The Real Core of Our Existential Crisis: “Oil That Is… Black Gold… Texas T… Y’all Come Back Now…”
I have not read Rachel Maddow’s book. This has been on my mind for months and I didn’t want her’s to influence my writing. But I have listened to the conclusions she’s drawn and while I agree with much of what she says, I don’t think she went nearly far enough in her assessment of the moment we are in, especially as it has to do with Donald Trump.
“…revelation for me…was how bad they are at their own game. How much they can’t do…Putin really thinks he needs Western oil companies to come help him drill the Arctic. Western oil companies have no idea how to drill the Arctic. They can’t think their way out of it. They can’t innovate their way out of it. They’re not actually that good at what they do. The people that are good at what they do are the people that are going to get us out of this mess.” ~Rachel Maddow, 2019
I was thirteen during the oil crisis of 1973. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] called for an embargo against nations backing Israel during the Yom Kippur War. I remember sitting in those long, long lines for a long, long time to get whatever gas we were allocated and could afford. Gas prices in the United States quadrupled at the apex of the Watergate investigation, lest anyone forget that the oil industry and its fragile fault lines have an uncanny way of revealing themselves anytime our little constitutional experiment is straining at its seams. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, anytime the seams are stretching the fossil fuel lobby comes oozing out.
The seventies were also the first time I heard the trope, “climate change.”
“…there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring… It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities… The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.”
It was also during my teens that I first heard talk of developing alternative energy sources that might eventually replace fossil fuels, but it was dismissed by many as science fiction. Only conceivable in a far away galaxy that had actually already been imagined by then in the original Star Trek. The whole function…
