“sense of the House” resolution on Peak Oil. Though it has no immediate legislative consequences, it’s a landmark document.
Henceforth it will be much harder to pretend that fossil fuel scarcity is merely the result of market forces, Islamic extremism, corporate price gouging, international hoarding, technological limitations, or regulatory red tape. Those factors affect pricing, but geology trumps them all. Of course the beast in the Oval Office and his allies in the Congress will keep on pretending, just as the Soviets kept up the fantasy that “dialectics” would guarantee an eventual triumph of world communism, or as the Chinese during the “Boxer Rebellion” convinced themselves that martial arts could outface the machine gun. The distractions and deceptions will continue, but now there is a critical mass of thinking persons inside the government who can speak the truth about the energy crisis. Not a lone visionary, vulnerable to dirty tricks or a convenient plane crash – this is a group of eight legislators of both parties from Massachusetts to New Mexico. The game has changed.
Here is House Resolution 507:
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the ‘Man on the Moon’ project to address the inevitable challenges of ‘Peak Oil’.
As Roscoe Bartlett made clear in his ASPO-USA presentation, the real analogy is not to Apollo 11, but Apollo 13. In a two-part story here at FTW, Tom Wayburn has demonstrated that “An Apollo Project For Energy Can Succeed, But Not In A Market Economy.” (See parts 1 and 2). The existing corporate “Apollo Alliance” pushes for a boom in renewables that will power urban sprawl and the car culture using non-fossil fuels. That is a road to nowhere; it is thermodynamically impossible and it would do little to avert the ecological collapse of which climate change is only the most dramatic sign. The pursuit of endless economic growth, no matter what its physical basis, leads to a dead lunar landscape. The Apollo 13 mission, by contrast, was (to borrow a phrase from Megan Quinn) an effort to get home from such a voyage, in a damaged ship with a perilously narrow mathematical window of opportunity for safe re-entry. That window is powerdown.
The wording of House Resolution 507 is bold and robust compared to the environmental lip service of the neoliberals; it is sober and insightful compared to the insanity and greed of the neoconservatives. But it is also shrewd and diplomatic and ambiguous: the reader can’t tell whether H.R. 507 advocates a utopian leap beyond the limits (Apollo 11) or an urgent round of problem solving for sheer survival (Apollo 13). In the ancient world Apollo was, after all, the god of both healing and plague. That name keeps coming up because of President Kennedy’s spiritual summons to a new era of human striving. But for most Americans, the moon landing was a glorious spectacle on a t.v. screen. Powerdown, by contrast, is about shared sacrifice for collective hope.This time, we’re all in the busted spaceship, and the journey home requires the utmost cooperation, cool headed resolve, and abundant good luck. “ Houston, we have a problem.”
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
