[su_spoiler title=”Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise. ” open=”yes” style=”fancy” icon=”arrow-circle-1″]
Eric A. Blair (EAB)
| Traducir—Translate! | |
| Make fonts bigger>>> | [wpavefrsz-resizer] |
IT’S THE OILCONOMY, STUPID
PART 3A : MATERIAL WEALTH and THE US PETRODOLLAR
by EAB, October/November 2025
MATERIAL WEALTH
At least twice per year, I re-read one of the most impactful essays ever written in the English language. It is called “Cold Turkey”, by the late great Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/cold-turkey
(*Read it in full in our Appendix)
Back in 2004, Kurt decried the invasion of Iraq for oil by the Bush regime which was based on lies.
Events in 2025 must now be causing Kurt to turn in his grave. We are witnessing the proxy war between the USA and Russia and the impending bombing of Venezuela and Iran for oil and gas by the Trump regime, all based on lies. History rhyming. The difference today is that Trump is certain to fail.
Kurt’s parting words in his essay were this:
“Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”
A twenty-one-year-old essay that is 100% relevant today. Certain morons may deny the reality of petroleum depletion and claim that the idea of “Peak Oil” is dead. I will demolish, crush and utterly destroy the arguments of those morons in the essays to come.
What device are you reading this article on: a smartphone, a computer, even a smart TV? What materials is that device made of, and how were they mined, manufactured and assembled and how were all the supply chains linked together: by road, rail, sea or air and by what vehicles were they transported and how were those vehicles powered?
Just one direct hit on Moscow by an B83 could cause the immediate death of 3 million people. Londoners and New Yorkers could face similar scenarios.
Where are you now? How was the apartment or house or office (or car or bus or train or plane) you are in constructed? What materials are they made of and how were they mined, manufactured and assembled and how were all the supply chains linked together: by road, rail, sea or air and by what vehicles were they transported and how were those vehicles powered?
The clothes you are now wearing are at least partly blended with polymers derived from petroleum (polyester, nylon, rayon, elastane etc), and even if mostly cotton, how was that plant sown, fertilised, irrigated, harvested and processed? If you wear spectacles, the lenses are plastic, contact lenses are plastic, your toothbrush is plastic and your toothpaste and cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, even the paint on your walls were made from chemicals derived from petroleum.
Certain industries or systems may be powered by electricity eg bauxite smelting, electric railways etc, however even if that electricity comes from so-called renewable sources, the dams or geothermal plants or nuclear power plants or solar farms or wind farms that generate that electricity were made from raw materials and minerals mined by machines powered by diesel, components were processed and manufactured by machines powered by diesel, then transported by and constructed by machines powered by diesel.
“Renewable energy” sources are fossil fuel extenders, not fossil fuel replacements. Once those renewable energy electrical generators reach their natural end of life and need replacement and once we have run out of extractable fossil fuels, INDUSTRIAL CIVILISATION AND OUR MATERIAL WEALTH WILL END. Mass die-off followed by an infinite future of abject poverty. That is, unless we can find a new energy source. More about that later. (Hint: do NOT bet on fusion energy, which has always been and will always be just 5 years away).
BELOW: The B2 stealth bomber is just about the only warplane today in the US arsenal capable of delivering B-83 nuclear bombs.
The great “productivity” of industrial scale agriculture (an argument also to be teased out later) is because of nitrogen fertiliser made from methane (Haber-Bosch) derived from gas/oil wells and by machines powered by diesel to plough, sow, harvest and transport the crops, not to mention herbicides and pesticides made from fossil fuels, sprayed by turboprop crop-dusting planes powered by Jet A1 kerosene. Irrigation uses water pumps run by energy mostly derived from petroleum and bore holes drilled into aquifers require machinery powered by petroleum.
Practically ALL our material wealth today directly or indirectly comes from fossil fuels and we remain completely ADDICTED.
If we are suddenly all deprived of fossil fuels today, the vast majority of humanity will be DEAD within a few months.
A methadone program is possible, to be discussed later, but those in denial of our existing fossil fuel addiction, those who refuse to plan ahead, when they are eventually faced with inevitable terminal oil depletion, will simply go cold turkey and DIE.
Do you understand all that, you pig ignorant Europeans? Do you understand all that, you pig ignorant Americans?
[su_note note_color=”#ebf1f7″ radius=”17″]Ten years ago Western Europeans had a reputation for being climate conscious and being keen to transition to “renewable energy”. Unfortunately, the original German Greens were hijacked by brown shirt CAWPs*, who chose to cut themselves off from low emissions Russian piped gas, in favour of super high emissions US LNG, as well as shut down low emissions nuclear plants in favour of brown coal, the dirtiest coal variety of all.[/su_note]
Am I being insulting by calling the Europeans pig ignorant? Not if the vast majority of Europeans are unable to see the direct link, the indisputable cause and effect between cutting themselves off from cheap Russian gas and oil and the catastrophic collapse of their industries, agriculture and economies which will NEVER RECOVER. Oink, oink.
I am NOT advocating that we keep utilising fossil fuels forever (which is impossible), I am merely acknowledging the FACT that practically all our material wealth today, directly or indirectly, stems from fossil fuels, primarily oil and gas.
I also acknowledge the FACT that rapid CATASTROPHIC anthropogenic global warming (AGM) is very real, is happening now and could potentially render humanity EXTINCT some decades from now. The scientific evidence is utterly indisputable and the outlook is getting worse every year.
I also acknowledge the FACT that continued use of oil and gas will lead to their eventual effective DEPLETION. The scientific evidence is utterly indisputable.
Here is a wise quote: “Wishful thinking is the enemy of accurate analysis“, I cannot remember who said it, perhaps it was Dr Wilmer Leon, it certainly sounds like him.
Many acknowledge the fact that our wealth stems from the use of fossil fuels, but then reflexively choose to deny the reality of AGM and/or petroleum depletion, because the implications of such truths are that we must somehow get off fossil fuels if we are to survive, yet that will lead us into a future of abject poverty. They therefore base their beliefs on wishful delusional thinking that AGM is untrue and that petroleum will never deplete.
On the other hand, there is the Extinction Rebellion crowd (who I deeply empathise and sympathise with and whose moral courage I admire), who are concerned about potential climate extinction (which I agree is a REAL POSSIBILITY but NOT a certainty) and who use the catchphrase “just say no to fossil fuels”. They wishfully think that suddenly stopping fossil fuel consumption is feasible, that it will not result in the death and impoverishment of billions. It will.
I am not here to confer good news or bad news. I am here to describe reality based on hard facts and rational analysis. My conclusion, arrived at more than a decade ago, is that the die-off of billions of people this century is inevitable, it simply cannot be avoided. Ecologists and system analysts have a term for this dire predicament, it is called “overshoot” and we are now well past that. Once you have fallen off a cliff, it is difficult to grow feathers on your arms.
However, human extinction this century, while entirely possible, CAN potentially be avoided. This is not wishful thinking; it is based on various facts I will elucidate later.
I am NOT an uber doomer loser climate near-term human extinction (NTHE) ideologue, the type who insisted we face climate extinction by 2030, then revised it and brought it forward to 2026. They are a particular and peculiar group of certifiable nutcases who inhabit a lunatic echo-chamber of their own.
Here is an indisputable fact however: global thermonuclear war WILL cause near term human extinction, because of the more than decade long subsequent nuclear winter, during which all plants will die, and because of the destruction of the ozone layer by stratospheric nitrogen oxides, which will cause cancers and infertility in the unlikely event there are any remaining survivors after the nuclear winter clears.
I offer the above fact and science-based information to the CAWP* neoconartists in the beltway swamp and Pentagon who think they can survive nuclear war by hiding in their bunkers:
Carve that message on a jagged rock, shove it up your rectum and sit on it.
Footnote:
*CAWPs = Chickenshit Armchair Warmongering Psychopaths
|
Cold TurkeyKurt VonnegutMany years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
[bg_collapse view=”button-orange” color=”#4a4949″ expand_text=”Show More Click Here” collapse_text=”Show Less” ] But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted. Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government. I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it. I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one. But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this: Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all? How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes? Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. … And so on. Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff. For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break! There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are! I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that. Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person? No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said. During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again. Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken. One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us. And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737–1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times. The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913–1960 A.D. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade. But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball. Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:
Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut. If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you. If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler? My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint. Other drunks have seen pink elephants. And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals. We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.” How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today. So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief. That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay. Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People. About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem. I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other. But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut. And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels. When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey. Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on. [/bg_collapse] [su_box title=”About the Author” style=”bubbles” box_color=”#0778d1″ radius=”18″]
 Kurt Vonnegut, the legendary author, WWII veteran, humanist, artist and smoker, was an In These Times senior editor until his death in April 2007. His classic works include Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle, among many others. The last book by him published before his death, A Man Without a Country (2005), collects many of the articles he wrote for this magazine.[/su_box] |
ADDENDUM
The True Scale Of Modern Nuclear Weapons {An Eye Opener]
BEFORE you leave, PLEASE pay attention to this alert.
[t4b-ticker id=”1″]
[/su_spoiler]
Print this article [bws_pdfprint display=’print’]
[su_note note_color=”#f1efef” radius=”0″]The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post, although, if we publish them, we obviously find them noteworthy and valuable. [/su_note]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
3 comments
“Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power.”
– KV Jr “Cold Turkey”
In the long timeline of history, our fossil fuel windfall is but the blink of an eye.
“Renewable energy” and uranium fueled electricity generators are fossil fuel extenders, not ff replacements and require ff for their construction, maintenance and for the mining of uranium.