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Clarke’s Wager
Kurt Cobb, Scitizen (“Bringing Science Closer to Society”)
Some 350 years ago, mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that it is better to wager for the existence of God than against it since the benefits of believing in God are so great. The argument became known as Pascal’s Wager. Today, author Duncan Clarke asks us to make a kind of inverted Pascal’s Wager in favor of continued abundance in world oil supplies. Is it a good bet?
A recent public exchange between David Strahan, author of The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man, and Duncan Clarke, author of The Battle for Barrels: Peak Oil Myths & World Oil Futures, illustrates a key point in the debate over the timing and consequences of world peak oil production.
…It is curious that for Clarke all of the surprises in a world full of nonlinearity seem to fall on the side of more oil rather than less. But there is no reason for this to be so. With all its curves and unexpected changes of direction, a nonlinear system can go down as well as up. And so, in a way the admission by Clarke that we live in a nonlinear world, at least when it comes to oil production, defeats his whole case. For his case isn’t really about oil per se, but about whether any immediate and purposeful preparations for a world of declining oil are necessary. What he is saying essentially is that because he can make out a strong case for continued abundance, we don’t need to worry about doing anything just now about our oil dependence.
We’ll call this Clarke’s Wager, a sort of inverted Pascal’s Wager about oil and the future of civilization.
(20 November 2007)
A new exhibition considers the lessons of the 1973 oil crisis.
Paul Makovsky, Metropolis Magazine
With fuel prices reaching record highs and concern about the planet’s dwindling resources mounting daily, Mirko Zardini, director and curator of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), thought the time was ripe to revisit the moment when the reality of an energy crisis first crashed into the public consciousness.
The exhibition “1973: Sorry, Out of Gas,” on view at the CCA until next April, considers that decade’s oil crisis and the architecture community’s response, which included significant experiments and research that Zardini fears are now being ignored. “Architectural thinking is very strange,” he says. “These people were heroes for a few years, and they have been forgotten. I feel that it is intellectually necessary to go back and pay homage to their contributions.”
But if the show is in part a celebration of green pioneers like Michael Reynolds and Steve Baer, it is also a warning to contemporary architects enamored with solely technological-driven solutions, and a call for societal changes to combat looming ecological disaster. Metropolis editorial director Paul Makovsky recently spoke with Zardini about the exhibition, the challenges facing sustainability in the future, and why Switzerland may be the new promised land.
Q: What exactly is the idea behind this exhibition?
Zardini: We want to say that nothing has changed. When the price of oil decreased in the eighties and nineties, most of us were very pleased to forget the crisis of the seventies. Today we have to confront this political problem again, as well as really analyze the shortage of natural resources. The awareness of environmental degradation was not as high in the seventies as it is today. But, since then, our decisions have become much more difficult politically, socially, and environmentally.
In a certain way we lost the last thirty years, and that is the point of the exhibition. In spite of the contributions of the seventies, when people and groups realized that the energy problem is deeply related to a society’s way of life, we are still attached to technological solutions. To think that the energy crisis will only be solved technologically is very reductive, and that scares me.
Q: How did groups in the seventies understand the problem differently?
Zardini: The Do-It-Yourself movement, for instance, raised the very important point that there are different levels of intervention, that each of us can get involved politically at different levels of the process. That for me is crucial to our future. With the increasing cost of energy, some argue that it is inevitable that the market will foster technological solutions and alternative sources-but we also need some political decisions supporting these options. We need to evaluate properly, for example, the investment that a country like Germany made in wind and solar energy. In the seventies there was a lot of criticism of the ideal of the American suburb and the car. Is the car sustainable? What are the alternatives? I want the exhibition to raise a lot of questions. Looking back at the contributions of that period, we can start a discussion on how to take advantage of past experiments.
(21 November 2007)
Give Thanks for Oil – and OPEC
Kelpie Wilson, t r u t h o u t
When you sit down for your Thanksgiving meal this week, don’t forget to thank the oil. No, not the extra extra virgin olive oil or the polyunsaturated high omega 3 vegetable oil, but the crude – the dead dino, fossilized pond scum, ancient sunlight, rock oil – aka, petroleum.
Remember as you give thanks for the bountiful Earth, that back of the bread lies the oil. We should acknowledge that our food production system and every other aspect of our lives are utterly dependent on fossil fuels. We should also remember that before World War II, this was not the case. We may even have relatives who remember those days. We should take a look at the children sitting around the table. They will not live in a world of cheap, abundant oil. Give thanks for that too.
Why should we give thanks that the future holds no cheap oil? There are several reasons, but the first is that cheap oil has fueled a 50-year-long party in the industrialized West that has left us with an unsustainable economy that is wrecking the planet. The recent awareness of global warming is beginning to put a damper on our out-of-control binge, but not fast enough to slow the heating of the planet. Rising oil prices will force a cutback in consumption. Rising oil prices will also chill the fantasy of endless growth and force us to confront the reality of planetary limits.
(20 November 2007)
