Toby Hemenway has an article on the genesis of peak oil doomerism, including a history of apocalyptic thinking through the ages- The Origins of Peak Oil Doomerism

People in the Peak Oil movement chafe at the label of doomer, but many of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of Suburbia, and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Peak Oil writings are sprinkled with predictions that billions will die, civil order will collapse, and even that civilization will end. Scientists, too, aren’t immune. During geologist Ken Deffeyes’s Peak Oil presentations, he displays the words “war,” “famine,” “pestilence,” and “death”—the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Right, the saying goes, has the Left Behind books, and the Left has Peak Oil. Both predict that the end is near.

After I published an article suggesting that Peak Oil may lead “merely” to widespread unemployment and hardship rather than collapse, hundreds wrote to tell me I was a naïve optimist and a cornucopian. A significant part of the Peak Oil community holds the rock-solid sentiment that the only future is one of chaos. While the end of the oil era possesses “death and taxes” certitude, plausible post-peak scenarios span a wide scope. So why is the most touted one the most extreme? Predictions of any stripe, a review will quickly show, are almost always wrong. The future rarely goes in the direction we expect. The certainty of coming doom held by so many made me wonder why we are drawn to societal collapse and our own extinction.

The point of this article is not to argue for or against a Peak Oil collapse—a futile debate that won’t end until we enter that future—or to discuss whether our civilization deserves to continue. Rather, it’s an exploration into why, given an impending crisis or major challenge, many people in our culture spiral so quickly and automatically toward an “end of the world” vision rather than imagining any of the countless other options.

My earliest hypothesis was that a person’s chosen energy future was based more on personality than on data: Given the same information, people I knew to be optimists generally envisioned a positive future, while pessimists descended into doomerism. But in this simplistic reasoning, I was leaving out a growing mass of critiques of civilization itself by authors such as Joseph Tainter, Derrick Jensen, and Daniel Quinn, and others esteemed by many Peak Oil adherents. While these writers argue that civilization is evil, unsustainable, and must collapse, they also posit that human beings deserve something better that can only arise after this culture dies. This death-and-rebirth thinking didn’t fit my “optimist versus pessimist” hypothesis. And seeing how vehemently and urgently people argue for doom-and-gloom—I’ve literally had my lapels grabbed—made me suspect that neither individual psyche nor the cold logic of pure reason was at work here.

I now believe that Peak Oil catastrophism is largely a manifestation of our primary cultural myth: that all things end with suffering, death, and then resurrection. Belief in apocalypse is programmed into western civilization. Given our heritage, “the end is nigh” is the nearly unavoidable personal and collective response to times of uncertainty and rapid change.

Apocalypticism is at the core of the Judeo-Christian social mythology, and it influences our beliefs far more deeply than we are conscious of. I can hear the objections: “I’m not religious—I’ve never even been to church.” But that’s like saying, “I never studied Greece, so ancient Greek culture hasn’t influenced me in any way.” Cultural beliefs are in the air we breathe. We are programmed by our knowledge of mortality and of the natural world, as well as by millennia of myth-telling, to believe that all things, from organisms to businesses to civilizations, progress from birth to a shuddering death and, often, a renewal in new form. As much as the Religious Right’s boast that America is a Christian nation makes liberals uncomfortable, there is some truth to it. From the Declaration of Independence’s “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and the dollar’s “In God We Trust,” to once-pagan, Christian co-opted Easter egg hunts, Judeo-Christian beliefs saturate our culture. And the idea of apocalypse, that some time soon the End Times will be upon us and all will be transformed, is one of the most fundamental tenets of that system. A look at the history and particulars of apocalypticism will show the truth of that statement, and reveals that Peak Oil catastrophism conforms to our apocalyptic myth in such detail that it is difficult to deny its role.

The archetypal apocalypse story in the West is, of course, that of Jesus of Nazareth. Both his life’s story and his messianic prophecies of Judgment Day reflect oppression, death, and transformation, following the common arc of the apocalypse myth. This trajectory is echoed in the Peak Oil projection of increasing global despoliation and chaos, collapse, and the belief that “after Peak Oil, everything will change.” But this myth has also emerged hundreds of other times in our history. Jesus would have remained one of thousands of minor apocalyptic prophets, all predicting a similar end, if not for the brilliant public relations of Saul of Tarsus and other early Christians. And one of their tactics was to piggy-back onto already existing apocalypse stories.

Apocalypse myths predate Jesus by centuries. Ancient Greece, Persia, and Egypt are their primary birthplaces for the West. In Greek mythology, Zeus destroyed the world several times via flood, fire, and war. In one typical example, Zeus, seeing that humanity had become corrupt, ended the world by flood, sparing only two people to found a new race. And there it is: the basic pattern of apocalypse that’s been followed ever since. Humanity becomes wicked and is destroyed except for an elect, who go on to birth a new world.

Always a Social Context

Most people think of apocalyptic groups as religious sects. Religion and apocalypse are still tightly wedded, especially in the US, where a Gallup Poll reports 75% of the people believe in life after death. But as religion has been replaced with other organizing principles such as science and economics, so too have the reasons for apocalypse. Religious people express their doomsday belief through acts of their deities, but the common feature of apocalyptic belief is not religion. It is a social background of upheaval and anxiety. When times get uncertain, people in Judeo-Christian culture gravitate to the idea that there will be an end to the wickedness and misery through disaster and collapse.

An example is one of the first Western apocalypse stories with a known historical setting, Daniel’s prophetic dream of the world’s end in the biblical Book of Daniel. Here, political and social strife paints the background. This story was written about 165 BCE, during the height of a Jewish revolt. Jews had enjoyed several centuries of peaceful rule under first the Persians and then Ptolemy, but Palestine then fell under a Syrian-Greek tyrant. He trampled on civil and spiritual liberties, and forbade Jewish religious ceremony. The result was the Jewish Maccabean uprising. During this, Daniel dreamed of four beasts, each representing a successive ruler of Palestine, in which the final beast would “devour the earth . . . and break it in pieces.” This rapacious empire would then be overthrown, and only Israel would be saved. Nearly every subsequent example of apocalyptic belief occurs in a similar social context of upheaval, oppression, and alienation.

The hallucinatory Book of Revelation is the best-known apocalyptic text, but early Christians and Jews had many other books for solace in difficult times. The first-century books of Ezra and Baruch, excluded from the Bible, tell of a time of terrible hardship and injustice, symbolized by the wrath of a devouring eagle. The eagle was the well-known emblem of the Roman Empire, which held Christians and many Jews under brutal repression at the time these books were written. This empire, it was prophesied, would soon be destroyed by a mighty warrior, and all those who collaborated in the empire’s rule would die.

A later set of end-times texts, known as the Sibylline books, first appeared in the fourth century after the death of Emperor Constantine, when rule of the failing Roman Empire was contested by his two surviving sons, Constans and Constantius II. Constans, who favored the Nicene version of Christianity that is common today, was murdered by his brother. The Sibylline books mirror the fearful response of Catholics to this killing and reversal for their beliefs, and tell of a time of tyrants who oppress the poor and enrich the guilty. The books say a new leader will appear and destroy the heathens and their temples. A similar set of Sibylline books appeared when Syrian Christians suffered under Moslem rule in the seventh century. In all these cases, people hoped for the end of social disorder through catastrophe.

Countless other apocalyptic movements arose in similar contexts of confusion and oppression. In 13th century Germany, Frederick II was enmeshed in bitter conflict with the Pope, claiming that the Church was irredeemably corrupt. During this clash, Joachin of Fiore arose as a prophet to preach of approaching last days when the Church would be destroyed, choosing 1260 as the date of its collapse. Later, in the reign of the singularly ineffective Frederick III, when the gap between rich and poor grew enormous, and lawless nobles extorted the populace, the Bohemian Wirsburg brothers attracted thousands who believed the final days would come in 1467. Apocalyptic cults arise, it seems, in a context of oppression, uncertainly, and corruption. And in most cases, the subsequent destruction of the wicked was to be followed by floods, storms, and plagues that would decimate mankind, reminiscent of claims that global warming and ecosystem collapse will come on the heels of Peak Oil, as if one calamity isn’t enough. ...

The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital Blog has a post on GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt complaining that "U.S. Energy “Policy” Is a Certain Kind of Hell", noting that the barriers to dirty energy are going up while cleantech remains unsupported by the US government, resulting in energy technology companies being left in limbo. His recommendation is for carbon cap and trade to be implemented as soon as possible to end the uncertainty.

The chief executive of General Electric has emerged as one of the most outspoken advocates of government caps on carbon emissions. But it’s not that visions of saving the planet are filling his “Ecomagination,” nor has he given up on Hayek. In transforming one of the world’s biggest companies into a clean-tech juggernaut, he just smells the chance to make a lot of money—if the U.S. doesn’t miss the train altogether. “It’s no great thrill for me to do this stuff. I’m not an environmentalist. But if business has no voice, that’s the worst of all worlds,” Jeff Immelt said tonight keynoting The Wall Street Journal’s “ECO:nomics” conference in California.

What’s scarier than seemingly inevitable government-mandated climate-change legislation that targets most of the industries GE thrives in? Exactly what the U.S. has now. “We live today in a certain kind of hell, where nothing happens,” he said. Lack of planning for new nuclear plants has paralyzed the industry; lack of progress on renewable-energy tax credits has clean-energy developers treading water. Worries over how carbon will be priced has the traditional coal-powered utility industry trembling. All are GE strongholds. ...

Predictability makes investment planning easier. Clean technology is a huge business for GE already, and only stands to grow, if not in the U.S. then overseas. Renewable energy isn’t just a subsidy baby, subject to the whims of Congress. It’s a multi-billion dollar business for GE around the world. “If the U.S. doesn’t buy my wind turbines, I’ll go to Turkey,” he said.

And government largess helps drive progress—like in GE’s aircraft engine division half a century ago. That admission riled free-market types in the audience (and on stage) who took him to task for subsidy-hunting and accused him of—gasp—betraying his capitalist credentials. “Don’t worship false idols,” he countered. “The government has its hand in every industry. If we have to have them, I’d prefer they were productive rather than destructive.”

Grist has a more detailed look at the more recalcitrant members of the audience, who clearly didn't like the "ECO" part of "ECO:nomics", noting it isn't company bosses that have a problem with carbon trading - its various conservative ideologues who talk a lot but don't run actual businesses. To reuse one of Margaret Thatcher's phrases - "there is no alternative" (well - there is one alternative, carbon taxes, but I'm sure the skeptics wouldn't view those any more favourably).

"I came because I was invited," says the man on stage heatedly, squaring off his shoulders to the packed crowd. "I don't need to be lectured by anybody in this room about how to compete!"

From another speaker it might sound defensive, but in this case it is the CEO of GE, the second largest company in the world. Jeff Immelt knows whereof he speaks.

Immelt's outburst came toward the end of a Q&A session that saw him repeatedly assailed by ideological conservatives angry over his involvement in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of large businesses lobbying for a carbon cap-and-trade system, and his leadership role in pushing the business world to embrace clean energy and sustainability.

First it was Kimberly Strassel, conference co-host and member of WSJ's notoriously hard-right editorial board. He answered her patiently, explaining that it's better for businesses to get out in front of what's coming than wait on the sidelines. Then it was Fred Smith Jr., president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who lamented the capitulation of business leaders before the onslaught of Big Government. Immelt smiled tightly, paused, and said, "it's a great country -- we can disagree about this."

What put him over the top was Terry Anderson of the Property and Environment Research Center, a right-wing think tank. Anderson asked what real entrepreneurs -- the ones who don't have the resources to lobby for favorable treatment from government -- are supposed to do when a carbon cap cripples the economy. Real entrepreneurs. That set Immelt off. "We compete our asses off," he snapped. "We're No. 1 at what we do!"

At points, Immelt seemed keen to let his antagonists know that he was one of them. "We read all the same books!" he said plaintively to Strassel. "I'm not an environmentalist," he insisted later. At the end of one exchange, he protested, "I've never voted for a Democrat!" adding with a mutter, "until tonight, maybe ..."

Conservative in good standing he may be, but Immelt has practical considerations to attend to. The day after this law is passed, he said, "you can write about something else. But I've got to go to work that day." He returned to several points repeatedly:

* The ideologues "worship false idols." There are no completely free markets. The government has its hand in every industry: Housing has mortgage tax credits; GE got into commercial aviation because the DOD helped fund it; in healthcare there's Medicare and Medicaid and the NIH, researching and funding new drugs. Only in energy, for some reason, "we've decided that the only regulation will be the price of a barrel of oil. That's crazy!"

* Businesses always forecast doom, but regulations can often work to spur competition. The SOX trading program worked. OSHA 1910 worked. CAFE standards worked. The production tax credits work. About the PTC, Strassel asked, "how many wind turbines would you have sold this year without government subsidies?" Immelt: "The same number. Just outside the U.S."

* Rising energy costs are not some theoretical worry; they're happening. Costs are rising. Better to get out ahead and take control than wait for it to be thrust on you. By the time a law is written, it will be five years too late.

* If business doesn't take a seat at the table, regs will be determined by politicians and activists (some of which, he said with evident horror, want to do away with coal entirely!). USCAP may not be perfect, but it replaced a vacuum.

Interestingly, criticism from the right came only from pundits and think tankers. Every CEO that addressed Immelt was supportive. Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers shared an old saying: "The pioneers get the arrows and the settlers get the land." Patricia Woertz of ADM talked about how mission-driven business can attract great employees. H. Lee Scott Jr. of Wal-Mart talked about how odd it is that conservatives oppose programs that are, in effect, reducing waste.

The impassioned folks from the Competitive Enterprise Institute are known fans of carbon dioxide, having long claimed it is "good for you", but I'm beginning to wonder if there is actually a mystical element behind the obsession some of the ideological conservatives have with continuing to burn fossil fuels instead of just switching over to clean energy sources and getting on with business.

Libertarians have long identified with Prometheus, one of the Titans of Greek mythology, who is best known for stealing fire from the god Zeus and giving it to mortals for their use - thus playing a pivotal role in the early history of mankind. For his trouble Zeus chained him to a rock where his liver was pecked at by vultures, until he was finally rescued by Hercules many years later.

Some examples of the idolisation of Prometheus in libertarian circles include :

* In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, John Galt is compared to Prometheus: "John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire--until the day men withdraw their vultures."

* In Ayn Rand's Anthem, the main character changes his name to Prometheus after being condemned for inventing the light bulb.

* Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound rewrites the lost play of Aeschylus so that Prometheus does not submit to Zeus (Shelley's Jupiter), but supplants him instead in a triumph of the human heart and intellect over tyrannical religion. Lord Byron's poem "Prometheus" also portrays the titan as unrepentant. For the Romantics, Prometheus was the rebel who resisted all forms of institutional tyranny epitomized by Zeus -- church, monarch, and patriarch (description from the Wikipedia article).

* The Prometheus Institute is a libertarian think tank in the US (albeit one keen to distance itself from Ayn Rand's Objectivists).

* The Libertarian Futurist Society sponsors an annual prize for libertarian science fiction called the Prometheus award - though looking at the list of recent winners (including Ken MacLeod, Charlie Stross and Vernor Vinge) it seems they have a different slant on things to the corporate libertarians pestering Jeffrey Immelt or Ron Paul's paleo-libertarians.

* There a sculpture of Prometheus outside the Rockefeller Center in New York - GE's headquarters (though it seems Mr Immelt isn't buying into the Prometheus worship any more).



Given this strong identification with Prometheus and the fire he gave mankind, perhaps there is some strong subconscious resistance at work in the traditional Libertarian mindset to the idea that we stop setting fire to things - clinging to the practice of burning fossil fuels like polar bears clinging to the last melting pieces of ice cap in the Arctic.

This psychological barrier then manifests itself in the form of resistance to doing anything about global warming, or even acknowledging that global warming is occurring, and to the idea that oil production will peak one day - sometimes resulting in the adoption of abiotic oil theory as a way of keeping the fires burning forever.

Of course, there is an alternative way of framing the transition that might allay these subconscious fears that we are heading backward into a pre-fire age - instead focusing on the fact that we are moving forward to high technology ways of generating the energy we require - a leap forward, rather than a step backward (and a very popular one at that). Given that the most clean energy sources are driven either directly or indirectly by the sun, perhaps fire worship can be replaced with sun worship over a period of time.

Admittedly this isn't the only factor at play - the dislike of regulation obviously plays a huge part (triggered by many activists suggesting heavy handed solutions to both problems) along with a loathing of environmentalists and hippies. There isn't much that can be done about the last one, but coming up with solutions that don't involve endless lists of rules enforced by the government is the best way of overcoming the first barrier - one reason why I prefer carbon taxes (which can be applied along with corresponding income tax cuts, thus ending up with no net loss from your average free marketeers point of view).