In the spirit of the very great and dearly missed George Carlin, let me borrow a technique he used on his brilliant 1996 album, Back in Town, and present my own, energy- and journalism-themed list of “free-floating hostilities”, without using any of the Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television:

• Enough with “perfect storm” imagery. For years it’s been a cliche worn thinner than a politician’s soul, yet people keep using it. My fellow writers, trust me on this one: It would be more entertaining and no less obvious if you wore a flashing neon sign around your neck that said “HACK”.
• Enough with the “peak” one-liners. Every time people want to get the attention of the peak oil crowd and/or prove how far around the next curve they can see they claim something else is at or nearing a peak. Peak food, peak travel, peak popsicle sticks, peak orgasms (oh, wait…). Quit being so freaking lazy, leave the “look at me!” attitude switched off, and talk about the issue, OK?
• Enough with the maddeningly bad oil puns, e.g. “high oil prices have US over a barrel”, “crude realities of the new energy world”, etc. If you can’t work harder than that to say something interesting, do us all a favor and go find another way to turn time and gray cells into currency. (The same goes for transportation puns about airlines experiencing turbulence, car makers stalling, motorcycle sales revving up, etc.)
• To all the morons who try about 100 times every day to register on this blog and/or the discussion board as a way to spread their spam: You must be dumber than the product managers at GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Who the hell is going to believe a registration with a Russian e-mail address that says the person, with a name made up of seemingly random letters and numbers, who lives in Greenland and is interested in tennis, is real? Here’s a hint: Not me, ya buncha maroons.
• “The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stone.” No kidding, and we’re using more stone now for various construction purposes than people thought existed during the stone age (assuming they even thought of those things while trying to survive day to day). Yes, I understand the point, that we found better and different ways to do those things we now do with stone, so we’ll do likewise with oil, and everything will be just peachy keen. But who believes that the supply of oil will last for thousands of years at ever-increasing rates of consumption, as stone has? Anyone?
• To the denier bots who flood the comment sections of sites like the NY Times’ Dot Earth: Grow up. You’re not convincing anyone and you’re just making yourself and your side of the “argument” look stupid. Do you live in some fantasy world where you’ll be noticed for your tireless efforts and get a call from Karl Rove or the oil or coal industry with an offer of a high-paying job to astroturf blogs? Oh, that’s right–they don’t need to pay you, because you’ll continue to do their dirty work at no charge.
• Enough with the arguments that shun real numbers and analysis in favor of “common sense”, which so often leads to absurd conclusions, e.g. “We use a lot of oil to do X, therefore after the peak in oil production we won’t be able to do X any more.” I’ve seen this one so many times and in so many minor variations that I swear it must be the first thing they teach new recruits at The Apocalypticon Institute. I find it astonishing that the people who write such things virtually never give any consideration to finding much less oil intensive ways of doing X, or that doing X might be valuable enough to the economy (e.g. transporting food) that we’ll make sacrifices in other parts of the economy (e.g. vacation travel) to preserve our ability to do X at an acceptable level.
• Enough with the idiots who can’t get their brains around the simple concept that oil is a finite resource that we’re using at the rate of 86 million barrels per day, so it therefore will eventually peak and decline. Seriously, do you Cornucopian Clowns think there’s some kind of fossil fuel fairy out there who will let us pull all the oil we want out of the ground for decades to come without hitting a peak?
• Speaking of fairy tales, let us not forget abiotic oil. Enough already with this laughable theory that oil comes from non-biological sources, and that there’s enough of it to make a difference. Show me the oil, and in quantities, locations, qualities, etc. that will change the date of peak oil and/or the rate of decline in production post peak, then we’ll talk. Until then, trade in your keyboard for something less annoying to other people when you use it, like a set of bagpipes.
• Journalists: Can we please give the “interview with the guy gassing up his 9,000-pound SUV and bitching about the price” shtick a rest? For maybe 2 or 3 decades? Why don’t you ever interview the guy who says, “I work out of a home office, and I hypermile in a really efficient car, so I spend about $10/week on gas”?
• Enough with “energy independence”. Politicians feed it to us, “journalists” regurgitate it, and most of the US public thinks it’s actually possible to “achieve energy independence” in just a few years. It ain’t gonna happen, people. Not now, not in 50 years, and probably not in 100 years.
• Stocks vs. flows. Can we all, please, take a few minutes to learn that there’s a world of difference between X barrels of oil in a resource (field, oil sands, whatever) and Y barrels/day of that oil being extracted, transported to refineries, turned into useful products, and then transported again to consumers? We keep seeing these breathless articles about how Colorado has enough oil to fill a barrel the size of Jupiter, or some such blithering nonsense. It’s not just the size of the barrel that matters, but the size of the pipe we can drain it with, what quality oil we get out of that pipe, and where the pipe is.
• Enough with the confusion about oil being a major fuel for electricity generation in the US. This one boggles my mind. The US gets about 1% of its electricity from burning oil, yet we see media reports from major networks and print publications constantly that either explicitly or implicitly link the price of oil and the price of gasoline. (Yes, I know that there is a very weak linkage here; oil goes up, natural gas drafts along behind it, so there’s some upward pressure on electricity prices because the US gets about 20% of its electrons from natural gas. But there’s no freaking way I’m willing to believe that the stringers and the anchordolls reporting this nonsense see that deeply into the issue.)
• Stop looking for silver bullets, people. There isn’t one, and trying to find one only wastes time and other resources that are already scarce. Sure, there will be technologies and combinations of technologies–the plug-in hybrid with cheaper batteries leaps to mind–that will have a huge impact on our energy future, but even those aren’t silver bullets, just really useful mid-term solutions that get us to the next stage. This is an infinite game, one with no clear ending and no definitive winner (regardless of what Dick Cheney believes in that fist-size chunk of granite he calls a heart); every “solution” is merely a transition to the next problem and ensuing “solution”.
• Enough with the economist bashing by the peak oil crowd. Seriously, you guys look around the current landscape, including all the international and national oil companies, governments playing politics and going to freaking war over oil, the Cornucopian Clowns who keep telling us not to worry, everything will be fine, and deranged politicians, and you think economists are worth picking on???