This week has been a good one for looking into energy resources and their futures, among other things.

On Tuesday, James Howard Kunstler, a “peak oiler” since at least the start of this century, emailed out THIS essay, titled “Degrowth and How It Will Define How We Live in the Future,” which was put online last week by The American Conservative magazine.

Today, the New York Times put on page 1 Clifford Krauss’s straightforward business story headlined “As Oil Demand Declines, Exxon Is at Crossroads.”

I recommend reading both carefully starting with Kunstler’s, which summarizes some of the arguments he and other peak oilers including Richard Heinberg at the Post Carbon Institute have been putting forth for years.

From one paragraph: “Oil supports [our techno-industrial economy], and has for the past 100 years, and it makes all our fabulous amenities possible. Oil has been heading for trouble for a couple of decades and now it has arrived at the crisis point. Our supply of oil is dwindling because it costs too much to pull it out of the ground. It’s that simple. Our basic business model is broken.”

Kunstler talks mostly about what, in his view, is in store for the future.

Krauss, in today’s article, focuses on Exxon Mobil in recent decades, its competition with other energy giants, and pressures from large shareholders. He quotes Daniel Yergin, author most recently of The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations: “We’ve moved from the shale era to the energy transition era, so there is a greater divergence of strategies among the companies, the widest it’s been in modern times.” 

Yergin is the energy historian most acceptable to mainstream publications, and his books are available to check out at plenty of libraries. For Kunstler’s and Heinberg’s, readers are more likely to have to use an interlibrary loan option.

— Mark Channing Miller