The longing for sacrifice - hair shirt self-abnegation - that underpins the appalling views of green fashion victims about agriculture discussed in the previous post are pervasive - a large part of their views about energy too. The lack of research funding that Revkin discussed is a symptom of a deeper conflict.

The denial of the growing evidence of - yes - "peak oil" by commentators on the Right resembles their vociferous denial of global warming (more sophisticated responses now reveal that, all along, it wasn't the reality of global warming that bothered them; it was the implications. And they are daunting).

The same is true of the reaction on the Right about Peak Oil (in fairness, there's a good deal of techno-optimism on the Left as well; while the Right thinks there's plenty of oil - enough in ANWR to run our civilization for another century, it is implied - the Left thinks we're going to replace oil with algae and fairy dust.)

Krugman's column prompted Andrew Leonard over at Salon.com (their in-house Peak Oil man - h/t Joe Knippenberg) to post a smart column about "the peak oil culture wars," observing what should be obvious at this point - the debate isn't about the facts, it's about the implications. And, people on the Right - "fighting like caged rats" - don't want to entertain the possibility that all those "dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right" - and worse still, we might have to change our behavior.

Energy, like climate and food, are instruments used by green fashion victims to advance their hoary old agenda to control and diminish humanity. Humans are too happy and noisy for their tastes. They long for crises, plagues and famines, anything to wipe the grins off the faces of those blandly cheerful optimists. Peak oil is an opportunity, a crisis if spun properly, and that, bizarrely, make the fashion victims happy. These aren't the real implications of physical reality, they are the political implications of the culture war. Obviously, they are opposed, and not just by people on the Right. They are opposed by anyone focused on reality or that has compassion for humanity, especially those less fortunate.

Writes Leonard:

My own view is that this debate is going to collapse as more people realize that our high oil prices are NOT the consequence of financiers or the evil oil companies stoking profits (all along, their production of oil is declining), but the cold hard facts of reality. The tired Left-Right consensus - one essentially designed to obscure that there is no real disagreement about whether a growth economy premised on an itinerant and rootless workforce is desirable - is going to collapse and something else will take its place. The great fear is that a new consensus will form that someone is to blame, and we have plenty of weapons to get what we want, or at least to distract us from our penury. The great possibility is that we will realize that a future of less driving, stable neighborhoods, greater localism, the reinvigoration of diverse local cultures isn't as bad as our kneejerk panic about impending change would lead us to believe. Surely this is something a "conservative" would not object to?

What may be most productive in coming years is to stop calling this cadre of economic libertarians - what we now call "the Right" or even conservatism - conservatives. There is nothing they want to conserve - nothing in the natural or moral ecology. They are rapacious exploiters who want to use every last natural and cultural reservoir for their own immediate profit - even at the price of leaving nothing for their children. Recall, it was Dick Cheney who said "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." Probably true, but it's a damned good place to start, and we fool ourselves if we think we are not going to need substantial reservoirs of personal and political virtue in coming years.

OK. Conservatives are not conservative, Liberals are not liberal. And as Pinker noted, "Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change". Duh. The wing nuts of all hues have much in common. A more reasoned analysis is useful: Peak Oil Hysteria

You will not be shocked to learn that, in fact, lots of forecasts for peak oil have been made over the years. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) identified 36 such forecasts published between 1972 and 2004 . . .

Roughly speaking, forecasts indicate that we are 20 – 30 years from peak oil today, just as forecasts generally indicated that we were 20 – 30 years from peak oil throughout the 1970s and 80s.

Unsurprisingly, the DOE has taken a serious look at this question. Their best guess (and they are rigorous enough to put a range of many decades on this) is that peak production will be reached sometime in the middle of this century . The International Energy Agency projects that production will continue to increase at least through 2030. So does OPEC. . .

I’ll also note that while the world spent about 6% of its total economic output on oil in 1980, this is down to about 3.5% today. Maybe this is why I see no observable signs of the collapse of modern civilization resulting from the current run-up in oil prices.

"Personal and political virtue" are not only irrelevant, they are impossible. This is fairy dust. It doesn't exist, and wouldn't accomplish anything useful if it did. Such prescriptions are not a response to any real world issue, they are merely fashion crime.

What is needed now is something closer to Revkin's suggestion for a research focus on energy and agriculture. Climate change and the related issue of fossil fuel costs and supplies are not reasons to hunker down and live in perpetual grim melancholy as the doomers long to do. They are welcome to do so themselves, it's a free country that has always had fairly high tolerance for religious wingers and lifestyle cultists, but it makes no policy sense in the real world and should not be imposed on others who think that the doomers are ridiculous.

This is an example of the intellectual exhaustion that preceded our current political exhaustion. In a better world our thoughtful types would insist on more factual and reasoned analyses of the current problem set, and prescribe policies appropriate to the circumstances.