Predicting Disaster

Wolcott's on fire.

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"Worse than a Fool"
Posted by James Wolcott

"Among the many peculiarities of this president is his utter refusal to listen to those within his own orbit in the oil realm. It's understandable, if unacceptable, that Bush would ignore the warnings of environmentalists regarding Peak Oil and global warming, but why would he tune out the words of his gummy ally Tony Blair, Matthew Simmons, the expert oil analyst and author of Twilight in the Desert who has briefed Bush personally, and Richard Rainwater?
"Richard Rainwater doesn't want to sound like a kook," began a profile of the super investor in Fortune magazine (the italics below are mine). "But he's about as worried as a happily married guy with more than $2 billion and a home in Pebble Beach can get. Americans are 'in the kind of trouble people shouldn't find themselves in,' he says. He's just wary about being the one to sound the alarm.
"Rainwater is something of a behind-the-scenes type--at least as far as alpha-male billionaires go. He counts President Bush as a personal friend but dislikes politics, and frankly, when he gets worked up, he says some pretty far-out things that could easily be taken out of context. Such as: An economic tsunami is about to hit the global economy as the world runs out of oil. Or a coalition of communist and Islamic states may decide to stop selling their precious crude to Americans any day now. Or food shortages may soon hit the U.S. Or he read on a blog last night that there's this one gargantuan chunk of ice sitting on a precipice in Antarctica that, if it falls off, will raise sea levels worldwide by two feet--and it's getting closer to the edge.... And then he'll interrupt himself: 'Look, I'm not predicting anything,' he'll say. 'That's when you get a little kooky-sounding.'"Rainwater is no crackpot. But you don't get to be a multibillionaire investor--one who's more than doubled his net worth in a decade--through incremental gains on little stock trades. You have to push way past conventional thinking, test the boundaries of chaos, see events in a bigger context. You have to look at all the scenarios, from 'A to friggin' Z, as he says, and not be afraid to focus on Z. Only when you've vacuumed up as much information as possible and you know the world is at a major inflection point do you put a hell of a lot of money behind your conviction."
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"The argument I will make, in brief, is this:
"Peak Oil is foreseeable.
"The consequences are also foreseeable and are likely to be ruinous.
"The Bush administration has been repeatedly warned.
"Actions could be taken to reduce the impact, but the longer those actions are delayed, the worse the impact will be.
"The administration, rather than taking steps to mitigate these looming catastrophic impacts, has instead done things that can only worsen them.