CRITICALITY

Kunstler is at his best when the subject matter ventures towards his Long Emergency book. The American people are being badly misled by idiots like Gingrich spouting the big lie of energy independence. We import 8 million barrels of oil per day and these morons have the gall to declare imminent energy independence if we can just drill in Alaska and off our coasts. You will never get the truth from a politician, oil executive, NYT journalist, or government bureaucrat. You need to think for yourself and connect the dots. As gas soars toward $5 a gallon, be thankful for the Dept of Energy – created in 1979 to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Their annual budget of $30 billion is really paying dividends for the American people.

A Fog of Mendacity

Those frightening sounds, sights, and odors on the wind this foreboding snowless winter – like emanations from some back ward of a global psychiatric hospital – are the signs of a nation going completely mad. The traumatic rise of oil prices above the $100 level is one irritant, prompting a range of people-who-oughta-know-better to gibber and fulminate as though they’d been locked in the nation’s attic since Thanksgiving with nothing to do but play with a box of pencils. Meanwhile, several absurd “narratives” circulate around the mainstream media that are sure to cause this country more trouble – as any set of pernicious untruths will.

One popular new lie is that US oil production is suddenly so robust that America is about to become a leading world oil exporter again – which is completely untrue. The lie arises at the intersection of wishful thinking and the willful misuse of statistics. It was trumpeted by the appallingly credulous Tom Friedman in his Sunday New York Times column, of all places, and it shows how effective the oil and gas industry’s propaganda campaign has been.

A lot of the wishing comes out of the shale oil and shale gas sectors. Those TV commercials you see around the news hours on the cable networks are designed to extract investment capital from elderly people who have been swindled in the bond markets and don’t know where to stick their dwindling retirement funds. Shale oil and gas must seem like a good bet to them, especially the ones marooned in retirement housing clusters in dismal places like Arizona and Florida, where not being able to drive is a virtual death sentence.

The US government is in on this propaganda offensive, especially the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency (EIA), which routinely issues overly optimistic reports about future oil production. The political spin is a quixotic effort to promote another commonly touted lie about the future: that the US is approaching a point of “energy independence.” You’ll know we got there when you have to walk to your new job weeding the potato fields. The mendacity behind this propaganda is strictly the wish of politicians to avoid telling voters the truth, out of sheer cowardice for the consequences. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu will go down in history as a pathetically passive quisling, who thought he was honest and patriotic by standing in the background and keeping his mouth shut.

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