Ah, those crazy, madcap Chinese. So wise. So inscrutable. So very many of them. What are they playing at, do you suppose? For as long as I have been reading (and writing) about peak oil, I have been reading about the Chinese, and their wild push to Westernize. More cars! More roads! More power! But why? They hate the West. Why would they want to emulate a culture they find offensive? Wrong question.
The question to ask is this: Why are the Chinese so bent on using up all of the oil? I’ve long had my suspicions, so I have to ask: Do they know what they are doing? The Chinese, with well over a billion people milling about, can easily ramp up their oil use and seriously hasten the downside of global oil product after it peaks. And then they can keep demanding more oil until they force the depletion curve over a cliff. But why would they want to do that? Why would they want to do the very thing that would pretty much speed the end of Western civilization as we know it? Oh, wait – I just answered my own question there, didn’t I?
The Chinese produce something like 40 million bicycles a year. They were, until recently, quite the total bicycle society. They have functional mass transit and low energy homes. Their population is not used to being Western, so even now, it would be very easy for the Chinese to revert back to their original low-oil lifestyle with very little disruption. They could use up all the oil, ruin the West, and go right back to being Chinese and never bat an eye. They would, though, quietly smile, knowing what they had done.
The funny thing is, there’s not a thing you or I can do about it. They can play the “We want to be like you!” game until oil goes to $400 a barrel, and no one will think anything of it. No one will think to blame them. At some point, we will all be too busy fending for ourselves to see what happened and why – and who sped up the drop. But now you know: In the big dinner plate of life, we are General Tso’s Chicken.
Pass the soy sauce, Yuan.
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