Partisan conservatives pooh-pooh peak oil (and human-caused climate change) because they think that to concede that these challenges are real and must be confronted is to acknowledge that greed is not always good, and that free market capitalism must be restrained, or at least tinkered with substantially. Peak oil and climate change are fronts in the culture wars, and to some conservatives, watching the price of oil rise as the Arctic ice melts, it might feel like being in Germany at the close of World War II, with the Russians advancing on one front while U.S.-led forces come from the other. The propositions that cheap oil is running out and the world is getting hotter — as a result of our own activities — threaten a whole way of life. The very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema.
Now, what if the matter is empirical, not philosophical? What if there is a fact of the matter of how much oil there is on the planet? Shouldn’t somebody do some research on it?
Well, well.
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