Pique Oil

I am slowly working my way through the latest issue of Texas Monthly. The main story is "35 People Who Will Shape Our Future." That's because TM is 35 years old this year. Get it?

Anyway, the issue came out about a week ago. Even though I am a subscriber, I looked up the story online because I wanted to see what it said about me. You can imagine my surprise when I found out I was NOT one of the 35 people who will shape Our Future.

I had coffee with a friend today, and mentioned the story. Her comment? "No one from Texas is shaping the future, except maybe in Texas." She could be right; the state that created groundbreakers like Denton Cooley and Ross Perot and business innovators like Texas Instruments and Dell Computers seems to have lost some of the initiative in recent years.

So far, the most interesting article I've read is "The Gospel According to Matthew," about Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons. Simmons for years has been arguing that we've reached the "peak oil" point, and that the world's oil production will decline in a curve that approximately mirrors the curve by which it rose. I was first introduced to the concept of peak oil in Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy, in which he tries to create a Unified Field Theory of declining energy reserves, rising religious fundamentalism, international finance and global geopolitics.

Anyway, Mimi Swartz's article on Simmons is good reading, and there is a link to an interesting interview about the Shrinking Energy Pie. The sad thing about both articles is that their subjects (Simmons, Nate Hagens of The Oil Drum and Matt Savinar of Life After the Oil Crash) seem pretty blindered about conservation and alternative energy; in their scenarios, oil gets to $200 a barrel and people start shooting at each other. Let's hope there's a middle ground: more serious conservation efforts (and some government leadership on those efforts; Dick Cheney calls conservation "a sign of personal virtue" -- God knows he has few enough of those) and alternative forms of energy (again, with some government leadership thrown in).