Peak Freaks

http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=385

(Gold9472: I would request that everyone read this please.)

BY AARON NAPARSTEK
10.28.2005 | ENVIRONMENT

If you happened to be strolling down E. 35th Street in Manhattan around noon on Wednesday, October 5, you may have stumbled across the shirtless, shoeless young man with a wispy goatee meditating on the sidewalk in front of the Unitarian Universalist church between Madison and Park. Or you may have noticed the fellow in the orange jumpsuit, NASA-style, circa 1981. Perhaps you were stopped by a pasty-looking woman and asked, aggressively and completely at random, if you knew a doctor who could help her with the mysterious illness she believes she acquired while volunteering at Ground Zero after 9/11. These and about 400 others were in attendance for the first-ever Petrocollapse Conference, a day-long event organized to allow "tremendous authorities offering a wide range of expertise" to educate the public on Peak Oil, according to Jan Lundberg, a conference organizer and the morning's first speaker.

In his opening remarks Lundberg said the event was "not so much an exercise in proving Peak Oil has occurred or will occur soon, but rather an attempt to explore our post-peak options and fate as individuals and communities." A worthy and compelling task, I thought. Having written and worked quite a bit on New York City transportation issues the last few years, I was slated to do a ten minute talk as a part of the "Local Solutions" panel at the very end of the day. I had put together a presentation called "Urban Transportation in the Age of Expensive Oil" showing five transportation and urban design ideas for weaning New York City away from its costly automobile dependence.

My presentation wasn't a comprehensive policy proposal. Nor was it a revolutionary break from the current status quo (though, I'm sure many New York City traffic engineers, would disagree with that). Rather, it was meant as a grounded, pragmatic review of five car-free transportation and urban design concepts that are working well in other big cities around the world but are still considered somewhat radical here in New York. I planned to talk about London's successful congestion charging system, bike paths and pedestrian spaces in Northern European cities, bus rapid transit systems in South America, and this great project to build light rail along 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan called Vision42. I have often found that, short of flying someone to Amsterdam to ride bikes and look closely at urban design, you need photos to convince Americans that a less car-dominated city is possible or even desirable. Even to New Yorkers who mostly don't own cars, the automobile is such an intrinsic part of American life it is simply impossible for many of us to imagine or envision a life not dominated by them.

Yet, as one tremendous authority after another got up to warn us of the impending, sudden demise of Western industrial civilization due to Peak Oil, I began to get the sneaking suspicion that this crowd, or at least these conference organizers, weren't interested in bus rapid transit, bike lanes or policy proposals of any kind. The Petrocollapse Conference had been convened to warn New Yorkers that End Times were upon us.

If Peak Oil theory is now maintream, discussed on the front page of USA Today and in Chevron and BP ad campaigns, then Petrocollapse is a secular, left-wing, non-fiction version of Tim LaHaye's Christian Apocalyptic "Left Behind" series. The gospel according to Petrocollapse is that Peak Oil is coming, and it's coming soon. The transition to the post-carbon world will not be gradual, it will be sudden and massive. And when it comes, the sinners--those profligate American consumers and the corporate whores who oversee them--will all be swept away in violent social turmoil, starvation and environmental disaster. But there's good news too. After the tumultuous mass die-off, a new society will arise from the burned out SUV hulks and melted plastic detritus. In this post-carbon world, humans will have no choice but to live sustainably, in cooperation with each other and in harmony with nature. Those who get religion and accept Peak Oil into their hearts soon enough--they may be among the lucky survivors whose children grow to live in this new and better world.

In other words, "grounded" and "pragmatic" weren't high on the Petrocollapse Conference agenda. This was made immediately clear in Lundberg's opening remarks as he started off the conference by listing his own Peak Oil bonafides and criticizing other "prestigious insiders of the Peak Oil 'movement'" who advocate various political solutions and policy reforms.

Lundberg isn't interested in these "agendas" because he is "promoting fundamental, system-change." He advocates a return to "complete reliance on nature" and "a real community-based" tribal culture. He believes that "we, like nature, are being raped constantly in every orifice" by Western Industrial civilization. "Progress is a new idea, and a dangerous one," at that. "Nature does not need progress."

Lundberg foresees, or advocates--it is often not clear which--a complete dissolution of the United States into locally governed bioregions and an enormous culling of the Earth's human population. There are three ways, he says, to deal with the overpopulation problem that will suddenly manifest as an overwhelming crisis once Peak Oil is reached. 1. A rational, gradual and voluntary population reduction. 2. Violent, involuntary reduction brought about by "elites" selecting survivors based on their national or genetic desirability. 3. Humanity simply killing itself off en masse.

Of these three options, Lundberg believes the third, is currently "operative" and "to avoid the second 'option' of top-down culling through violence, the first option, compassionate planning, would have to start soon."

Sure, "Our time as a species in a favorable, biodiverse ecosphere is about up" and "there appears to be little hope for a viable future," but it's not all doom and gloom to Lundberg. Upon petrocollapse, "a new society will come together on a local-ecosystem basis. Cooperation and sharing will be necessary for survival, to make urban and suburban land productive and to assure water is as clean as possible." Petrocollapse will be so shocking and so revolutionary that "a completely different approach to human relations and economics will be adopted." How we will get from here to there and in what time frame, Lundberg didn't say.

What was made clear, though, is that to Lundberg petrocollapse is not so much the problem as it is the solution. "I believe petrocollapse can cure Earth of this civilization," he said. "Civilization is the threat."

Another featured speaker at the Petrocollapse conference was Michael Ruppert, editor of From the Wilderness, a web-based clearinghouse for news headlines and original stories that tend to confirm a conspiratorial worldview of government and corporate power. His book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil claims that the U.S. government orchestrated the events of 9/11. There is a strong overlap between the Petrocollapse and 9/11 conspiracy communities. Conference organizers found Ruppert's version of doom so compelling they gave him two prominent speaking slots.

He introduced his talks by saying "This is the first of two cold showers I'm going to give you. Get ready for goose bumps." Ruppert's thesis: It simply won't be profitable for the big corporations and government that control us to slow the global economic decline and human suffering that will be brought on by Peak Oil. So they won't.

Peak Oil, Ruppert said, is the beginning of the end of industrial civilization and it is driving the elites of American power to implement unthinkably draconian measures of repression, warfare and population control. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have known about Peak Oil for decades and they are implementing "a very clearly established plan" to crash the US economy. The crash will be worse than 1929 and it is "just a few weeks away." They have decided that the only way to control U.S. energy consumption is through "demand destruction"--impoverishing Americans, or worse, liquidating them altogether. That the city of New Orleans wasn't rescued after Hurricane Katrina wasn't due to federal government incompetence. Letting American cities filled with poor people suffer and die is simply what "demand destruction" is all about. During a break outside with a group of smokers, Ruppert went on, "Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld all have their ranches off the grid. They're all running solar and biodiesel. They know what's coming,"

End Part I