There's been a lot of discussion lately regarding fracking, obscene oil profits, and the need to funnel part of this largesse into social programs and needed improvements. Oil companies and their lobbyists are seen as immoral and exploitive, and the taint of money from any of these sources is an overriding theme to this campaign season. Moreso, as they're seen as the culprits both behind our endless Middle East wars and the growing concerns of global warming and greenhouse gases, with calls to phase out fossil fuels now, not later.

Curiously, there's not much talk about the way that old world's changed - more than "the horse that left the stable", we're witnessing a fullblown stampede while calmly discussing saddle sizes, or worse, jettisoning horses in a stormy sea. How do we ride and tame a bucking bronco in the midst of a maelstrom?

Michael Klare at TomDispatch describes some of the "pandemonium" from the latest round at Doha. 

It's not just that fracking and political changes have crashed the price of oil by 2/3 in 16 months. It's also that there are countries like Russia & Venezuela depend on oil exports for 50% of gov spending; Nigeria a whopping 75%, 19% of Norway's GDP. With oil at $100 trillion or ~5% of global GDP, many poorer countries like Angola and Ecuador and Kazakhstan and Libya are massively exposed. Oddly enough, the US is much more diversified and less likely to be hurt directly more than it saves. Assuming we're not done in by the chaos elsewhere.

Listening to our political discussions on energy issues, I'm happy they're more substantive than in years gone by, but they're still largely illusory and irrelevant. Fracking will drive the world's oil whether the US participates or not. When the long term reality of near permanent low gas prices hits countries that depend on oil revenues, they may or may not have a revolution or serious starvation and disruption. The low price of oil cramps investments into new energy that were possible with $100+ a barrel oil. And the low cost of oil encourages consumption, exacerbating the greenhouse gas problem even more. 

We are not in control. Our discussions of energy policy have all sorts of human and foreign policy and economic factors, but we're mostly treating it as telling Standard Oil to play fair or deciding to put cleaner filters on coal plants. The old way. But after a century of buildup, the MIdeast and Russian energy cartels are collapsing, leaving a complicated landscape to navigate. And Big Oil and climate change are just two disruptions we'll be facing.

It's an interesting historical juncture where we have more and more tools to predict and deal with the future, but our wisdom tells us things are much more complex than we've believed, and much less knowable. We have a foreign policy currently focused on ISIS & Syria, at the same time as we see the power of ISIS rapidly subsiding as fast as it grew, and Russian involvement taking its own turns. We can't even close Gitmo after 12-13 years of operation, yet we're trying to figure out a humane but effective approach to marketplace terrorism as seen in San Bernardino or Paris. I'm not referring so much to the fine details of "how do we police it", but the larger budgeting and priority, vs. what to do about jobs (where & which demographics) tied to education (educate for what? STEM or Uber jobs or do-your-own-home-startup or ...) and job inequality.

George Bernard Shaw famously said that every solution creates 10 new problems, but he was ahead of his time and flattered his contemporaries - it's only now that the speed and scope of our success leads to such fast negative results or at least complications as well.

One of the big "breakthroughs" in the 80's was automated trading, which we'd be hard-pressed to decide whether it was an advance or opening Pandora's Box. But push forward 30 years, and our Big Data analytics and related compute-heavy approaches give a variety of far-reaching insight - and only sometimes concomitant wisdom. Still, many of our leaders and decision makers barely have a handle on these technologies and "decision support systems". Looking at Congress discuss Benghazi and the basics of a news cycle vs. press release vs. phone call, it's beyond us to have an Electronic Town Hall, much less a data-enabled register that tracks our issues and problems and relevant solutions to handle them. While our systems everywhere are going through data overload, exemplified by Wikileaks and the Panama Papers, our decision making remains as stodgy as ever. Even our polling is still afflicted with questions like "did we get enough mobile phones?" or "we haven't asked in 2 months" that have made the process look either like a coin toss or sheer idiocy or only marginally improved over 20 years ago. We can't keep up. We're effectively outsourcing our decision making to those who understand statistics and data and equipment and what the enormity of the trends mean.

When candidates give answers based on what they'd do 30 or 50 years ago, that should largely scare the bejeezus out of us. Sure, there's an element of wisdom and methodology that doesn't change, and the nature of negotiation and personalities is similar, but even there, techniques and strategies have evolved. We went to war 12 years ago based on a mass of lies and people not reading the NIE and a variety of unknown information. Yet our evaluation procedures don't seem to have gotten us very far from then. When we say police should wear body cams, we're largely saying "let's implement tech from 2005". On the private market, 21-year-olds are buying wearables to track sweat poured out and heartrate, but in government, we're just discovering video. We've been discussing digital medical records for 20 years, and while there's been improvements, it's hardly ideal or worthy of the tech developments since.

While the youth vote this year has largely been phrased as impatient with settling for second-best, there's been poor articulation of "how". A book "The Phoenix Project" describes in novel form how to get exponential results from optimization, past what might look like theoretical possibility. Part is that our problems are not in a vacuum. Our trade and energy and jobs and human rights and economy and education and health care are all interrelated, and the bottlenecks and inefficiencies can only be fully solved by taking a more systemic approach - not just raising interest rates or a minimum wage or a tariff.

A valid beef against austerity measures was that they were more intent on punishing in a moralistic way perceived bad behavior than in trying to understand the best ways to get trade and production and jobs back on their feet. But the same valid beef applies to liberal causes as well. Punishing polluters is less important than policy that moves us towards new, lower emissions, more sustainable energy. Perhaps both can be accomplished, but if not - favor the latter. Punishing Wall Street is less important than implementing needed social structural change that helps the next generation in terms of job equality, a living wage, ability to retire and handle catastrophic illness, and other basics. Even increased wages isn't important if costs go down equivalently. It's all fungible as a system, but not item-by-item.

Probably some of the disconnect in this year's campaigning is the "man-behind-the-curtain" problem - difficulties that cure themselves, that require no process or technology or budget or any special effort - simply a wish and they're cured. The expectation that we can solve tomorrow's problems with resources to spare seems valid, as we're making tremendous progress every day in a number of ways. But that progress isn't magical or in a vacuum - it just sometimes seems that way. And it's easier in private sector than public, as our system is infected with obstructionism - one that's predominately the strategy of the right, but at times an issue of either lack of creativity or gutsiness on the left.

The campaign of 2008 was largely a debate in ignorance of the full meltdown that was to come, or after Lehman Brothers' collapse, a question mostly of how much money to throw at the problem. This year's campaign has a wider array of issues to mull over, but little prediction of what's coming our way, and what to do to prepare for it, aside from a less than strategic or specifically urgent approach to global warming. In the olden days, Kings & Queens had seers and wizards and oracles to help them divine what was to come. Now we largely leave it to chance and trust our abilities to somehow muddle through, the "character" approach.

But when a forest fire's spreading or earthquake's coming, the animals seem to know. Where's our canary in the coal mine even, or wise old Merlin owl? Instead we're playing it by ear, focused on the old playlist when those performers have long passed on. When we say we'll plod through, dig ourselves out, will it look like the scene below? Hardly an inspiring message for the next millennium.