Some of you have been kind enough to ask why my doom-and-gloom forecasts have been absent from these pages for so many issues. It is not, I assure you, because the editors have been censoring me. No. It is simply the world events, in terms of sheer direness, have overtaken anything I might predict. Who needs Cassandra to dampen your optimisim when you can open the daily paper or turn on the TV? Even now I write briefly and only to call your attention to a gloom-and- doomer with far better credentials than your entrail-reading Cassandra, a geologist, one Richard Duncan, who in 2000 delivered an overlooked keynote speech at a meeting of the Geological Society of America. Under the non-catchy title, "The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge," the estimable Dr. Duncan laid out a doom-and-gloom time-line that was after old Cassandra's heart. His argument, which is quite simple really, is that because of energy issues over which at this point we have little control, it's all over for us except the shouting, civilization-wise. The graph above, from his paper, says it all. In August, 1914, as World War I began, a statesman famously remarked: The lights are going out all over Europe, and I don't know if we shall see them come on again in our lifetime. Richard Duncan predicts, with pretty hard data to back him up, that we will shortly--and literally--see the lights going out all over the world. At this point, inveterate free-marketeers and irrepressible imperialists, will of course mutter, "Oh, pooh," and click away to the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, or some such myopic site. Others, who like Cassandra try to keep the emerging shape of future reality in focus, will instead examine and evaluate Richard Duncan's argument for themselves: Go to "The Peak of World Oil Production
How many voices of humor and hope
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2003 Texas Chapbook Press
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