By webmaster Thursday July 2nd 2009 15:24 Central European Time

You can hardly open a newspaper or visit a news web site this week without being bombarded with news about Michael Jackson’s death. Superstars, celebrities in music, film and sports, people that become rich beyond most people’s wildest fantasies by entertaining us, have been with us for a couple of generations now. Long enough for people to think that they have always been there. Looking at the economic climate in which they emerged it is obvious that they are products of an industrialized society. Hence, they are really one of the results of us burning large amounts of fossil fuel.

A couple of days ago, I wrote an entry in our Norwegian blog, claiming that the end of cheap, abundant fossil fuel might mean the end of superstars as we have come to know them, and that the death of Michael Jackson might very well mark the beginning of the end of superstars. As a result, someone calling himself “musician” seemed to get quite offended by my writings and wrote a comment that “I better learn the music business before I wrote one more word” That is, of course, more than just a little beside the point. Since this isn’t really about the music industry, or the film industry, or sports. Energy deprivation does not apply to any one business in particular, and one needs not know all the inns and outs of every business to see that it will, indeed, affect them all.

Musicians, actors and athletes certainly did not enjoy a status as superstars before the industrial age. Sure we had musicians and composer, like Mozart, and we had actors and play writers, but they did not all live like kings and they were not known world wide in their life time. I guess you could call Mozart a superstar of his time, but he and other pre industrial era superstars lacked most of what constitutes a superstar as we know them. When it comes to sports, superstars or stars of any kind seem to have been unheard of before the industrial age.

Dr. Colin Campbell compares the energy used in the world’s machinery to having 22 billion slaves working for us 24-7. A fraction of these slaves can be replace by sustainable energy solution, but probably far from all of them. That means that the human race will need to prioritize in the future. Is lifting entertainers to stardom and great wealth something that man will prioritize beyond peak oil? Personally, I neither hope, nor believe, that it is.

Further reading:

• Made to break or last?
• Sometimes a machine might not be the best solution
• Must see: Tropical permaculture strategies
• Are solar cells the solution to the energy crisis?
• The brutal end of the growth paradigm

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