Out Damn Spot--Oil Prices !

by William Bowles - Damn! I hit a sore spot with my last piece on ‘peak oil’ that unleashed a stream of invective from all manner of people that I feel compelled to address yet again. Now whether this was due to my inadequate presentation of my case apropos ‘peak oil’ or the refusal of certain people to face the facts, I don’t know. In all likelihood, it’s a combination of the two. Be that as it may, I will once more attempt to address what I view as the main objections to my trashing of the ‘peak oil’ hypothesis.

I was extremely lucky whilst at art school to have a lecturer, Keith Critchlow, who worked with Buckminster Fuller and who introduced me to the ideas of Fuller and who even got me involved in working on designing and building geodesic domes and other, even more daring design conceptions. And although I had problems with Fuller’s technocratic approach, he most definately convinced me that there is no problem that we, as a species, can’t overcome given that we collaborate on finding solutions, the operative word of course being collaborate.

So why has the ‘left’ (not to mention the Greens) embraced the ‘peak oil’ hypothesis so uncritically and, as one writer informed me, has sought such ‘strange bed fellows’ to use Lenin’s famous phrase, as an advisor to the major corporations who back Bush?....