The Race to Doomsday

Which will win: peak oil or global warming? If you follow both narratives in the blogosphere, which is where the debate is most kinetic, you already know that peak oil and global warming are flip sides of the same coin. I come at this mainly as a journalist, but also as someone who is interested in archaeology and the collapse literature of recent decades. I'll leave the modern-day parallels to Jared Diamond, though I tend to think he oversimplifies his case studies. What fascinates me about the respective peak oil and global warming narratives is that both revolve around the same meme: that civilization is on the fast track to collapse, unless we make systemic changes to the way we live. The peak oil camp take the argument to its logical extension and talk earnestly about such things as overshoot, or carrying capacity. The gobal warming camp dabbles in this ...