**What** Bollocks

I know that you’re not supposed to argue against unfounded claims and counter with founded nor unfounded claims – especially with someone who is boxing some strawman in the far corner of the room. The best thing to do would be to shake one’s head and leave the room.

Right?

But I can’t! I have to! Hold me back!

Well, I guess as much as I would love to claim being above it all, I guess I’m just not. So, off to the shadows-boxing we go… (And how am I going to keep this piece short!?)

Anyway, Lara wrote an incredibly rediculous piece over at Fortune telling us not to consider the risks of resource depletion ahead, because the wonders of the Industrial Revolution will continue offering us both a miracle and a brave new world every 20 years or so to keep the party going.

So how about we all just relax a bit and wait for the *Singularity* (yes, with a capital "S") that’s scheduled for in 33 years. Just one generation away! (I wonder how many times that date will be postponed!?) I just can’t wait to meld with Lara and her cronies with their marvelous videos and rapture around about our infinite and resource-abundant possibilities waiting for us right over the horizon!

Now, while riding the commuter train to work every day, I sure don’t feel any lack of resource restraint. Physical reality is quite unmerciful, I must say. Paying the bills sure doesn’t seem to be getting easier either. But this isn’t about some sort of subjective perspectification-ationing, now, is it??

Lara thinks that all we have to do is take a step back and recongnize that our time frame shouldn’t be 5-10 years to think about these things, but decades: For hasn’t the world gotten better in the past decades? In the past centuries?

The funny thing is that her wide-angle view of things goes all the way back to the beginning of time, to the start of creation, as it were. "On the first day, God created the American Revolution"!

Sorry, that was the Industrial Revolution, which was going on at about the same time anyway.

And then God saith: "Let Boulton the Industrialist and Watt the Dreaming Inventor pair up and recreate Eden!!" And so it happened that all Carbon that had been hiding from God’s Sight for 306 Million Years be uncovered by man’s sweat and by coal’s smoke sothat the untidy garden could finally be sacrificed to the straight rows of the John Deere and the city planners.

Now, I just love Civilization. And here’s a toast to Sid Meiers. I just hated stopping those bouts to have to go to work in the morning. Of course I saved the match each time after winning a round. And I made it to Alpha Centauri by 1942 a number of times.

But who’s going to tell Lara that the game here can’t be saved after every round so that we still have enough resources to reach Alpha Centauri in time? Who’s going to tell her that Peak Oil is not about Hubbert’s guestimation that it would "happen" (whatever that means) in 1996, all things being equal? Which they weren’t, of course. And as far as "happening" is concerned, oil production has not risen since 2005, meaning that we’re into the 7th year of flat oil prodution (the flatulating plateau) with consistantly rising prices.

Yes, Peak Oil has already "happened" on a global level and it’s not about to unhappen – whether you call it Peak Lite, or Peak du Jour, or Peak Just Oil And Not Gas And Not Ethanol-Crap And Not Tarsands-Crap, or Peak For Non-OPEC But Maybe For OPEC Too Because They Threw Out Indonesia And Took In Angola, or Peak Somewhere Other Than The Dakotas And Alberta And Mongolia And In Santa Claus’s Back Yard And Deep Deep Under Quadtonnish-Megalatonnish Jules Verne Monster Way Way Way Under The Sea Right Off The Coast Of Brazil Oil.

"Peak" has happened or rather is happening. But "Slope" has not. Not yet. Maybe that’s what Lara’s a bit confused about?

How about we change Lara’s narrative a bit to help her figure out where she’s strayed off the straight and narrow?

Well, here goes:
Any discussion about resources should take place outside of The Industrial Age. For the Industrial Revolution has to do with one simple experiment: Automating everything using the reservoires of energy that nature has so generously provided us over the last half a billion years. Some refer to these reservoires as fossil fuels.
This means that the exercise is not trying to consider what has happened after the Industrial Revolution but what is happening because of the Industrial Revolution. The first result of the Industrial Revolution has been most certainly resource abundance. We’ve been getting to the resources easier and easier. And on the flip side: The second result of the Industrial Revolution does not necessarily mean resource scarcity. But it most certainly means fossil fuel scarcity.

Oil first.

But since my horizons only stretch 5-10 years into the future, I’m pretty clueless as to what’s second on the list. Take your pick:

Coal; Natural Gas.

Well, Ms. Lara Hoffmans, is there anything we can agree on here? You wanna think about your hop-scotch peak oil date again?