Teetering on the brink of catastrophe

By Wan Lixin  |   2008-6-14  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

CRUDE oil crossed US$137 a barrel last week for the first time in New York and London trade.

Across the globe, many car owners have taken to the streets to air their discontent with high fuel prices.

Those who have been accustomed to cheap oil are clearly ill-prepared for this.

But according to "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century," there has never been a lack of warning signs.

"The world has never faced such dangerous circumstances as it does early in the twenty-first century," said author James Howard Kunstler in his book published in 2005.

But leading gas guzzlers like Americans simply find it more pleasant to ignore the dire consequences of their lifestyle.

"For many Americans, who have never known a way of life without cheap oil, there is a simple inability to manage life without it," the book observes.

The pending energy crisis will end the kind of high standard of living people in the West have been enjoying in decades, and culminates in the 'Long Emergency,' which is marked by a series of calamities: drought, famine, diseases, conflicts, and wars.

Kunstler goes to developmental psychology for an explanation of this overwhelming collective state of oblivion.

As these problems create too much stress, and people have difficulty comprehending conflicting ideas in their effort to make sense of the world, they are said to be unable to handle "cognitive dissonance" - maintaining two contradictory ideas at the same time.

One scholar uses "consensus trance" to explain people's failure to understand the reality of diminishing oil reserves. "Consensus trance" refers to the phenomenon that people do not act because other people do not act either.

According to one study, the peak of oil production would have come before 2008, but accurate information will be hard to get.