In last night’s third debate, which was supposed to be about domestic issues, I didn’t hear a
\nsingle mention of oil. Not one word about those three little letters. Yet oil — supply, cost
\nand dwindling geological reserves — is the greatest domestic crisis we are likely to face in this
\ndecade: Greater than the deficit, jobs, taxes, health care, social security, you name it. Even greater
\nthan all of them combined.
\n
I’m not making this up. David Owen is. In a fascinating article in the current New Yorker, With roughly half the planet’s total petroleum supply already consumed, according to The result is that “various well-established laws of economics are about to assert themselves, So I leave it to my preferred overnight arbiters Alessandra Bush is now down 3-zip. Blank looks, a trace of drool, bad jokes that hit a wall of flopsweat, As far as I could tell, however, both candidates came in last by failing to address the looming 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-dO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n“Green Manhattan” (unfortunately not online), which makes the counterintuitive case that our big
\ncities are more energy efficient and friendlier to the environment than our sprawling suburbs,
\nOwen quotes a warning from
\nGoodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
\n
\nGoodstein’s book, “the world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil,”
\nand we’ve got less than 10 years to solve the problem. As Owen writes, the
\n“devastating global petroleum crisis will begin not when we have pumped the last barrel out of the
\nground but when we have reached the halfway point, because at that moment, for the first time in
\nhistory, the line representing supply will fall through the line representing demand,” and “we will
\nprobably pass that point within the current decade, if we haven’t passed it already.”
\n
\nwith disastrous repercussions for almost everything<\/I>.” (Italics added.) And here’s
\nGoodstein’s capper: “Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century
\nunless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.” Does that need
\nrepeating? I think it does: “Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime
\nin this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.” If that seems far away
\nto you, how about this? We’ll be starting down that road by 2015.
\n
\nStanley<\/B><\/FONT><\/STRONG><\/A> and Tom
\nShales<\/B><\/FONT><\/STRONG><\/A> and
\nI’ll also quote Wolcott, even though I think he gives Kerry too much credit, because his
\ncomments are the sharpest and because I hope he’s right.
\n
\n
\n
\nweaselling out on Roe v. Wade and minimum wage, a lot of kerfluffling to fill out his time — Bush
\nbombed badly and only avoided disaster because Kerry was too scripted. But Kerry knocked the
\nassault-weapons issue into the seats and handled the Social Security issue convincingly — his
\npoise and knowledgeability carried the night, as I think the polls will reflect. (CNN just came in at
\nKerry 52, Bush 39<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, to the
\nsurprise of their knucklehead pundits.)<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\noil crisis. The moderator Bob Shieffer is partly to blame for not asking the question. But if they
\nhad wanted to deal with the subject they could have. Both had no trouble ignoring any question
\nthey felt like, simply by replying with boilerplate about some other subject. Both did that so often
\nit didn’t matter what question was asked. In pundit parlance that’s called “pivoting.” In the real
\nworld it’s called bullshit.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"