.
As if these tidbits aren’t enough to strike fear into the hearts of reasonable people, how about this one: Dubya wants to give you money. Seems Hank Paulson and the Boyz at the Federal Reserve Bank (Benny and the Inkjets) have convinced the CEO-in-chief we need to pump more “liquidity” into the system. The market has failed. That’s quite an admission from the cabal that promotes the so-called “Free Market.” So Dubya and his neo-conservative lackies in Congress are willing to risk another Weimer Republic to keep the Dow Jones Industrial Average riding high for another day. Actually, we’ll be lucky to have hyper-inflation, instead of government-induced chaos, within Dubya’s term.
Except for all the terrible news, which I’ve come to expect even though I can hardly stand it, I had a great weekend. I gave an invited address to 250 archaeologists, helped facilitate a talk titled God: The Failed Hypothesis, and was asked to help develop a screenplay about the collapse of civilization.
My talk to archaeologists focused on peak oil and the associated collapse of civilization. Turns out archaeologists love to study the collapse of civilization, with a minor exception: They aren’t particularly keen on hearing about the collapse of their own civilization.
The talk by Victor Stenger was sponsored by the Center for Inquiry. We reserved a venue large enough to accommodate twice our maximum audience to date, and it was about half the size we needed. Fortunately, Stenger repeated the talk, so about three-fourths of the initial audience got to hear it, although a third of them didn’t hear it until a couple hours after they’d planned.
Finally, a New York Times bestselling novelist discovered my earlier entry about the collapse of civilization and extinction of Homo sapiens, and he’d like to write a screenplay about the former. He describes the proposed film like this, in an email message:
“One that scares the shit out of people. A BLAIR WITCH like movie that begins in 2012 when the first city suffers the first blackout. Everything first person, shot from a family’s perspective. The blackouts become more frequent, and still no response from the herd. The Government makes up their pet excuses, then the gas lines begin. Then one day everyone makes a run to the grocery store … and the looting begins. And the lights go out.”
“Chaos.”
“Okay, you know where I am going, since you and I have already lived it in our heads a thousand times. So let’s SHOW IT in theaters. Let’s give Americans and the rest of the rats in the race a preview of what’s down the road.”
Pretty exciting stuff, I’d say. I can hardly wait.
For the screenplay. Not the chaos.