The Pain

The artist’s statement on this weeks The Pain comic is pretty good. He’s talking about the end of the world, whether due to environmental collapse, peak oil, or plague. Naturally, there’s profanity and stuff. Consider yourselves warned.

A Google search of the term “peak oil” will instantly tell you far more than you ever wanted to know about this subject and immerse you in a subculture of somewhat tediously well-informed people who believe with alarming certainty and unanimity that modern society is going to go to all to hell in the near future. Suffice it to say that “peak oil” refers to that historical moment at which the depletion of the resource will exceed production, a point we may pass in the next few years, or may indeed already have passed. Exacerbating the crisis is the fact that the Indians and the Chinese have just learned that cars are fun to have. (The most readily comprehensible and alarming analogy I’ve read is that, in party terms, we have one six-pack, of which we’ve drunk four cans [!], a bunch of new people have just shown up with no beer, and it’s after two.) After this happens, energy prices will continue to rise and never come back down, massive shortages and crises will become common, and eventually the infrastructure of industrial civilization will collapse, after which we will descend into Mad Maxian squalor and savagery and terrible warlords such as Lord Humungus will assume control of what’s left of society.

However … not to worry, there’s plenty of oil, we’ll figure something out before it runs out, so just relax and take another half a Xanax and why not get myself a beer from the fridge. I would like to feel comforted by this advice but the fact that it is roughly identical to the official position of the Bush adminstration RE: oil and alternative energy sources (except for the Xanax and beer) disquiets me.