We Learn Nothing Read online

  Peak oil is not like the 9/11 Truther conspiracy theory or the Birther movement or any of the other currently fashionable delusional systems. The basic geological and economic facts of peak oil are uncontroversial: petroleum is a nonrenewable resource; eventually it is going to run out. We’ve burned through most of the planet’s supply in less than a century, like crack addicts on a binge. What’s less clear is what the long-term consequences will be, and how we’ll adapt. Possible outcomes span the range of optimism from a somewhat hasty, perhaps not entirely bump-free transition to alternative fuels and energy sources, to the catastrophic end of our civilization and descent into well-armed barbarism. The darkest forecasts involve food riots, wars, and mass starvation, with deaths numbering in the billions.*

  Ken is guarded about his own predictions, but it’s pretty obvious he tends toward the pessimistic end of the spectrum, or else he wouldn’t be lobbying so urgently for all his loved ones to prepare for the worst. Months before the economic crisis of 2008, he was predicting the collapse of the U.S. banking and financial system and runs on individual savings accounts, followed by gas and diesel shortages, followed by food shortages. He himself was selling off his own investments in stocks and bonds and buying gold. He advised me to keep several thousand dollars in cash or traveler’s checks on hand, several weeks’ worth of storable food and bottled water, as well as standard emergency equipment: candles, a flashlight, batteries, a hand-crank recharger. He was tentatively planning to relocate to New Zealand, where the “human-to-nonhuman biomass ratio” was lower, meaning that people will be slower to turn on each other once the supermarkets run out.

  So far, it should be noted, not much has happened to contradict Ken’s argument. Some of his specific predictions have been borne out by subsequent events, and the financial decisions he made based on his research have all been vindicated as savvy ones. He sold his house just before the housing bubble burst, at an 80 percent profit. He invested in gold when it was under $600 an ounce and silver when it was $11; as of this writing, gold is over twice that, at $1,240 an ounce, and silver is over $19. He was generous in sharing all this financial advice with his friends, me included, and we all ignored it. I never even bought a flashlight.

  Ken always considered me one of the few people who’d paid attention to him and didn’t simply dismiss him as a crank. But my main concern was making him feel that I was listening to him and taking him seriously. My focus was on the friendship itself, not the content of our conversations. I was like the dog in the Zen parable staring at the pointing finger instead of the moon. I read around in a perfunctory way on some of the websites Ken had recommended, attended a conference on peak oil for which he’d had paid my registration fee, and watched Collapse, a documentary about a leading peak-oil writer, at his urging. But I never did the hard, boring work of evaluating enough evidence for and against peak oil that I could make an informed decision for myself. I’d been evaluating all the information Ken sent me, but not on the basis of the facts; what I was evaluating was something else.

  Ken was right: I’m intellectually lazy. I’m a fan of empiricism; it’s just a drag to have to practice. If you’re anything like me, you don’t make up your mind about important issues by doing original research, poring over primary sources and coming to your own conclusions; you listen to people who claim to know what they’re talking about—“experts”—and try to determine which of them is more credible. You do your best to gauge who’s authentically well-informed and unbiased, who has an agenda and what it is—who’s a corporate flack, a partisan hack, or a wacko. I believe that global warming is real and anthropogenic not because I’ve personally studied Antarctic ice core samples or run my own computer climate models, but because all the people who support the theory are climatologists with no evident investment in the issue, and all the people who dismiss it as alarmist claptrap are shills for the petro-chemical industry or just seem to like debunking things, from the Holocaust to the moon landing. We put our trust—our votes, our money, sometimes our lives—in someone else’s authority. In other words, most of us decide not what to believe but whom to believe. And I say believe because for most people, such decisions are matters of faith rather than reason.

  But Ken is one of those rare people who actually change their minds—and their lives—based on abstract ideas, on books and intellectual arguments and evidence that challenges their beliefs. Such people are certainly a breath of bracing Enlightenment air compared to the much larger number of people who could care less about any objective pretext for their beliefs—who “just know” that Jesus is real or that Barack Obama is a closet Kenyan. You’d think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there’s something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they’re immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the for fuck’s sake defense. (Think of hard-core libertarians carefully explaining to you why the fire department should be privatized or heroin should be legal or everyone should be allowed to have automatic weapons.) As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, “An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness.”3

  A lot of peak-oil supporters seem to be of this genus, their decision making as carefully divorced from emotion as church is separated from state—which may account for their self-defeating assumption that other people are the same way. The typical rhetorical tone of the papers and articles on peak oil I’ve read is almost willfully unpersuasive, as if they’re conscientiously refraining from any unfair effort to influence your opinion, instead simply placing the inert data before you and waiting for you to draw the correct conclusions. Ken forwarded me an article by Nate Hagens, editor of the peak oil-website The Oil Drum, called “Enter the Elephant,” about the problem of overcoming the irrationality of human nature to effect social change. Hagens writes, “I am becoming convinced that confronting [people] with ‘facts,’ although necessary to better understand our predicament, will be almost completely ineffectual when it comes to altering our course . . . facts will become secondary and accessing raw emotions will be required for change.”4

  Reading this, I suppose I feel the same way Hagens would if I were to write an exposé breaking the news that we can’t just make more oil. That this insight comes to Hagens this late in his campaign to educate a broader audience seems like a telling indictment of the peak-oil movement’s inability to incite action. People are not sent screaming into the streets by warnings like “the global scale of financial leverage relative to achievable quality adjusted BTU flow rates going forward suggests significant changes to our per capita throughput, or even to capita itself,”5 a sentence Hagens writes in the very next paragraph. It’s hard to find a predicate in that sentence—it’s the uncataclysmic “suggests”—let alone cause for alarm. (What this sentence appears to mean, roughly translated, is: “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”) At the peak-oil conference I went to I had the same feeling of walking in late on a conversation in which all the fundamental premises and terms had long since been agreed upon—of having missed out on the first day of class. By contrast, in summer 2009 Fox News was able to convince half the electorate that government health care would lead to some mandatory Carousel-like6 festival of euthanasia.

  At one point Ken wrote to tell me that he’d reserved a cabin on Pony Island, and invited Harold and several of our other friends and me out for a weekend of talking about peak oil—which, since Ken was the only person present who would have any interest in the subject, would mean a weekend spent hearing about peak oil. I imagined it being like one of those free weekends in Maui where you have to spend the whole time in a windowless conference room listening to someone try to sell you a time-share, tortured by the muffled sound of distant surf. I could picture my friends looking at each other, trying to keep straight faces, surreptitiously pantomiming suicide, passing notes saying So hey man when’s freakin’ class over already? I think I made an excuse not to go; as far as I know none of my other fr
iends even responded.

  Not everyone was as impressed by Ken’s intellect as I was. My friend Lauren didn’t necessarily disagree with his conclusions, but she rankled at his response: “Just write off the rest of society, drop out, and hole up in some compound?” I halfheartedly defended him: he hadn’t abandoned everyone—he’d tried to convince his family and friends to join him or take similar measures. “Yeah well, if Ken’s so brilliant,” she said, “how about sticking around to help the rest of us figure a way out of this mess?” But Ken no longer had faith in institutions to recognize the problem, much less offer solutions. The time and money for technological fixes had long run out. And look at what had happened in Hurricane Katrina, he argued: the elites had abandoned the expendable population to fend for themselves. By the time we’re shooting each other over the last can of corn on the shelf they’ll be living like exiled emperors in fortified villas in Belize.

  In 2007 Ken and his wife sold their house outside Philadelphia and bought property in a small town called Golden City, Missouri. Somehow I’d missed both Ken’s marriage and his move to Missouri. By the time he announced both events we’d fallen out of frequent contact. Harold and I had gone to his engagement party and met his fiancée, but neither of us could make it to the wedding. And I’d moved to New York by the time he left Philly, and couldn’t get away to see him one last time. Although I had legitimate excuses for both absences, the truth is that you don’t miss such occasions if you’re still close to someone. By the time you’ve realized that an era has a finite life cycle, an inevitable rise and decline, the peak has already passed.

  After Ken moved to Missouri, we maintained contact exclusively through email, a medium that, as many have learned, is not conducive to discussing sensitive subjects or conveying nuances of tone. There was something relentless about his messages from Golden City, a steady, insistent pressure. He sent me long lectures about permaculture and biophysical economics. He waved off Rebecca Solnit’s hopeful account, in A Paradise Built in Hell, of civil society spontaneously reconstituting itself after disasters, darkly invoking Hobbes instead. He repeatedly invited me to visit. Our correspondence began to remind me uncomfortably of conversations I used to have with a friend who was a cocaine addict: it always felt like he was trying to sell me something, to elicit some very specific response and would not let up until I’d given it to him. I wondered if this was what it felt like when someone was trying to seduce you. In my addict friend’s case the pitch was relatively straightforward—I ought to sublet his apartment or buy this microwave out of the back of his car or just give him money with which to buy more cocaine—but I couldn’t tell what it was that Ken wanted me to say or do. To admit unconditionally that he was right about everything? To sell off my stock in Smucker’s and Rubbermaid and buy gold? To break my lease in New York and make immediate plans to move to Missouri and join him in the peak-oil compound?

  Calling it a “compound” makes it sound more paranoid/survivalist than it was; he and his wife had bought a small farmhouse on four acres of land, where they were cultivating a garden and a “food-bearing forest” of fruit and nut trees. Ken was working for a small nonprofit dedicated to educating people about issues of peak oil, energy, and sustainable living. In the warm months, at least, their life sounded much pleasanter than the one they’d left behind on the East Coast. Ken wrote to me about the vegetables and fruits they were raising, the birds that visited their feeder, their new cat. They spent their weekends buying seeds, shopping for tools and tools used to repair tools. They were currently heating their house with propane and firewood but hoped to make the transition to firewood alone after installing a Franklin stove next season. In the meantime, Ken wrote, he was typing with gloves on. Reading this in my toasty New York City apartment, the radiator hissing pleasantly, I thought, Yeah, no thanks.

  Writing him felt like a minefield of misunderstandings. It was increasingly difficult to avoid giving offense. I tried to anticipate and preempt his arguments. I’d pause and sit at my computer for twenty minutes, trying to think of a neutral, nonjudgmental synonym for what I really meant—advocacy journalism instead of propaganda, or idiosyncratic instead of batshit—that would not provoke a paragraph-long rebuttal parsing my word choice and deconstructing my meaning—only to have him seize on my revised words and write paragraph-long rebuttals of them instead. (“Can you explain to me how anything I’ve done could be accurately described as ‘idiosyncratic’?”) If I called his crusade “Cassandran” he would prove to know much more about the history of the myth of Cassandra than I did and could easily demonstrate why my analogy was false in five different ways. It was one reason I’d always admired and deferred to him—he knew so much more than me, about everything. But he never seemed to understand that exhausting someone in argument isn’t the same as convincing them. In fact it frequently accomplishes the opposite. “Ken might be right, I’ll give him that,” admitted my friend Kevin. “But I’m never, ever going to agree with him.”

  Even when you were trying to agree with him, it seemed as if you could never agree enough—you were always going to be behind the curve, things were always worse than you understood. I’d forward him an interview with the political science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson in which he referred to peak oil, and Ken would respond that it was nice to hear that Robinson was catching up but he was disappointed that he seemed unaware of the even more pressing issues of peak water and peak phosphorus. Like, now I’m supposed to worry about peak phosphorus? It was becoming easier to ignore him than to try to keep up. His worldview was gradually contracting into a one-man club—or two people, including his wife—that excluded everyone else on earth.

  Ken and his wife endured more social ostracism over the issue of peak oil than my friend Jim Boylan did when he announced that he was going to become a woman. (Maybe most people—most liberals, at least—are less inhibited about judging people for what they believe than for what they are.) According to Ken, he had been mocked by his closest friends and family. His in-laws had openly urged his wife to leave him, telling her that her husband was insane, that he’d hijacked her life on some delusional crusade. (“People don’t move to Missouri,” her mother explained.) Ken had reason to be oversensitive. But I also think he engendered some of this defensiveness and hostility because his life choices seemed to a lot of people—whether he intended them as such or not—like tacit repudiations of their own. He made the rest of us look complacent, lazy, indulgent, and apathetic, in the same way that vegans’ conscientious diets can’t help but indict carnivores’ as callous. The impulse is to write such people off as self-righteous and shrill (which, conveniently, they often are) so that you can stop thinking about slaughterhouses and keep eating scrapple.

  When somebody tells us something that would be disturbing or inconvenient for us to believe, we reflexively scrutinize that person for some excuse to discredit him. Their disdain for emotion and dogged, blindered focus on Evidence and the Facts makes it tempting to speculate that people like Ken, rather than simply being more objective than the rest of us—which might threaten to make us feel stupid—just have more deeply buried agendas and are driven by unconscious forces about which they’re in even better-defended denial. It’s not usually hard to find such ulterior motives in anyone, especially not in the sorts of people who are most likely to bring us such news. As soon as Ken started insistently telling us things we didn’t want to know, all of his familiar eccentricities and foibles started to seem suspect, symptomatic of some pathology. Even those qualities we’d always admired in him—his unrelenting intellectual curiosity, his bottomless erudition, his adamant conviction—became grating.

  His interest in peak oil was also consistent with a history of abrupt changes of direction in which he’d reorganize his whole life around some new intellectual enthusiasm. Once every five years or so he’d change his academic focus, his career, and his circle of friends. He’d amassed a BA, two MAs, and an MFA, and begun two PhDs and abandoned them
both ABD (all but dissertation). One day when we were driving from my cabin down to Ken’s house, Ken in one car and Harold and me following, Ken unexpectedly pulled over onto the shoulder, got out of his car, and ran back to ours. Harold and I thought he must be having car trouble, or had forgotten something back at my house. We rolled down the window. “I almost forgot to mention,” he said, beaming. “I’m retired!” He ran back to his car and drove on. It was an uncharacteristic bit of theatricality. He explained further when we got to his house: inspired by his creative work with Harold and me, he’d resigned his teaching position and decided to become a full-time filmmaker. And he did indeed form a filmmaking collective, which made a few short films that were entered in competitions and festivals, until he discovered the implications of peak oil. So it’s easy to hope that the peak-oil thing has almost run its course and by this time next year he’ll be writing an opera about Eugene Debs or monitoring those mysterious radio stations that just recite numbers late at night.

  But what most gave me pause, privately, was my sense that Ken was a deeply angry man. Which is not to say he was some stereotypical lefty ranting about The Man with the tendons in his neck sticking out; in fact his demeanor was exceedingly gentle and courteous. His voice was soft but insistent, reminding you of the way that some people lower rather than raise their voices when they’re furious. I only ever heard him raise his voice when he concluded a long, carefully constructed argument, like an exuberant flourish at the end of a handwritten declaration, as if to say, “Refute that!” His anger, when he expressed it, was couched in deceptively bland expressions like “It puzzles me . . . ” or “Can I ask you to be clear . . . ?” I’d lash back at his endless lectures from Golden City with what was, for me, real rudeness, telling him that he had done the worst disservice to peak oil that any teacher could do to his subject, turning it into an object not just of boredom but of active antipathy for me. He’d respond: “Fascinating insights, Tim.”