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most issues that are of any interest are really many issues balled into one.
the only problem that complexity creates, really, is trying to figure out a way to think about it so that you don't simplify in the wrong direction.
there is a problem of supply.
there is a problem of falling-off of new oil potentials, so a sense of the finiteness of the resource as a whole.
there are a host of problems that all point to the degree(s) of dependence on petroleum and petroleum-based products. i look at my computer and see almost nothing but these products. i think about the fact i am on the internet and imagine how much of these technologies are petroleum-based. this is obviously way way bigger than gas prices.
but there is obviously a problem, a host of problems, of demand.
this seems far bigger than a matter of what car one drives, but maybe that's just me.
there is a problem of how prices for petroleum is set. this is obviously the space where the futures market comes in.
there is a problem of the collapse of the dollar, which impacts on prices independently of the futures market.
the problem of the dollar is an intersection between the transnational currency market and the political fall-out of the bush administration's actions and the assumptions made by currency traders as to the meanings of indices of economic activity in other areas as they impact on their sense of the dollar's prospects.
there is the problem of the increasing integration of markets for both oil and currency into a transnational space that provides at this point very little in the way of room to manoever for nation-states.
there is the strange matter of infotainment, televisual and otherwise, which seems to obscure as much as it informs about these matters.
there is the problem of neoliberal ideology, which is the frame of reference through which all this tends to be thought about, which is another matter.
there is a problem of the intertwining of petroleum dependency and agricultural production and distribution.
one way of thinking about this is the problem of scale---centralized corporate-style monocrop-based farming as the dominant paradigm for transnational agriculture may be starting to hit it's limits.
there are alternatives, but these are not matters of state policy at this point.
the transition from the present model to another may well suck for alot of people.
there is a problem of transnational logistics, the nature of food commodity flows, of food aid, of neocolonialism, which is also tied into all the above.
there are separate problems of how the prices for all these items are fixed. futures again.
there is also the problem of the dollar, again.
there is another, longer-term problem which has to do with the effects of fixing nitrogen, the revolution in fertilizer production this enabled, and the relation between that and global population and the relations between that and these other problems. this one freaks me out a bit when i think about it, because i take no particular solace in malthus, but it seems to push one toward that kind of thinking.
i'm sure there's more too.
it's pretty big.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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