Peak Oil ─ Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture

Porn. Peak Oil. Enjoy.” This is the title of a YouTube video with over 300,00 views that was made in 2007 for the purpose of explaining a subculture of people who believe an imminent collapse of industrial society is coming our way, the result of oil scarcity and energy depletion. The video features a sexualized Cassandra,” performing a mock-striptease in split screen (on the right, with a sober explanation of peak oil on the left by the same woman, dressed modestly). The believers are called peakists”: they wind up changing jobs, buying land, retrofitting their homes, driving less, biking more, stockpiling supplies, and even leaving their partners as a result of their newfound belief system. Schneider-Mayerson has delivered account of the movement, vividly portrayed through interviews with peakists and a mostly hidden network of virtual communities in blogs, podcasts, fiction, nonfiction books, videos, and disaster movies. He spells out the political, ecological, cultural, and (to a degree, adumbrated by apocalypse”) religious aspects of this movement, addicted as it is to fatalism, abrupt/cataclysmic change, and an odd convergence of right- and left-wing survivalism. Gender plays a role (male hysteria” is a notable feature), as 90% of the peakists turn out to be white males, tracked here with edgy, compulsive narrative momentum from political defeatism to the libertarian shift within the Left. Probably no recent book focused on social movements will generate as much excitement as this one, even as Schneider-Mayerson shows how a decline in appeal for peakism has followed on our new era of fracking and tar sands. He compares Peakists to Doomers and Preppies in useful ways for cultural and political commentators. Whether or not the peak of oil production may already have passed us, the fact of chapters of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in 23 countries indicates a powerful global presence, not ready by any means to fade from view.

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is assistant professor of social sciences (environmental studies) at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.