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Big Frights of our Times #9: Peak Oil

#8 - The notion that the world was running out of oil gripped the international middle class early in the millennium. The panic had something in common with the just earlier Y2K scare in that unless something was done the whole of the developed world would seize up. Yet while Y2K could be firmly pinned to the computer industry itself, and which benefited mightily from it, nobody can still identify the source of the Peak Oil panic. The position now In the event other sources of oil came on stream, notably of the shale variety, and crude oil |…

Big Frights of our Times #8: Food Miles

#8 - This intelligentsia-driven flap was an offshoot of climatism and a forerunner of the Peak Oil panic. The contention was that the greater the distance the final consumer was from the food that they were consuming that each mouthful was responsible for a correspondingly greater consumption of transport oil and thus spread of carbon dioxide from the combustion process. The position nowEconomies of scale proved that this equation, the one relating fuel consumption to distance to plate, flawed. The scurrying around of delivery vans on roads was seen to be less oil-burning per- plateful than shifting food around in…

Big Frights of our Times #7: Genetic Modification

#7 - This panic’s debut can be firmly dated to May 2002 when the BBC exhibited a drama, Fields of Gold which many still believe to have been a documentary on supposedly devastating diseases caused by what suddenly became known as GM. This BBC scare mongering concoction insisted that GM was zoonotic in that the contagion it triggered could jump from animals to humans. The contagion it was dramatized could also jump not only from fauna to humans but also from flora. The position nowThe panic went through the political class like a prairie fire and cost New Zealand prime…