This is one of those headlines that I have wondered if I would ever live to see. And there it is. The entire economic edifice and ideology that has shaped the world through my lifetime now caught up short. And those of us who have been ridiculed and berated for years, decades, about the unsustainability of an economic worldview based on cheap and abundant fossil fuels? Now we're told that we're standing in the way of the drilling that will get us out of it!
The article is worth reading in full. But here's the core of it:
The world economy has become so integrated that shoppers find relatively few T-shirts and sneakers in Wal-Mart and Target carrying a "Made in the USA" label. But globalization may be losing some of the inexorable economic power it had for much of the past quarter-century, even as it faces fresh challenges as a political ideology.
Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages.
"...That treats geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages." Yeah, that annoying reality of geography, space, actual places on the earth.
I submit this diary mainly for the record: to note a key moment when the world began to turn. Which direction we turn is now the question.