Lucas Hüsgen 11 maart 2008 – 15:11

In 1999 the CEO of the oil servicing company Haliburton, Dick Cheney, gave a speech about the encroaching crisis called ‘peak oil’. This indicates the point in time at which half of the world’s proven reserves of oil have been exploited, and from which point onward the ever increasing demand for oil inexorably can no longer be met by the ever diminishing supply.

In 1999 Cheney predicted peak oil to take place in about 2010. According to an increasing number of specialists in the field, we may already have passed this peak. Oil will only, slowly but steadily, get more and more expensive. And, as they once said when everything seemed fine and dandy, the sky is the limit.

Now, Iraq is known to have some interesting oil reserves that may come in handy as a temporary back up, when other reserves move closer to depletion. So why not go and get them, oil folks like George W. Bush, Chevron’s Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney may well have thought.

Horribly, they also did this for our benefit. To keep the dream alive which we are living here and now. The dream of millions of years of earth’s history, magically being turned into cars, into clothes, into plastics, into computers, which require ten times their own weight in oil just to get produced, into our wonderful travels all around the globe, into the orange or Brussels sprout we may have been eating today. Into the vessels which slaughter the last remaining shoals of tuna in the Mediterranean.

Not to them, but for us this dream is a very wonderful happy go lucky sweet apple pie sort of a castle in the air dream, which sometime during this century will be gone. And just for keeping this dream of cheap oil alive, if only for a short while, thousands and thousands of people may well have been killed in Iraq. For a Disneyland which cannot be replaced by any other phantasmagoria from any other resource in the same way and to the same dimensions in the same short amount of time.

So shouldn’t we ask ourselves, for how much longer must we buy into this dream of fun?

Lucas Hüsgen
Nederlandse schrijver en

Bericht aan de Bevolking is een initiatief van Het beschrijf, in samenwerking met het B/Russell/s Tribunal. Een aantal auteurs van deze teksten treedt ook aan op de Literaire Wake n.a.v. 5 jaar oorlog in Irak, op woensdag 19 maart van 20 u. tot 24 u. in Literatuurhuis Passa Porta, A. Dansaertstraat 46, 1000 Brussel. Zie www.passaporta.be

Link naar het overzicht