Re: [A-List] Is the world's oil running out fast?

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

 

> "Oil is far too cheap at the moment", says Mr Simmons.

 

"The figure I'd use is around $182 a barrel. We need to price oil realistically to control its demand. That is because global production is peaking."

 

"If we price oil correctly", Mr Simmons says, "it could give us time to find bridge fuels, fuels to fill the gap between an oil economy and a renewable economy. But I don't see that happening." The adherents of the peak oil theory warn the decline of world oil output will force oil prices higher for good, and that the knock on effects could be catastrophic.<

 

Comment

 

It seems to me that what is being stated here . . . is that the societal move to other forms of energy infrastructure is dependent on price . . . or rather a function of the property relations or the bourgeois quest for profits.

 

I had promised to do a critique . . . to the best of my ability . . . of "The Hyrogen Economy" by Jeremy Rifkin and lost interest in this project. This "lost interest" means I disagreed with the entire conceptual framework of the presentation of energy infrastructure and what is called "sustainability."  Rifkin's presentation presupposes the permanence of the bourgeois mode of industrial and post industrial society and totally side steps the "needs" created as a function of the impulse for capital to reproduce itself.

 

The role of the automobile as the premium form of transportation in America is taken and understood as a human need . . . which it is not. The question is inverted and presented as "how can we sustain" this form of transportation?

 

Henry once wrote that it would not be that bad to run out of oil (not a direct quote) and talked about oil reaching $400 a barrel.

 

I have thrown the towel in on this particlar form of discussion because the issue we face is not a law of science  . . . directly (in my opinion) but the law of capital as it produces a unique set of needs peculiar to it as the form or shape of a distinct mode of production.

 

I also believe that earth could easily sustain 50 - 100 billion people . . . but not on the basis of the material relations of man to nature inherited by the bourgeois mode of production and the unique set of needs it creates as a basis of its cycle of reproduction.

 

Obesity is the number one premature cause of death in America and it is time we really got behind this question. Overproduction and over consumption is now manifest at the individual economic and human unit in our society. What an enormous . . . and . . . catastrophic waste and plundering of life and biosphere.  If one is dying of over consumption there is one solution and one solution only . . . to stop consuming that which is causing death.

 

One need to examine the entire infrastructure of production and its configuration . . . and its social and human relations . . . that drives over consumption.

 

Melvin P.