No Longer Taking Orders  

No - not me - I've never been much good at taking orders - in fact I tend to do the opposite of whatever I'm told (which can have horribly embarrassing consequences at times).

As I'm having a night off I thought I'd post this article by George Monbiot up - it was one of the things which finally convinced me peak oil was real last year. Some of you have already read it (Mobjectivist even uses a quote from it in his sidebar) but for the rest of you, enjoy.

At any rate of use, non-renewable resoures are, by definition, depleted. They will not come back. As soon as you begin to use one, the clock starts ticking towards the day on which it becomes exhausted. This applies even to the non-renewable resource on which the entire modern economy is built: namely petroleum. Global oil production will soon reach its peak and then decline, at which point the Age of Growth will give way to the Age of Entropy.

Not immediately, of course, but unless another source of energy, just as cheap, with just as high a ratio of “energy return on energy invested” is discovered or developed, there will be a gradual decline in our ability to generate the growth required to keep the debt-based financial system from collapsing.

Those of us who are alive today have been lucky enough to have been brought up in an age of energy surplus. This is a remarkable historical and biological anomaly. A supply of oil that exceeds demand has permitted us to do what all species strive to do – expand the ecological space we occupy – but without encountering direct competition for the limiting resource. The surplus has led us to believe in the possibility of universal peace and universal comfort, for a global population of 6 billion, or 9 or 10. If kindness and comfort are, as I suspect, the results of an energy surplus, then, as the supply contracts, we could be expected to start fighting once again like cats in a sack. In the presence of entropy, virtue might be impossible.