Peacoyl and a changing climate. I am Tom Harman. Join me in listening to various experts discuss fossil fuel depletion and global warming. Peacoyl means a production peak. It means that you can no longer increase production. It is not a reflection directly of how much oil is under the ground. It is a reflection of how much you can extract in any given year. And so the inheritance of oil that we have is finite. And at some point with a finite resource, you can no longer increase production here on year. And we are arguably at that point right now. And so we are looking at a plateau at the moment. But ultimately we are going to be seeing the ability to produce oil declining year on year. For example, the Chamber of Commerce, the main business lobby, the American petroleum industry, other business lobbies, have publicly proclaimed, in fact, with enthusiasm that they are carrying out campaign to try to convince the population that global warming is liberal hoax. And it is succeeded, unfortunately. The latest polls I have seen show maybe a third of the population believes in anthropogenic global warming. The media contribute in their own way. So for example, when the New York Times runs a front page article on what meteorologists think about global warming, they don't believe it. Meteorologists are pretty faces who read scripts telling you if it is going to rain tomorrow. What do they have to say any more than your barber? But that is presented as if it is a significant contribution to the discussion. The same when they, in pursuit of the fabled objectivity, present two sides. One side is 98% of scientists who know anything. The other side is a senator in hope and a couple of stragglers. And that is the two sides. People are supposed to make a choice between them. They leave out a third side, which is the substantial number of climate scientists who believe that the consensus predictions are much too optimistic, including some of the leading scientists right here who have recently run what they call the most extensive modeling ever done that concludes that it is far worse than anticipated. And that their own results are an understatement because they don't take into account such things as effects of methane after permafrost disappears and so on. So that is the debate that people are presented with and it is not surprising that the effort to manufacture consent to the belief that doesn't mean anything is pretty successful. What is rather interesting about this, that tells you something about the nature of our society, is that those same CEOs and managers who are trying to convince the public that it is a liberal hoax, no perfectly well that it is extremely dangerous. They have the same beliefs that you and I have. So they are caught in a kind of an institutional contradiction as leaders of major corporations. They have an institutional role. That is to maximize short-term profit. And if they don't do that, they are out and someone else is in who does do it. So it is basically institutionally speaking, it is not a choice. That is going to happen in the major institutions. So they may know that they are mortgaging the future of their grandchildren and in fact maybe everything they own will be destroyed but they are caught in a trap of institutional structure. That is what happens in market systems. The financial crisis is a small example of the same thing. You may know that what you are doing is carry systemic risk but you can't calculate that into your transactions or you are not fulfilling your role and somebody else replaces you. In fact in the United States it is actually a legal obligation to do that for corporate executives. So that is a very serious problem. It means that we are marching over the cliff and doing it for institutional reasons that are pretty hard to dismantle. There are other factors like the anger and fear and hostility in the country about everything carries over to this. So if you look at polls, everyone hates Congress, they hate the Democrats, they hate the Republicans even more, they hate big business, they hate banks and they distrust scientists. So why should we believe what these pointy headed eliteists are telling us we don't trust anything else, we don't trust them? So all of this combines the latest election a couple of days ago as you can almost interpret it as a death knell for the species. There was an article in Bloomberg Business Week, not a radical rag, exactly. Running through the new Republican's coming to Congress and they are worried about them. One of the reasons is because they are global warming deniers, almost all. That means the powerful House committees are like science and technology and so on. They are going to be in the hands of people who think there is nothing to it or at least claim that they think that what they actually think is another story. In fact one of them was quoted as saying can't be a problem because God will take care of it. If this was happening in some small country and maybe I don't know what, Monaco or something wouldn't matter much. But when it's happening in the richest most powerful country in the world, it's a danger to the survival of the species. Nobody else is going to do very much if the United States doesn't do a lot, not just some but take the lead. So we're essentially saying let's kiss each other goodbye. Please come back and watch complete interviews with each of the experts. And you can join me, Tom Harman, anytime on the web at TomParpon.com.