Wishful fracking thinking

Wishful fracking thinking by Jame Howard Kunstler, April 30, 2013, red green and blue.org
Wishful thinking now runs so thick and deep across the USA that our hopes for a credible future are being drowned in a tidal wave of yellow smiley-face stories recklessly issued by institutions that ought to know better. A case in point is the Charles C. Mann’s tragically dumb cover story in the current Atlantic magazine – “WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL” * — setting out in great detail the entire panoply of techno-narcissistic “solutions” to our energy predicament. Another case in point was senior financial writer Joe Nocera’s moronic op-ed in last week’s New York Times beating the drum for American “energy independence.” You could call these two examples mendacious if it weren’t so predictable that a desperate society would do everything possible to defend its sunk costs, including the making up of fairy tales to justify its wishes. Instead, they’re merely tragic because the zeitgeist now requires once-honorable forums of a free press to indulge in self-esteem building rather than truth-telling. … The reason we, in effect, lie to ourselves incessantly is because of the master wish behind all the subsidiary wishes:
We want to keep driving to WalMart forever and we can’t imagine any other way of life let alone the way of life that the contraction of industrial economies is tending toward which is to say a way, way downscaled and re-localized economic life centered on farming and artisanal manufacture. Yes, we are going medieval too, eventually, just like the Japanese, who will get there a little sooner than we will. It’s hard to swallow, I’m sure. That’s why we prefer the more digestible propaganda…. [Emphasis added]