NickBlack.com

I know. The oil. The gas. The arctic, the albedo effect. The thermohaline. 386 ppm. 8 billion starving refugees by next week. I know. I spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to get a major documentary on peak oil made for PBS (American Public TV). I’ve met and interviewed most of the serious peak oil ecologists and geologists. Last night I sat watching Fora.tv (“the world is thinking”, oh really?). An hour long presentation on a tiny web screen by Dan Miller called A Really Inconvenient Truth. Yes, it is worse than Al Gore dared tell you. Yes, I already knew everything Dan had to tell me, as would most of the eco-oilers I know. We are like some goth punk death cult, avid for the new terror numbers of ice melt, storm surge or oil field decline.

Then, because of an unavoidable social context, I watched the penultimate final of X Factor. I watched for a while in sneering disbelief at the demented Karaoke of these guileless kids and Simon, their gurning svengali, all lit up like the Nuremberg Rally. I saw the crowds, crowds of 20 million – crowds for which any politician would sell their soul – cheering and screaming for their Stacey or Olly or little Joe. Every single ambulatory person in these kid’s hometown was on the street. This was the democracy they’d always wanted, the chance to vote on something they really cared about. The aspirational Viagra of instant celebrity, not just of the kids, but them, the hometown crew who have never ever known anyone on the telly before and now their hometown exists, and they exist, because of X.

And then the terrible truth dawned on me. We, the Collapse Literati, are doomed to write our pitiful blogs and make our tiny webscreen docs of impending Apocalypse to no avail whatever, unless we are simply entertaining ourselves. Al Gore had to train a legion of “Town Hall” speakers to spread the Inconvenient Truth. You see Simon Cowell wrestling with how to get his message out? No you don’t. Because one of the fundamental things about the human cognitive system is that it doesn’t like a downer. It likes up and preferably cute. It prefers bright lights shining on a perfect cleavage to earnest old men talking geology. I’ve watched for years as some of the most informed scientists and commentators on earth have put on their best suit and teeth to bore the living beejesus out of believers decked out in white people rasta hair and greenpeace fleeces, sitting on hard chairs in dank halls. For all the difference it made they could have been shooting heroin in the lavs.

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil, or ASPO, (pronounced Asspo, not a moment of marketing genius), began in 2000. Colin Campbell should be given the Nobel Save the Goddamn World Prize. I love these guys. They have done their best to make the world sit up and look at the oil horror movie coming to a planet near you. And Mike Ruppert, lovely guy, with his Collapse documentary. I hope it makes it to theatres. But do you for a moment think it’s going to have the impact, or the box office, of Roland Emmerich’s 2012? No, it won’t because neither Colin or Mike look as good as Amanda Peet in underwear.

My species likes stories where 5 good looking people save the world, or sing us to an anodyne consumer coma, or best of all, show us the perfect kitchen. They don’t like to be told no, you can’t have that, no it’s bad for you, no it will destroy the atmosphere and your children and grandchildren, forevermore, will live in a boiling desert next to a dead ocean. They don’t like to be told that now we’ve burned all the easy oil and had a damn good time whizzing up and down those freeways, it’s over and we may have to share the expensive stuff that’s left with everyone who didn’t get their go in a Cadillac yet, like the poor people from those countries we go to on holiday. How the hell is Cheryl Cole the hair extension replicant going to make that sound bouncy? Not even Cheryl could pull it off. (Yeah Cheryl, pull em off, nice one innit. Sorry. No disrespect intended.)

So we’ll have to lie.

We are never going to sell the great ruminant herd out there on the shopping Serengeti the idea that we’d better grow up and get responsible and treat the earth like the fragile little Christmas tree ornament it is. People don’t want to hear about efficiency, or cutting down, or organic carrot soufflé, or wearing a woolly over their lingerie because of green morality. Never going to sell.

So we’ll have to lie. Here we go.

We are moving into an unimaginable future of free energy, space exploration, bio and nano engineering, and artificial intelligence embedded throughout our lives. War, want, pestilence and decay will be things of the past. Old age and decrepitude will be remembered like images from a Breugel painting. Social networking will enable us to solve humanity’s problems in completely new ways. With 350,000,000 people working on a problem, be it poverty or middle east conflict, facebook will vote on the most democratic solution – X factor style. You can be part of the greatest experiment in history: to re-engineer the whole planet in 3 decades.

Details to follow. Stay tuned.