Dwindling Resources and Common Ground

George Monbiot has an interesting take on how policy (corporate and governmental) must change in the face of dwindling environmental resources.

Partly as a result of the changes they have engineered, partly as a result of the depletion of natural resources, the corporations now appear to be more vulnerable to environmental protest than they are to industrial action. Having exhausted the most accessible reserves of oil, minerals, timber, fish and freshwater, they are now forced into ever wider conflicts with the local people whose land and water they must seize to maintain production. As a result, the theft of resources and the ensuing pollution have become major political issues almost everywhere.

Later, he stresses the potential common ground or bandwagon effect this will have on disparate groups of people, without the ideological baggage getting dragged along.

I was reminded of this article, when John Emerson at Seeing the Forest spoke of the resistance of people that "just don't want to hear certain kinds of ideas" because of ideology or whatever. My question remains: Is the issue of peak oil considered extreme, but contains no real ideological agenda?

• It is liberal in the sense that it speaks to populist ideas


• It is conservative in the sense that conservation and technology will play a big role in the solution