"Peak oil was fifty years ago" (Art Berman)
(This blogpost is welcome to be read to the sound of the beautiful song "Eternal Odyssey" by Delerium. It is the last half of the song that is most beautiful. Try also "Somewhere in time", sung by Michael Crawford)
"Peak oil was fifty years ago." (From the ingress to this recent blogpost on Art Bermans blog). Berman's got the big picture, he's a veteran with 45 years of experience as oil geologist, and he's got the overview which is easily lost in the jungle of details and data, in the mountains of charts that just lie to us if we do not have the right context and an eagle perspective.
Usually it's the old, retired oil geologists who ring the alarm bells. It's understandable. The young ones have to make money, and has a stake in the success of the oil industry. Remember Colin J. Campbell and Jean Laherrére? They were both retired when they became the fathers of the Peak Oil movement twenty+ years ago. Jean is still alive. He's 93 years old. And still he makes charts. Colin died one and a half years ago, in November 2022. He became 91. The world was blessed because he lived so long. So with Jean, too.
Peak Oil is not about volumes, it is about rates, says Berman. And the decline began in the early seventies. Since then we have gotten poorer every year.
Tim Watkins confirms this in this recent blogpost on his blog. He says there:
"This, remember, began long before the peak of global oil extraction – although it corresponded to the end of US oil dominance. Rather, it marked an inflection point at which the cost of energy was too high to allow general prosperity growth to continue. That is, while the years 1953 to 1973 across the western states had seen rich and poor enjoy rising prosperity, after 1973 the rich could only prosper at the expense of the poor."
And in the end of the same blogpost:
"Economic growth across the western states since the 1970s has been increasingly an illusion resulting from a growing and indebted population. But now, with the youth population in decline, any “asset” which depends upon a growing mass of payers – a house, a pension, a government bond, a collateralised debt obligation, an apple i-phone, or a Netflix subscription, to name but a few – will be rendered unviable… only the order and timing of the failures is left to discover. And beyond that, all that remains is when the various sour grapes narratives – including the one about how some all-powerful “they” behind the curtain is doing this deliberately – finally breakdown and people are forced to acknowledge the reality of a natural process of collapse which has been slowly gathering pace for more than half a century."
High technology and the internet and smartphones, all this is just makeup on the face of the decline. Or the drugs that prevents us from revolting against the super-rich and those who profit from the decline, the "disaster capitalists" (Naomi Klein's phrase).
This picture is so funny. The whole world right now is just drugs upon drugs:
