Fossil Fuels

Spreading Manure over Astroturf: Why Ad Men Hate Brown

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Sharon Astyk is one of those “loony tunes” who shows her concern for the planet by depriving her children of central heat and baseball, or at least that’s how she’s portrayed in the New York Times article by writer Joanne Kaufman.
This article is part of a new media genre that takes the serious worries of almost two-thirds of Americans, and creates a special brand of pathology designed to stigmatize, pathologize, trivialize, and marginalize their concerns. In some articles, they call such activism “eco-anxiety” and seek out therapists who “treat” the “disorder.” In this article, she’s coined a new name for the ‘disease,’ calling it “carborexia,” and apparently it is a disease that is spreading.

Earth as a magic pudding

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Cornucopians – those who believe the Earth’s resources are boundless – have a clever mental trick to avoid acknowledging that the planet is finite. It is commonly called the “resource pyramid”. … As resources begin to become scarce their price rises. The higher price now makes it economically viable to extract the substance from a less accessible and/or less concentrated source. Amazingly, the total amount of the substance present in this lower-grade resource is greater than in the original, most concentrated resource. … The resource pyramid idea contains a hidden assumption – that energy is cheap and abundant. In fact, it is the price of energy that ultimately determines the base of the resource pyramid.

The tyranny of the immediate

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Six months ago, some pundits argued that the price of oil would soon soar to $250 a barrel. Now some are claiming it will soon drop to $35. The short-term vagaries of a speculative market, though, are hiding a long-term message — one the world desperately needs to hear.