blog.eliduke.com

first and foremost, i have to admit that my only source for the following information is Matt Savinar’s book “The Oil Age is Over.” Although he made references to numerous sources and he seems very credible, i personally have not checked those sources for validity (aside from a few internet references here and there). that said, reader beware, this is about to get heavy.

the oil supported world that we live in is quite a bit more flimsy and subject to natural law than we have all thought (and most of us continue to think). we have built every aspect of our civilization (from transportation and housing to and food and water distribution) on one pretense: there will always be a never ending (and always increasing) supply of fossil fuels (with no real alternatives). i need you to stop and think about that for a second. our society, our culture, our entire world psychology relies exclusively on this ONE finite resource. does the scope of it settle in? did it make you realize how fragile the system truly is? did it make you sick? when i finally wrapped my mind around it, i realized how incredibly powerless we will all become without this resource. without it, we are no longer giants; we can longer maintain the hold on this world that we once had.

over the past 150 years we’ve had ample access to an ever increasing supply of oil, and with this resource we’ve developed an ever increasing supply of food. the more oil we discovered, the more food we could produce. the earth’s human population grew from 1.5 billion people to 6.5 billion people from about 1859 to present day. you need to understand this completely in order to fully grasp the enormity of the situation we are currently in. if not for oil, there would NOT be 6.5 billion people on the earth today. it is the ONLY reason why our population is so large. if you remove this resource or it becomes increasingly scarce, it is like removing our food supply. what happens to a population that becomes increasingly low on food? it is at this point that Matt Savinar predicts a mass die-off of the human race, where the “… world’s population will contract to less than 500 million within the next 50-100 years …”. unbelievable, isn’t it. sickening. in about one generation 6 billion people will die.

after you’ve cleaned up the vomit, you might say something like,”Yeah, but we’re human, and we can fix this. that CAN’T happen to us!” it is at this point that 3 examples of previous die-offs are presented to the reader: bacteria in a petri dish, reindeer on St. Matthew Island, and humans on Easter Island. all three represent populations that, given ample supply to a specific finite resource, had population explosions over a relatively short period of time followed by drastic and severe population crashes (because of resource depletion) over a much shorter period of time.

bacteria in a petri dish, aren’t exactly “comparable” to humans, but it is still a living organism, and some laws give no allowances. in either way, we’ll skip on to the next two examples, as i think they are more explicative.

the 29 reindeer that were artificially introduced to St. Matthew Island by humans in 1944, multiplied to about 6,000 in less than twenty years (1963). a mere three years later (1966), that population had crashed to 42, and the island was littered with deer carcasses. the reindeer had exhausted the one available resource that they depended on (lichen) and nature took care of the rest. but they’re deer, that can’t happen to us, right?

the human population on Easter Island had developed quite a complex society, and it’s population surged to somewhere between 7,000 – 20,000, but when the first westerners to discover the island came ashore in 1722, they found “poverty and barrenness.” the discovers were very confused, as the remaining islanders had none of the necessary technology or organizational skills that would be required to build the large statues that the island is famous for. when ask who had built the statues, the few natives that were left had completely forgotten their own history and claimed that the statues had “walked across the island.” what happened? simple, the population grew to such levels that the rate at which they were cutting down the once rich and lush forests (to perpetuate themselves) eventually became greater than the forests could replenish themselves. or you could say, they were consuming wood faster than it was being produced. lumber was the one resource responsible for the advancement of their entire civilization. within a few generations, the population crashed, and what was left had completely forgotten even simple skills like canoe building.

so where do we stand? from 1859 to present day (less than 150 years), the human population has grown from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion. this explosion, and it’s perpetuation, is completely reliant on oil. the continued extraction of oil is absolutely necessary in order to continuously expand our food production capacity. the more oil we extract, the more food we can produce, the more people that can live. when that resource becomes unavailable (by price hikes, war, weather, natural depletion, etc), the global human population is going to crash just like every other species that has encountered this problem in the past. we are NOT above this law, and at this point, there’s very little that we can do about it.

so do i just sit around on my ass? how can we prepare ourselves for such a catastrophe? there are hundreds of websites out there to help you begin the process of relying less on oil. you can start to farm some of your own food, get rid of your car, and wean yourself as much as possible from being the consumer that the corporations want you to be. it’s not going to be easy, but i really hope i don’t have to say, “I told you so.”

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.