It’s curious how things seem to cluster together. I found a good essay by Brian Eno in the Long Foundation‘s library talking about the way we seem to have become increaingly short-term in our thinking. Then shortly afterwards I found an interview with Paul Roberts in Mother Jones where he talks about energy illiteracy. These two extracts, the first from Brian Eno, the second from Paul Roberts, would seem to make the point.
“Now is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. Huge industries feel pressure to plan for the bottom line and the next shareholders’ meeting. Politicians feel forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. The media attract bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated reactions to human interest stories while overlooking longer-term issues the real human interest.”
“We won’t really run out of oil, because before oil runs out, it will become too expensive to use. Another way to ask that is: When will we hit peak production? The estimates range anywhere from 30 years, to 35 years, to it’s already happened. I think that we’re going to hit peak production in probably about 25 years. But that’s worldwide, and really the one you want to think about is when do we hit production peak outside of OPEC? Because when that happens — when we can’t get any more oil out of the ground outside of OPEC — then we have to turn to OPEC. And that’s a tough thing for America and other countries to have to do, because they don’t trust OPEC. The non-OPEC peak will be in about 10 years. Although OPEC countries will still have a lot of oil, they may still be as unsympathetic and as an unfriendly to Western countries as they are today.”