[KyotoMotors Blog
Post #11]
We hear a lot of
promises in our lifetimes. It’s the nature of
marketing, and the nature of politics, and – if you want to get down to
it – it’s the nature of our faith in Progress that we believe a good many of them,
even when we should know better.
When I was young,
the year 2000 loomed large, and everything was going to be about space travel
and robots. If you’re older than me, maybe you expected heli-ports and rocket
packs in this future that has since passed. Of course, what we got was nothing
of the sort – not even a good old fashioned apocalypse branded as “Y2K”.
To be fair, we do
have the internet, and hand-held devices that would shame the best technicians
aboard the original Starship Enterprise. So we’re pretty good at
telecommunications and data storage that run on an infrastructure of satellites and
rare earth elements.
What we also have
is a host of unforeseen consequences converging to form the mother of all
predicaments for the current incarnation of civilisation. Atop the list is
probably climate change caused by industrial activity and several resultant
positive feed-back loops that accelerate the phenomenon, such as shrinking
polar ice mass, and methane-released by melting permafrost.
Another global problem
surrounds energy, and the challenge of accessing enough of it to maintain
normal operations for the global economy (including the operation of the
internet and those hand-held devices, not to mention our beloved automobiles).
That we face increasingly dire challenges to maintain the levels of energy that
we have grown accustomed to, is not commonly spoken about in polite society.
Instead, at all costs, we tend to look to the art of promise, and the faith in
technological progress in order to convince ourselves that this challenge
simply isn’t – simply must not be – true. Why, just recently I’ve been reading
about a new era of energy independence dawning in America. Fracking, it seems, has
come to answer our energy prayers, so that we can all continue to enjoy 20th
century levels of extravagance and specialisation that defines our
civilisation.
Such promises!
Well, don’t shoot
the messenger, but have I got news for you: Some serious questions have arisen
surrounding the validity of the hype. Fracking, it would seem, may not be all
it’s cracked up to be. It may rather be yet another in the string of dubious
promises we conjure up for mass consumption while avoiding the hard questions
pertaining to the hard limits to growth set by Nature herself. Worse still, the
whole shale oil bonanza may well prove to be the latest in a string of economic
bubbles that characterise our troubled economy.
I’m not making
this stuff up, so don’t credit me with the foresight… There are a number of
commentators who seem to have connected the dots, and now there’s a concise
book written on the subject: Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future by Richard Heinberg. [http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/1789950-snake-oil-how-fracking-s-false-promise ]
It appears the
fracking industry is following the familiar pattern of a classic economic
bubble, which like a pyramid scheme, leaves most investors in the lurch with a
sense of having been duped out of however much money they were hyped into
investing. Like the recent
housing bubble, a bubble in fracking would be closely tied to our troubling
insistence on furthering the consumptive patterns of car-oriented living
arrangements and expectations (entitlement). Like the housing bubble, the
fracking instalment of this tragi-farce will be shrouded in layers of denial
and hand-waving-insistence that such a thing is impossible -- It is somehow
always “different this time”-- until, of course, the whole thing has burst.
For me, what is
different this time, is that I am comfortably in the camp that sees it coming,
and will do the only thing I can do about it, and that’s to call it as I see
it. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it from happening – this sucker
will go down – but there is at least the possibility of keeping your money
safely away from unsound fracking investments.
After it does go
down (within a year or two) think back to this blog and remember that checking
in to Kyotomotors wasn’t such a bad idea! You may also want to get to know the
issues a little more closely by visiting sites like the Post Carbon Institute’s
www.resilience.org , which serves as a
hub for lots of great info on alternatives worth pursuing…
Meanwhile, as the summer fades, and autumn sneaks in a little closer every morning, I will make every effort to resume regular posts here at kyotomotors. I will start by asking , what is a "kyoto motor" and offer a number of ways of answering the question next week.
Please stay tuned.
