The Iron Triangle (T.I.T.) is a catch-all phrase (popularized by Jeffrey J. Brown‘s Net Oil Exports and the "Iron Triangle"), enclosing:
T.I.T. is an economically profitable, viable, tacit web of collusion, connectivity, and incestuous interdependency — weaving three (seemingly) distinct industries into one coherent whole. Though (seemingly) distinct, their wholeness comes of common credos: to discount statistical likelihoods (peak oil, climate change, economic collapse, ecologic collapse, et al.) by over-counting, overtly propragandising statistical unlikelihoods (energy abundance, climate stability, economic growth, ecologic sustainability, et al.); or, categorically, to discount Malthusian, techno-dystopian, under-optimistic evidence by over-counting (overwhelmingly) cornucopian, techno-utopian, over-optimistic, and (typically) unscientifically groundless conjecture. Bluntly, they wave their hands; we wave statistics, stochastic models, and consensus in the scientific community.
T.I.T. is a tacit web in that its constituent strands (i.e., oil, bubble, and media industries) uniformly disavow that web; and that the public consuming the dividends, profits, and fueled products of that web also disavow that web. That, though certainly dim evidence against its existence, does not conclusively discredit its existence. Tax-paying Americans, for a mangy example, though uniformly disavowing participation in and personal responsibility for a military-industrial complex blithly responsible for the cluster bomb-slathered massacre of over 1,000,000 (largely) innocent Iraqi civilians, are, still, participants by virtue of the enabling force of those taxes. Disavowels aside, therefore, the onus of argument honourably lies with T.I.T.. Its participant industries, companies, and consuming public must demonstrate that they are not; if they are, indeed, not, then let them rebut the Malthusian claim with cogent, coherent evidence and action. For our evidence, at least, is cogent; our actions coherent; and our lives, as lived, ethically consistent with that evidence and action.
That they do not implies they cannot.
That they cannot implies T.I.T. is, in fact, what we claim it is: to our wisdom-slain detriments, a superdense, fact-colliding, farce-colluding web of profit, political subtlety, and subterfuge.
This is not, however, to vainly confer any artifical intellegences or artifices of cruel, crude intention upon the participants in that web; or any diabolic conspiracy, co-orchestrated between those participants, with illuminated candor and evil. There are, simply, no upper echelons; no central actors; no single collection of countable persons or personable corporations, simply responsible for and responsive to this web. An ant, individually, has but 250,000 brain cells; an ant hive-mind of 40,000 such individuals, collectively, has 10,000,000,000 brain cells (roughly that of one human). Likewise, the hive-mind composing T.I.T.‘s economic web is considerably more adaptive, robust, and consciously intent than the individuals, corporations, and corporate societies composing that web.
T.I.T. is reinforced, cognitively, by these severe (although revered), inborn human flaws: