Over the past two hundred years, certain vested interests in the industrialized world have promoted a particular narrative about the nature of technology, development, economics and modern society. Eventually that narrative became so widely accepted that today it is virtually impossible to have an economic or political discussion outside its frame of reference. The pervasiveness of this narrative is, I have increasingly come to believe, one of the main reasons many people have difficulty accepting the reality and imminence of peak oil.
It is also the main reason proposed “solutions” to the problem—from the liberal “subsidize alternative fuels” approach to the conservative conviction that we should “let the market sort it out”—are so misguided. More surprisingly, I believe the dependency and learned helplessness this narrative engenders is a major cause of the fatalistic despair many so-called peak oil “doomers” feel.
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