BOOK REVIEW: MICHAEL RUPPERT'S "CONFRONTING COLLAPSE"

The love of money is the root of all evil. That is the fundamental truth that I have verified through 3 decades of empirical, investigative, legal, academic research trying to answer some fundamental questions about human existence and why we behave the way we do, why we think the way we do, why we act the way we do...It is the love of money that has the potential to exterminate- to render extinct- the entire human race.

As a writer, Michael Ruppert was a helluva speaker. I don't say that to denigrate this troubled, frustrated, charismatic, controversial, and ultimately tragic figure, merely to explain the modest three-star rating I gave to his book, CONFRONTING COLLAPSE (previously released under the more prosaic title A PRESEIDENTIAL ENERGY POLICY), which I believe ought to be read, or at least skimmed, by everybody in the Western world.

Like many people, I came to an awareness of Ruppert through the excellent (and terrifying) biopic-documentary "The Collapse" (2009), which was about the idea of Peak Oil and what will happen to world civilization as oil production inevitably collapses -- inevitably because oil is a finite, non-renewable resource which is rapidly running out. This narrative weaves around Ruppert's personal narrative, the things he went through and says he went through as a result of decades of muckraking gonzo journalism. The documentary shook me so badly (and I don't consider myself all that easy to shake) that I sought out the book upon which it was based to hear his theories, opinions and warnings in more detail. Yesterday, after about two years of reading the book in tiny installments, I finally finished.

Ruppert's thesis is actually very simple. All of modern civilization is founded on oil. Everything from gasoline to plastic to resin to pesticide to paint to synthetic rubber to toothpaste, and very much else, is manufactured from petroleum by-products. Petroleum also powers our jetliners, our cars, our buses, our motorcycles, our tractors, our trains, our Navy destroyers and our tractors. It heats our homes, allows us to farm and to transport food, to extract raw material and to ship it, and to create and sustain all of our infrastructure (think: garbage collection, police cars, etc.). Everything we do in daily life is founded directly or indirectly on oil, from brushing our teeth to throwing a light-switch to driving a car to shopping at the grocery store to making love (even condoms are made from petroleum by products, i.e. plastic). The total supply of oil on the planet, however, is now "past peak," meaning that more has been burned than remains in the ground, and the supply is dwindling faster and faster because commercial use of oil is going up everywhere in the world, especially developing nations like China and India, but most especially in energy-ravenous America. At the same time, the remaining oil is by necessity harder and more expensive and environmentally destructive to remove from the earth, since the "low hanging fruit" has for the most part already been plucked out of existence. Ruppert believes, and there is considerable evidence to support, that all of human civilization is in a death spiral which will accelerate as oil usage surges even while the oil supply shrinks toward the zero point (zero point is not, incidentally, zero oil: it is the point where obtaining oil becomes so expensive and energy-intensive that there is no return for mining it...think of it in these terms: if you're starving, and somebody tells you there's a strawberry on top of a mountain, you'll burn 3,000 calories obtaining the strawberry but only 10 from eating it, rendering the journey pointless). This will produce a collapse -- power, food and other basic necessities of modern life will no longer be available in sufficient quantity for our population, and will lead to a huge die-off which will encompass wars, riots, and global anarchy.

The driving force behind the collapse is obviously our gluttonous appetite for the energy and products oil provides us, but Rupert argues, also the blind greed and sociopathic disregard for human life which is characteristic of modern governmental systems, be they socialistic, communistic or capitalistic. Our desire for profit and comfort are pushing us faster and faster toward the cliff which Peak Oil represents, and rather than address the problem, he points out that all nations seem to be doubling down on aggressive acquisition of oil (through drilling and if necessary, war) while making meaningless, lip-service commitments to the environment and alternative sources of energy. One of the key arguments of the book is the jinxed relationship between money (fiat currency) and energy, which accelerates the collapse by building an infinite-growth paradigm: very crudely put, our economy must have infinite growth or it will stagnate and collapse, but the resources we base our currency and our growth around, are not infinite. Thus at the heart of the paradigm is a paradox which can lead to only one catastrophic outcome.

All of these arguments are well-presented and difficult to refute on any level without resorting to sophistry or name-calling ("You're just a prophet of doom/conspiracy theorist!"), or the use of wobbly statistics and ideas that rely more on optimism and hope than fact. Nobody, after all, wants to believe our civilization is on its last kick and that our children or grandchildren will grow up in a dystopian future. On the other hand, some of the conclusions Ruppert reaches, and some of his predictions, are less impressive; the main difficulty with the book is that Ruppert, while highly intelligent and very knowledgeable, is really more of a blogger than an author. His writing style varies from arresting to amateurish, gripping to boring, and like many people with martyr complexes (he committed suicide in 2014), he has a tendency toward egotism and would-be omniscience. This makes a 220-page book feel like it's 1,000 pages, which is why it took me aeons to read it when I usually burn through books of this nature in less than a week. It is also why I prefer Ruppert as a public speaker (watch his videos or the documentary), or even as an article-writer and blogger, to a book-length author.

Having said that, I really do feel that CONFRONTING COLLAPSE is a book which ought to be read or at least skimmed by anyone who is still whistling past the petroleum graveyard. Our species (and all species on this planet we dominate) are in an existential struggle against our own excesses and the paradigms we have developed to live safe and comfortable lives. It is well past time that someone in power accepted the unsustainability of our way of life and enacted radical changes to meet the future, instead of telling us a few electric cars and some recycling will save the day, or just sticking their heads in the sand while choking out the words, "All is well!" All is manifestly not well and it is easy to understand why Ruppert's own life mirrored the spiral into destruction that he anticipates for our race. He was just sincere enough to agonize over the needless dilemma in which we now find ourselves, and just sharp enough to see that human nature is sufficiently selfish and illogical that nothing would be done to solve the dilemma until it was far past too late. I leave you with some of his more haunting words, which certainly go a fair country distance toward explaining why he chose to end his own life:

"Bridges are burning all around us; bridges to responses that might have mitigated the already brutal (and just beginning) ravages of Peak Oil; bridges to reduce the likelihood of war and famine; bridges to avoid our selectively chosen suicide; bridges to change at least a part of energy infrastructure and consumption; bridges to becoming something better than we are or have been; bridges to non-violence. Those bridges are effectively gone."