elbows
Well-Known Member
Not sure why I bothered being curious, the same old same old, despite the fact that enough time already passed to prove that you were over-egging things back in the day for no bloody good reason other than trying to conjure up an even more desperate sense of immediacy of crisis than would actually turn out to be the case. No acknowledgement that you damaged your own credibility when it came to that stuff, and plenty of goalpost moving.
Its bloody simple in regards the point I raised from all those years ago - the yearly rate of production declines. You painted a picture where the graph would show UK declines of increasing steepness year on year, rather than what actually happened, which is more nuanced and bumpy with further minor peaks along with the declines. In some senses its a minor point because given enough time the graph will still go in that direction overall and things will dwindle to a level where the plug is pulled on what little production is left. But it does affect the exact timing of when this happens, and in this sense your spin on facts is at east as grotesque as that of the industry - you think they need to make the picture look better than it really is to the public, but its pretty clear that you decided long ago to do just the opposite, and stick to a picture that is even worse than it really is.
I know that historically part of the way you did this was to suggest that all of the different areas of production that have been unlocked in recent times are somehow phoney, that the true costs are hidden, and that peoples food is being liquidated in order to prop up the numbers. Well, do I know what you mean, just as capitalism is often fond of keeping the true costs of something conveniently disconnected from the financial picture they are trying to paint, since someone other than them will be expected to foot the ultimate bill to civilisation. In a very broad sense I could agree along a number of lines, but we are well past the point of being able to pretend that Shale oil is just trickery. There may be trickery in terms of some predictions about how long it will last over the next 20 years or so, but that industry already survived some price drops and made a material difference to the picture of global exports. There is certainly some stuff going on with regards the demand side, eg the removal of fuel subsidies in some parts of the world, and the destruction of some states that would otherwise have seen a lot of increasing domestic consumption. I'm not in denial about that, I am interested in all these years that are behind us and in front of us, where the existing systems are managing the situation in ways that do have notable effects on people, but are still not the ultimate end game where a classic and simple oil production decline unfolds in a manner that is clear and obvious and matches your rhetoric.
I still think a big chunk of what you say will turn out to be true eventually, but that it is rather important to try to judge when exactly that eventuality will come home to roost. And when it comes to the timing, we are just going to argue like this incessantly so I probably wont bother.
For what its worth I still find it unlikely that there was no relationship at all between what happened to the oil price, and the financial crisis. I think there may have been a partial acknowledgement about, at best, limits to future growth, and the idea that we had been borrowing against a future that will never exist. But the full picture is complex and I do not know quite how much temporary wiggle room there is, or for how long the wriggling will be able to continue. There have been some changes to the trajectory of transition since we first spoke of these issues, still absolutely nowhere near enough to 'save the system as we currently know it', which was always going to be completely impossible as far as I'm concerned. But I would have had egg all over my face by now if I was only interested in ramping up the doom, and promoting the earliest possible timescales for collapse. There are only so many times that people are going to listen to predictions of doom being just around the next corner before they become skeptical. And that sort of skepticism is only going to make things worse eventually, when the shit really does hit the fan.
Its bloody simple in regards the point I raised from all those years ago - the yearly rate of production declines. You painted a picture where the graph would show UK declines of increasing steepness year on year, rather than what actually happened, which is more nuanced and bumpy with further minor peaks along with the declines. In some senses its a minor point because given enough time the graph will still go in that direction overall and things will dwindle to a level where the plug is pulled on what little production is left. But it does affect the exact timing of when this happens, and in this sense your spin on facts is at east as grotesque as that of the industry - you think they need to make the picture look better than it really is to the public, but its pretty clear that you decided long ago to do just the opposite, and stick to a picture that is even worse than it really is.
I know that historically part of the way you did this was to suggest that all of the different areas of production that have been unlocked in recent times are somehow phoney, that the true costs are hidden, and that peoples food is being liquidated in order to prop up the numbers. Well, do I know what you mean, just as capitalism is often fond of keeping the true costs of something conveniently disconnected from the financial picture they are trying to paint, since someone other than them will be expected to foot the ultimate bill to civilisation. In a very broad sense I could agree along a number of lines, but we are well past the point of being able to pretend that Shale oil is just trickery. There may be trickery in terms of some predictions about how long it will last over the next 20 years or so, but that industry already survived some price drops and made a material difference to the picture of global exports. There is certainly some stuff going on with regards the demand side, eg the removal of fuel subsidies in some parts of the world, and the destruction of some states that would otherwise have seen a lot of increasing domestic consumption. I'm not in denial about that, I am interested in all these years that are behind us and in front of us, where the existing systems are managing the situation in ways that do have notable effects on people, but are still not the ultimate end game where a classic and simple oil production decline unfolds in a manner that is clear and obvious and matches your rhetoric.
I still think a big chunk of what you say will turn out to be true eventually, but that it is rather important to try to judge when exactly that eventuality will come home to roost. And when it comes to the timing, we are just going to argue like this incessantly so I probably wont bother.
For what its worth I still find it unlikely that there was no relationship at all between what happened to the oil price, and the financial crisis. I think there may have been a partial acknowledgement about, at best, limits to future growth, and the idea that we had been borrowing against a future that will never exist. But the full picture is complex and I do not know quite how much temporary wiggle room there is, or for how long the wriggling will be able to continue. There have been some changes to the trajectory of transition since we first spoke of these issues, still absolutely nowhere near enough to 'save the system as we currently know it', which was always going to be completely impossible as far as I'm concerned. But I would have had egg all over my face by now if I was only interested in ramping up the doom, and promoting the earliest possible timescales for collapse. There are only so many times that people are going to listen to predictions of doom being just around the next corner before they become skeptical. And that sort of skepticism is only going to make things worse eventually, when the shit really does hit the fan.
