• Home
  • About
    • Straight Up
    • Jan Herman
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

DEBATING WHAT THEY FORGOT

October 14, 2004 by cmackie

In last night’s third debate, which was supposed to be about domestic issues, I didn’t hear a
single mention of oil. Not one word about those three little letters. Yet oil — supply, cost
and dwindling geological reserves — is the greatest domestic crisis we are likely to face in this
decade: Greater than the deficit, jobs, taxes, health care, social security, you name it. Even greater
than all of them combined.

I’m not making this up. David Owen is. In a fascinating article in the current New Yorker,
“Green Manhattan” (unfortunately not online), which makes the counterintuitive case that our big
cities are more energy efficient and friendlier to the environment than our sprawling suburbs,
Owen quotes a warning from “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil,” by David
Goodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology.

With roughly half the planet’s total petroleum supply already consumed, according to
Goodstein’s book, “the world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil,”
and we’ve got less than 10 years to solve the problem. As Owen writes, the
“devastating global petroleum crisis will begin not when we have pumped the last barrel out of the
ground but when we have reached the halfway point, because at that moment, for the first time in
history, the line representing supply will fall through the line representing demand,” and “we will
probably pass that point within the current decade, if we haven’t passed it already.”

The result is that “various well-established laws of economics are about to assert themselves,
with disastrous repercussions for almost everything.” (Italics added.) And here’s
Goodstein’s capper: “Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century
unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.” Does that need
repeating?  I think it does: “Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime
in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”  If that seems far away
to you, how about this? We’ll be starting down that road by 2015.

So I leave it to my preferred overnight arbiters  Alessandra
Stanley
and Tom
Shales
and Jame Wolcott to say who won and who lost the third debate.
I’ll also quote Wolcott, even though I think he gives Kerry too much credit, because his
comments are the sharpest and because I hope he’s right.



Bush is now down 3-zip. Blank looks, a trace of drool, bad jokes that hit a wall of flopsweat,
weaselling out on Roe v. Wade and minimum wage, a lot of kerfluffling to fill out his time — Bush
bombed badly and only avoided disaster because Kerry was too scripted. But Kerry knocked the
assault-weapons issue into the seats and handled the Social Security issue convincingly — his
poise and knowledgeability carried the night, as I think the polls will reflect. (CNN just came in at
Kerry 52, Bush 39, to the
surprise of their knucklehead pundits.)


As far as I could tell, however, both candidates came in last by failing to address the looming
oil crisis. The moderator Bob Shieffer is partly to blame for not asking the question. But if they
had wanted to deal with the subject they could have. Both had no trouble ignoring any question
they felt like, simply by replying with boilerplate about some other subject. Both did that so often
it didn’t matter what question was asked. In pundit parlance that’s called “pivoting.” In the real
world it’s called bullshit.

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit

Filed Under: main

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
Another strange fact... Read More…

About

My Books

Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

Straight Up

The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said in a movie: "Man is the only … [Read More...]

Contact me

We're cutting down on spam. Please fill in this form. … [Read More...]

Archives

Blogroll

Abstract City
AC Institute
ACKER AWARDS New York
All Things Allen Ginsberg
Antiwar.com
arkivmusic.com
Artbook&
Arts & Letters Daily

Befunky
Bellaart
Blogcritics
Booknotes
Bright Lights Film Journal

C-SPAN
Noam Chomsky
Consortium News
Cost of War
Council on Foreign Relations
Crooks and Liars
Cultural Daily

The Daily Howler
Dark Roasted Blend
DCReport
Deep L
Democracy Now!

Tim Ellis: Comedy
Eschaton

Film Threat
Robert Fisk
Flixnosh (David Elliott’s movie menu)
Fluxlist Europe

Good Reads
The Guardian
GUERNICA: A Magazine of Art & Politics

Herman (Literary) Archive, Northwestern Univ. Library
The Huffington Post

Inter Press Service News Agency
The Intercept
Internet Archive (WayBackMachine)
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Doug Ireland
IT: International Times, The Magazine of Resistance

Jacketmagazine
Clive James

Kanopy (stream free movies, via participating library or university)
Henry Kisor
Paul Krugman

Lannan Foundation
Los Angeles Times

Metacritic
Mimeo Mimeo
Moloko Print
Movie Geeks United (MGU)
MGU: The Kubrick Series

National Security Archive
The New York Times
NO!art

Osborne & Conant
The Overgrown Path

Poets House
Political Irony
Poynter

Quanta Magazine

Rain Taxi
The Raw Story
RealityStudio.org
Bill Reed
Rhizome
Rwanda Project

Salon
Senses of Cinema
Seven Stories Press
Slate
Stadtlichter Presse
Studs Terkel
The Synergic Theater

Talking Points Memo (TPM)
TalkLeft
The 3rd Page
Third Mind Books
Times Square Cam
The Tin Man
t r u t h o u t

Ubu Web

Vox

The Wall Street Journal
Wikigate
Wikipedia
The Washington Post
The Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)
World Catalogue
World Newspapers, Magazines & News Sites

The XD Agency

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit
This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in