PROGRESSIVISM PRODUCES PENURY.

In "The Iran War Reveals a Global Chokepoint," Common Dreams contributor Richard Heinberg admits as much.  "The current fixation of world attention on the Strait of Hormuz should remind us of the inherent brittleness of an economy in which our food and energy security, and our livelihoods, are intertwined with depleting and polluting resources and expectations of perpetual growth."  If you don't ask too much of his essay, there is wisdom in it.  "The more extensive the market, the finer a division of labour is possible.  That's generally for the good, but what happens when the s**t hits the fan?"

That question of the delivery trucks not coming turned from online musings to messy reality a couple years later, when the politicians panicked and cities had to make do with stocks of toilet paper, and sometimes foodstuffs, on hand.  But if you're contributing to Common Dreams, you think that reducing the carbon footprint of the civilized word is a good thing for its own sake.  Helium and fertilizers, as well as sweet crude oil, transit the strait, and what's left of the mullahcracy seems bent on flipping their remaining drones and antiship missiles that way.  Now is the time, this Heinberg fellow asserts, to reduce our dependence on shipping through the strait.

These developments underscore a message that we at Post Carbon Institute have been repeating for over two decades. Oil and other fossil fuels are the basis of the modern industrial economy. They’re polluting, but they’re also depleting. And in the case of oil (and, increasingly, natural gas) they’re internationally traded at massive scales, raising geopolitical risks. This is a system destined to fail.

But when? During and shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the all-time peak in world conventional oil production seemed to be at hand.

pppIt wasn't.  But the real kicker comes at the end of the essay.

The current fixation of world attention on the Strait of Hormuz should remind us of the inherent brittleness of an economy in which our food and energy security, and our livelihoods, are intertwined with depleting and polluting resources and expectations of perpetual growth. More chokepoints loom.

As always, we advise community resilience as the best strategy for coping with what’s coming. Localize production and consumption, reduce your dependency on global supply chains, and get to know your neighbors.

Reduce the extent of the markets, reduce the division of labor, revert to the living standards of the early nineteenth century, before steamships and railroads.  So it always is with these environmentalist true believers.  Hard pass.