We held a screening of CommunitySolution.org’s “How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” yesterday 4 August 2006. A total of 6 people turned up and like typical Singaporeans, we were fashionably late but it’s good since the rest had some time to share with one another their personal Peak Oil experiences.
Well, to me, the most interesting part of the evening was the post-show discussion (this is not saying the film wasn’t good but since it was the fourth time I’ve seen it, I was more intrigued by how people was taken by it). It turned out most of our visitors have already been exposed to Peak Oil, usually via a friend’s email forward, but not doing anything about it.
It’s a very common phenomenon in Singapore, and it’s what Kevin Danaher (globalexchange.org) calls “powerlessness”. On this subject, I’d like to recommend that you listen to Kevin’s interview with the LifeBoat radio show here (get part 1, where talks about powerlessness). Personally, I was very inspired by Kevin’s speech and perhaps as a result, now thinks that I can effect changes in our government’s policies on energy and sustainable living in Singapore.
Back to powerlessness in Singapore. Not wanting to go into a discourse on our political system here, Singaporeans by-and-large has gotten used to having the government dish out solutions to their lives. Try and imagine a place where citizens’ involvement in policy-making started out as a government policy. As the years passed and with every successful policy, our people got, and rightfully so, comfortable with the idea that the government is omniscient and will always take care of them.
Against this background, I’d like to put across that the powerlessness Singaporeans feel about Peak Oil is rooted in 1) the ‘confidence’ that our government already knows about it and has some plans to address it, and 2) that if the government doesn’t have solution, and they’re so ’smart’, who else could have come up with a solution?
Well, personally, I don’t know if the government already knows about Peak Oil or that they already have a plan for it. This is something that we can find out together. I bet you’d want to know how Singapore can continue to run when oil hits $100, $150 or $200 a barrel.
I’ll leave you with this, it’s Yeats’ The Second Coming which I first came across last night in Oliver Stone’s Nixon:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I’m neither religious nor apocalyptical, but Yeats’ verses, written in 1920, somehow clinged on me for a while.
