Peak Oil, Climate Change, and Human Fallibility

I’m just going to share verbatim a letter that I just sent to a few friends. I think it is worth giving it some thought. The letter expresses my comments on an excellent set of films by James Corbett. (Link is below. Part one is better, and extremely important.)

Hi folks,

James Corbett is an excellent researcher, but he’s not God, and he’s not infallible. He’s wrong on peak oil, wrong on the looming energy crisis, and the coming shocks and disruptions from it. (See Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, and Dmitry Orlov on that issue.)

And he’s wrong about global warming. We have the indisputable data and obvious evidence the planet is warming, and the climate is getting more extreme and unpredictable, and both are causing rising ecological disasters, and systems disruptions and systems failures. There is no question global warming is happening, is accelerating, and little question it will cause rising environmental cataclysmic effects. Other environmental crises may be equally severe, but global warming, along with species and biodiversity loss, soil depletion and desertification, deforestation, and toxic pollution, certainly ranks in the top five.

(My focus at Trent University, in 1986-1990, was in philosophy and environmental studies. The science seemed clear then, on all five of these top environmental crises, and it seems even more certain on all five now.)

I think anthropogenic climate change is well established, and greenhouse gases are the primary cause. (See the David Suzuki Foundation.) But whatever the cause, the precautionary principle makes sense. We should, therefore, swiftly reduce our dependency upon, and then shift entirely away from, our heavy use of fossil fuels, plastics, and petrochemical industrial agriculture. (The energy crisis will force us to do so anyway.) And secondly, the reality is: whatever the cause, the disaster is here – and we need to: a) mitigate the harm, and b) adapt to a changing world.

Is it true that the billionaire elite are trying to use climate change and environmentalism to increase their wealth and power? Almost certainly – it’s what they do with every crisis. That does not mean the crisis is necessarily unreal. It just means that we have to deal with very real and disastrous climate change and global warming, along with a rising energy crisis – and deal with vampiric and predatory crypto-fascist elites, at the same time, who want to turn every crisis to their advantage, and use any excuse or pretext to create a police state, run by and for themselves.

Warm regards,

Todd

P.S.:

It’s disaster capitalism, writ large. Now we have to deal with an economic crisis, a health crisis, an energy crisis, an environmental crisis, the risk of world war – and corporate fascism on top of it all.

Bloody bastards…. They’re absolutely mad.

Stay calm, stay brave, stay free. We have a new world to build. And we will – despite the predatory elite. We clearly cannot count on their help. So we will do it ourselves, they way we usually do.

***

Extremely important: Part One of, How & Why Big Oil Conquered The World.

https://www.corbettreport.com/bigoil/

Sent from my iPad