Re: Running out of oil?

OK, so I shouldn't be intemperate. However, it is pointless to continue a
discussion when we are not starting from a real investigation of the facts.
And to say that

>But right now,
> many millions of people are miserably deprived not because there is not
> enough oil for their energy or food for them to eat, but rather because
> capitalism A) won't let them have it; and (B) won't even produce what they
> need if they believe that they can't make a profit from it.

is to fly in the face of the facts. There is no such availability of oil.
More. Each English person metaphorically stands on about ten tonnes of
steel - the accumulated, written-down asset-base of 250 years of
industrialisation; each year British quarries mine several times more rock
for hardcore and concrete than is contained in all the pyramids of Egypt.
The same is true of core-states generally. There is no possibility
whatsoever of the billions who live outside the cores which are thus endowed
with infrastructure, EVER catching up. The biosphere cannot support it. You
would need to have at least five other planet earths parked alongside this
one, to accommodate such a  gigantic ecological footprint. It is simply out
of the question for India, China or Africa to ever achieve standards of
personal or social wealth anywhere within orders of magnitude of those known
in the cores (which, obscenely enough, are still growing!). And the ice caps
are melting ANYWAY.

And these irreducible constraints hold even BEFORE you start to look at the
question of oil scarcity and its impacts. Thus if oil (or coal, or tar sands
or whatever) was burnt in amounts sufficient to make the peripheries as
energy and food-rich as the cores, then climate catastrophe would be
irreversible, would eliminate life on earth. But it cannot happen anyway
because without the existence of cheap petroleum to cross-subsidise all the
other forms of energy, from PV's to windpower to tar sands, these
alternatives can never be more than marginal irrelevancies. And there is no
such superabundance of cheap oil. Therefore, the following are surely
certain: (a) deepening climate dislocations and catastrophes; (b) growing
energy-famines and (c) the entry of the world-system as presently
constituted into an ungovernable and uncorrectable historical impasse. What
happened to one major industrial subset (the USSR and its satellites) of the
system was a precursor and forewarning.

Mark Jones



----- Original Message -----
From: Spectors <spectors@netnitco.net>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 27, 1999 12:08 AM
Subject: Running out of oil?


> Mark Jones, who often posts some insightful messages on WSN, does not see
> the dialectic of the recent discussion on WSN the way I do.  The core of
the
> discussion is not whether the world can ever run out of oil. Or even how
> much oil is left on Earth. Whether it is 10,000 gallons or
> 10,000,000,000,000,000 gallons is something that Marxist theory, or any
> theory for that matter, cannot answer without having the data, the
> information. Of course.
>
> The dialectic of the recent struggle started out with a sociobiologist
> practically imputing consciousness to "genes" and arguing, in essence,
that
> virtually all variance in social, cultural, political, and economic
> processes can be rather easily reduced to his simplified version of
> genetics. Tied in with this was some rather stale Malthusianism.  His
> discussions about energy use, and his dire predictions that the world will
> run out of oil in the next few years (five? ten?) are quite pretentious,
and
> are a corollary to his sociobiological beliefs rather than something which
> independently is a matter of concern. His metaphors, examples, and
evidence
> for the five year or fifteen year depletion is not at all compelling.
>
> Is oil the axis on which social change hinges in the near future? On that
I
> tend to say "YES." Most emphatically. Well, not exactly. It hinges on the
> mode of production, on capitalism, on imperialism, on profits.  But oil is
> most definitely KEY to profits in an immediate sense (selling oil) as well
> as being the stuff that keeps industry and farm machinery and trucks and
> cars and trains running. And buildings warm.  And there certainly could be
> MAJOR WARS fought over CONTROL OF OIL, and CONTROL OF OIL PROFITS. But
that
> is not the same as saying that the fight would be over having the oil for
> the working class to USE.  Marxism, and other theories as well,
> differentiate between production for sale and production for use.
>
> Does capitalism squander oil? Yep. Terribly. Does it produce ecological
> disasters with pollution?  No doubt. Could it conceivably deplete the oil
> supply to the point where it impacts on people's lives? Yep. But right
now,
> many millions of people are miserably deprived not because there is not
> enough oil for their energy or food for them to eat, but rather because
> capitalism A) won't let them have it; and (B) won't even produce what they
> need if they believe that they can't make a profit from it.
>
> There is a "real world" which existed before people and politics, and of
> course, this sets certain limits. But until we resolve the social,
political
> and economic issues (which, to me, means the complete end of class
> exploitation, class inequality, and the culture that goes along with it)
we
> will also be seriously hampered in our ability to understand the natural
> world.  We have to do our best, of course, but the struggle over politics
> and economics, the social struggle, is what is key at this point in world
> history.
>
> As a final point, discussions on WSN have been a bit skewed of late. That
> often happens right before a school year starts, and only a few people
> dominate the discussion.  To withdraw from a list of hundreds of serious,
> concerned social scientists because you don't like what two people wrote
> seems a bit odd, but I guess that's everyone's choice.
>
> Alan Spector
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: M A Jones <mark@jones118.freeserve.co.uk>
> To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, August 26, 1999 4:49 PM
> Subject: Re: Hanson
>
>
> > This is silliness bordering on denial. Petroleum IS running out, as even
> the
> > IEA has recently acknowledged. Why do social 'scientists' like Stremlin
> and
> > Spectors have such trouble facing up to a well-attested and accepted
fact?
> > You may not want to believe Hanson but you can hardly continue this
absurd
> > ostrich performance in the face of expert opinion and the statements of
> > international agencies tasked with dealing with the matter. Or perhaps
you
> > can, I dunno. Either way, it shows the utter pointlessness of even
> debating
> > you. I, too, shall be unsubbing.
> >
> > Mark Jones
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Boris Stremlin <bc70219@binghamton.edu>
> > To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
> > Sent: Thursday, August 26, 1999 9:49 PM
> > Subject: Re: Hanson
> >
> >
> > > I couldn't have said it better myself.  Off-list commentary used with
> > > permission of the author.
> > >
> > > On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Spectors wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'm about finished responding to Hanson. His comment:
> > > >
> > > > "It is not necessary to understand all the complexities of the
social
> > > > world."
> > > >
> > > > marks him as someone who actually is not concerned with
investigating
> > the
> > > > world, but rather advancing his own science-fiction agenda.  His
last
> > > > response to you, complete with a 25 year old news article about oil
> > > > shortages is very silly. One could argue that the shortage of fresh
> air
> > in
> > > > parts of Mexico City prove that the Earth is about to run out of
> oxygen.
> > > > Furthermore, there were very specific political-economic factors
that
> > caused
> > > > that uneveness of oil distribution, and  fact that the oil shortage
of
> > 25
> > > > years ended is what completely discredits his argument. Usually
> doomsday
> > > > folks don't come back 25 years after they were proven wrong and say:
> > "That
> > > > proves I'm right!"
> > >
> > > By the way, Jay has yet to enlighten us as to how the obsolete "social
> > > mentality" has led us to the energy crisis, when in fact prior to the
> rise
> > > of "physical world mentality" such crises did not occur.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Boris Stremlin
> > > bc70219@binghamton.edu
> > >
> > >
> >
>
>