‘Peak Oil’ – Newsspeak for 'Too Many Poor'

by William Bowles - The doomsayers have been predicting ‘peak oil’ since the 1980s just as in the 1960s we saw a comparable bunch of doomsayers talking about ‘over-population’ and indeed, it seems that ‘over-population’ is once again in the gun-sights of the same bunch of Malthusian hangovers. And it’s no accident that ‘over-population’ and ‘peak oil’ go together in a case of oily feathers flocking together (to mix and ruin a couple of metaphors).

And once again, without getting into a debate about the origins of oil and its relationship to exactly how much oil there actually is, the amount of oil is connected not to the total amount whatever the number is, but whether it’s economically viable for capitalism to extract it.

There are many issues wrapped up in the ‘peak oil’ debate, none of which are connected to how much oil there actually is......