Surviving Capitalism (Not) : They tell us we're on the cusp of an oil & gas revolution. But what if it's all just a short-term bubble?

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

They tell us we're on the cusp of an oil & gas revolution. But what if it's all just a short-term bubble?

Click here to access a website produced by the Post Carbon Institute which is dedicated to this question.

The Reality is that the so-called shale revolution is nothing more than a bubble, driven by record levels of drilling, speculative lease & flip practices on the part of shale energy companies, fee-driven promotion by the same investment banks that fomented the housing bubble, and by unsustainably low natural gas prices. Geological and economic constraints – not to mention the very serious environmental and health impacts of drilling – mean that shale gas and shale oil (tight oil) are far from the solution to our energy woes.

The favorable propaganda celebrating the bubble found all over ruling class media can generally be explained by their blindness to a long-term vision that handicaps all capitalists whose class interests causes them to focus on short-term profits as reported in quarterly financial statements.