my first attempt
by Eli
in the past 3 months i have become ridiculously obsessed with Peak Oil. i seriously can’t get enough information about it. i have subscribed to a number of blogs and news sites about it; read a number of books, journals, and newspaper articles on the topic (Powerdown, The Long Emergency, etc); talked about it with my friends and family; and i think about it constantly. it seems like such a huge issue, with such wide ranging possible impacts, that i have a hard time understanding how people can’t be as obsessed with it as i am (there I go being ridiculous).
and it seems like it just keeps gaining momentum. at first i was reading an article on rolling stone by James Howard Kunstler (a quick primer to his book of the same title) and that really got the ball rolling. from there i couldn’t NOT be smacked in the face with more and more information. i started seeing it in local independent newspapers, then in not so independent newspapers; i saw it everywhere online and on TV; there were documentaries (real and fake) being made on the subject; more and more information was being published by informed people; and even the oil companies were starting to get a clue.
so what is really at stake? just about everything. try to imagine for a moment, something in your life that doesn’t require (large or small amounts) of fossil fuel energy. really, anything. i have a very hard time. from the food we eat to the cars we drive to the clothes that we buy. everything requires fossil fuels in large amounts and in more than one way. most of the food we eat is planted with tractors, grown with natural gas fertilizers, harvested with tractors, processed in factories, and then shipped to us by plain, train, or automobile. and that’s just food. what’s important here is to wrap your mind around this one fundamental idea: the only reason we live the way we do, is because of cheap, abundant fossil fuels; when we no longer have access to cheap, abundant fossil fuels we can no longer live this way. by default, we have to change.
so what’s the craziest part about it? we probably won’t prepare enough (world/national/local) to avoid a hard crash. it’s just not part of our societal or cultural make-up to allow for this kind of a transition.
The managers in charge of the world’s economic, political, and military regimes are immensely powerful within the context of the present world system, but they may be utterly incapable of preventing the disintegration of that system, since the only actions they can take that will be significantly effective toward that end will also tend to undermine their own power and authority vis-a-vis competing regimes and managers. Thus, the system actively discourages steps towards its own preservation.
Richard Heinberg, “Powerdown”, pg. 140
so what’s going to happen? is the world gonna fall apart and destroy itself, or is all this hubbub just another false scare by the same people that brought us Y2K? no one really knows for sure exactly how or when it’s going to happen (there are just too many unknowns), yet it will.
A possible scenario for the collapse of our own civilization might go something like this: Energy shortages commence in the second decade of the century, leading to economic turmoil, frequent and lengthening power blackouts, and general chaos. … One after another, central governments collapse. Societies attempt to shed complexity in stages, thus buying time. Empires devolve into nations; nations into smaller regional or tribal states. … Between 2020 and 2100, the global population declines steeply, perhaps to fewer than one billion. By the start of the next century, the survivors’ grandchildren are entertained by stories of a great civilization of the recent past in which people flew in metal birds and got everything they wanted by pressing buttons.
Richard Heinberg, “Powerdown”, pgs. 149 – 150
so what is there to conclude? not a whole lot. by the end of this decade, oil (and gas) will be too expensive for most people in this country to afford it. by that time, we will have to have localized the economies that we live in, or we will perish. that means, local food, local energy, local clothing, local everything. right now the nations of the world rely far too heavily on each other for basic necessities: food, clothing, shelter (not to mention luxuries as well). it seems that the world is going to change; let’s just hope it’s for the better.
I really like your bit about the rising cost of oil. I agree that our whole “system”, economy, life runs on oil, but there are already side projects in the works.
Car companies are just one of the many oil using industries feeling a huge squeeze due to the rising gas prices. Most noteably, the car companies are starting to test and invest in non-fossil or not as oil heavy based fuels into their infrastructures.
Since car companies aren’t being subsidized as much by the government, they are beginning to fend for themselves and develop alternate fuel sources for the future. With the Japanese placing their plants around the South now, where Bush is from, the government can’t afford to side with either the American companies or the Japanese. Siding with the Japanese would piss off the union workers and siding with the unions would discourage the Japanese to build plants in America where alot jobs are being created.
Next year California is planning on opening a hydrostation and testing hydrocell cars. This is to shed some light on the process of switching over from only fossil fuels to a mixture of fossil fuels and some other plant based concoction (biodiesel, soy, etc.) or to see how to make the transition from fossil fuels to a completely different alternate fuel.
Although these are grand plans, atleast there is hope, and more importantly, money backing up the proposed switch.
all that sounds great joe, and we certainly shouldn’t ignore those alternatives (the renewable ones at least), but you have to wonder if there’s time. there’s a strong possibility that global oil production will peak this winter, and when that happens price will rise and probably not significantly fall ever again. i’m definitely with you on this one (a hope for alternatives), but my skeptic side just can’t keep itself hidden.
I like to think of myself as a perpetual optomist. However, all the alternative energies including wind, solar, biomass, hydro and thermal all require huge amounts of oil input to manufacture and maintain. The battery cells used in conjunction with this technology have a lifespan of 15 yrs at best. The materials needed to make such technology are finite. Renewable energy won’t even come close to bridging the looming fossil energy gap which will soon be upon us. It’s time to powerdown and go back to basics.
hey newhuntergatherer,
i really appreciate your response to my blog, but i’m just curious how you found it. maybe i know you and i just don’t know your pseudonym, but i’m just too curious not to ask.
thanks again for the response.
Joe wrote me this email:
You think that we are nearing the end of production of oil due to rise in price or do you think we are running out?
I responded:
i think that we are running out, and that coupled with rising demand will make the “crash” that much more fragile. actually, in the big picture, we will NEVER run out of oil. there will always be oil / natural gas in the ground somewhere, but we are running out of easily accessible, high quality oil / natural gas. essentially, we’ve used up half of it. there was approximately 2 trillion barrels of oil in the earth when this all started, and we’ve gone through the first half. the second half is the hardest to get to and the lowest quality, so it will be more expensive to extract and more expensive to refine. therefore, prices will naturally rise until it gets too expensive to rely on it anymore.
we’re not going to run out of oil, we just won’t be able to afford it anymore.
Since we, as a race of humans, are not smart enough yet to find alternative energy sources, we need to rely on our friends from beyond. Aliens have probably figured it all out by now. If aliens do not exist, then other planets probably have a lot of the natural resources we need. Before oil gets too expensive, we should use the rest of it in a gamble to find new planets and rape them of their oil and trees and stuff. At this point i believe it is our ONLY option.
brandon…
you truly are hilarious. THAT is our only option.
Eli: solid piece…there’s not nearly enough voices out here on this topic, so I wanted to drop a note to say, “yeah reality sucks…now let’s deal with it.”
Btw, I would suggest energybulletin.net, peakoil.com, and a couple of others. And, if you’re in the mood, by all means, stop by our place at The Oil Drum.