A very smart man once told me that Oil (I capitalize it on purpose) is as important to modern society as the Buffalo was to the plains Indians. Like the Indians almost every single aspect of our lives involves oil, we use it to move, we make our homes out of it, we make everything we wear/touch/use out of it, it keeps us warm, it cools us down, it keeps our lights on, we even eat it (most crops are grown using a significant amount of oil). It is arguably THE most important part of our lives. The plains Indians treated the Buffalo like a friend, they have religious ceremonies to honor it, they thanked the gods for every one they killed, it was a revered and honored part of their lives. We on the other hand only think about oil when the price at the pump goes up.
Something so vital to the way we live and we hardly ever think about it. The one substance on this planet that we simply can not live without (at least for now), and we only pay it a second thought when we have to pay more for gas. Well it’s time for all that to end.
Oil is a necessary part of our lives, it’s an inescapable truth. Nothing else has the energy density that oil does, no other substance allows for the creation of of power so easily. And what do we do with it? We waste it in big inefficient SUV’s. We let it spill out onto our beaches, we make billions of plastic do-dads out of it and then throw them away after one use. It’s about time we start prioritizing our use.
Then:
We are long past the point of “easy” choices. We now much decide, do we continue to waste oil on water bottles, and one time use razors, and packaging that gets tossed after one use. Or are we going to save the last supplies of oil on this planet for things like medical breakthroughs, water filtration devices, emergency shelters, etc. Well we might not get that choice the market might make it for us.
The Dow Chemical Company announced today that on June 1 it will raise the price of all of its products by up to 20 percent – depending on their exposure to rising energy, feedstock and transportation costs – and will review all terms to all customers. 20%!
Andrew N. Liveris, Dow chairman and CEO, said the sweeping price increases and reviews are essential as the Company attempts to mitigate the extraordinary rise in energy and related raw material costs.
Now:
“Our first quarter feedstock and energy bill leapt a staggering 42 percent year over year, and that trajectory has continued, with the cost of oil and natural gas climbing ever higher,†Liveris said. “The new level of hydrocarbons and energy costs is putting a strain on the entire value chain and is forcing difficult discussions with customers about resetting the value proposition for our products.â€
Dow spent $8 billion on energy and hydrocarbon-based feedstock costs in 2002. At the current rate, those costs would climb to $32 billion this year.
“In addition to these price increases,†Liveris said, “the Company is continuing its aggressive cost-control plan internally and is accelerating its existing top-down competitiveness review for all of its businesses and manufacturing facilities in the light of these new feedstock and energy prices.â€
This is one company that makes products used in almost every other company in the world. If Dow raises prices 20% so does everyone else that uses their products. Dow is not the only one, all you have to do is walk (too expensive to fill up the car) to the grocery store and you will see the cost of Milk has rocketed, the cost of food is on the rise and the cost of everything else made far away is also going up.
Weather you like it or not, oil is no longer going to be providing the free ride it has for the last couple hundred years. We are going to have to start getting real stingy about how we use it, how we burn it, and how we move it around. When the white man came and decimated the Buffalo, the plains Indians way of life fell apart. Are we headed for a similar fate?
The crash is coming, mate — so many people are feeling it and the analysts know it. The rising prices are telling the world to slow down; but are we listening? Are we, hell!
Yes, the crash is coming, and it’s going to swallow civilization up in one big gulp.
The sooner the crash gets here the better because rarely do societies make sweeping changes without some form of crisis to act as the impetus for change. Trying to conserve the dwindling oil reserves simply drags out the inevitable, which is that it will run out someday. Oil is a limited resource and by definition can not be replaced (ok, technically, it can but it takes several millions of years for that to happen; several millions of years we don’t have). So long as it continues as the energy foundation upon which modern societies are built, it WILL run out. So why try to extend it? It’s refinement, processing, combustion, and transformation into so many billions of disposable plastic do-dads are responsible for so many of the environmental ills and global warming that are plaguing our planet’s ecosystem, the sooner we wean ourselves off of it, the better.
Yes, short term, if oil suddenly dries up within, say, 50 years or less, there will be chaos, anarchy, war, famine, disease, etc., etc., etc. as modern oil-dependant societies collapse when their machines grind to a halt, but long term we will recover and it will be better for the planet’s life forms (including ourselves) when the last drop is burned and there’s no more left to pollute the Earth. And yes, I know what that means in real terms. In short, it’s a return to pre-industrial, agrarian society (albeit armed with the knowledge of energy sources and their conversion to electricity that weren’t available to original pre-industrial civilizations such as large-scale wind, geothermal, hydro, solar, and possibly nuclear power).
Given the state of things now, that may not be such a bad thing. Imagine people having to walk to work, engage in health-promoting manual labor, talk with their neighbors in the field, breathe fresh air, bask in a sun not filtered through smog, take a cool, refreshing drink of unpolluted water. I know I’m idealizing and over-simplifying to make a point and that there can still be many problems and drawbacks in a pre-industrial society. But it’s a lot harder to destroy those facets of the ecosystem on which you depend for survival when you don’t have a few billion gallons of crude to burn anymore.
Besides, I doubt we’re on the verge of entering the world of Mad Max/The Road Warrior. Yes, there will be changes but I don’t think it will come tumbling down all at once. We know too much about alternative energy sources for that to happen (even if we’re not using them to their full potential at the moment because of the ease with which we can extract energy from oil due to a century-old infrastructure that’s already in place). I recently saw a map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_land_area.png) of the world that was used to demonstrate how large an area would have to be covered by solar panels on each continent to supply the worlds current energy needs. It probably amounts to an area less than the size of the USA’s desert southwest. And that’s only if all the cells were concentrated in a single location. If they were broadly disseminated on residential and commercial rooftops in addition to regional solar farms, then there would be no need for such a large array in a single location.
The lights aren’t going to be shut off anytime soon; a way will be found to make the transition from oil-dependency to some other form(s) of energy. There will be growing pains during the transition (metering, rationing, taking 2 steps back so we can take 3 steps forward, etc.), but we’ll figure it out. The thing people seem to forget is how adaptable human beings are; it’s arguably our greatest evolutionary trait and one that we’ve leveraged to it’s fullest potential by having managed to SURVIVE thus far under far worse conditions than we find ourselves in at present. And, I, for one, am certain we’ll continue doing so.
So cheer up! You’re in the enviable position of living at a time in history when you might actually get to witness the world’s civilizations cease their dependency on oil along with an end to all the problems it causes. And if not you, then very likely your children or grand-children will get to bear witness to the passing of an era and a paradigm shift within the course of human events.
This article by Jan Lundberg is related, but takes a more hardline view. Well worth reading to dump all those assumptions most of us still have about technology:
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=173&Itemid=1
I read Jan Lundberg’s article and didn’t really see anything in there as far as supporting references or verifiable evidence to back up many of her “debunking facts”. Though some of what she states may come to pass, thus retroactively validating her assertions, that is not the same as fact or truth. Overall, my take on the article is it’s more of the same “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” environmental hysteria that’s becoming de rigueur these days.
Furthermore, the author completely overlooks historically demonstrated human adaptability, ingenuity, and resourcefulness in the face of a crisis (though I concede it often takes the crisis growing to truly immediate, life-threatening proportions before those aspects I mentioned come to the fore). It also overlooks human resiliency. Think of all of the wars, genocides, plagues, droughts, famines, and civilization collapses throughout the thousands of years of human history. Yet here we, all 6+ billion of us, still going strong. Yes, I’m aware overpopulation is itself a problem; but the fact that there are so many of us despite all the horrors that have threatened to destroy us is a testament to our survivability. Now we just have to learn to temper it so as not to impact the survivability of the other organisms on this planet.
Modern doomsday environmental propagandists would have you believing humans are as fragile as fine china when it has been conclusively demonstrated that we are much tougher; if not as individual organisms, then as a species as a whole. It’s even theorized that an asteroid impact ~100,000 years ago decimated the then human population of ~100,000 down to only 1,000. From 1,000 we rebuilt back up and are now 6 billion?!?!? Amazing if true. It’s going to take a lot more than some melting polar ice, flooding coastal cities, increasing temperatures, and a few extra hurricanes to wipe us out.
In a sense, it’s unfortunate that in today’s world a human lifespan is shorter than the energies and complex systems that we are toying with. When something goes out of whack and has some immediate undesirable consequence for a human being, human construct, or human society over the span of a few years, we tend to jump to the conclusion that it’s a worse case scenario and it spells the end of the world. If we had the benefit of living longer to see the cause and effect relationships carried out over a few centuries or millennia, we might not be so quick to jump to doomsday predictions as we witness the Earth’s inherent balancing mechanisms avert the global catastrophes that we’re told are coming. But because we only live ~75 years, we can never get a personal sense of the epoch-spanning, planetary-scale forces that keep the environment in balance when averaged over the life of the planet.
In a response to one of The Naib’s previous articles (http://www.blog.thesietch.org/2008/04/24/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/#comment-83770) I touched on this by using past Extinction Level Events as an example to demonstrate that prehistoric injuries suffered by this planet at the hands of asteroids makes all of the human-wrought environmental destruction and climate change pale by comparison. In short, if your concern is for the planet as a whole, you don’t need to worry; Earth has seen far, far worse than anything humans will ever be able to conceivably do to it any time soon AND recovered quite well.
We need to stop equating “disaster for human civilization = disaster for the planet as a whole”. That’s just arrogant and human-centric. That mental attitude of displacement, that what is bad for us is bad for the planet, is very much a part of the larger problem. What I mean by that is that outlook is symptomatic of the prevalent practice of measuring and valuing everything in human terms rather than from the perspective of that which we are measuring or evaluating. This stems from the belief that the only things that are important or of value are human things; human lives, human possessions, human security, human culture, human civilization. The belief that informs the current slogans of the environmental movement (“what affects the human affects the planet”, more-or-less) is the same belief that leads us to rape the world of its natural resources for our own benefit; the belief that we are at the center of the universe (even if we don’t believe this rationally, we act on it emotionally almost all the time). This is not a surprise or even something to assign blame over; we’re living organisms with a healthy survival instinct who, motivated primarily by emotion rather than reason and using all of the tools at our disposal, are doing what appears to be in our best interest relative to survival. But if you really, really, really, truly care about the PLANET, then you’re going to have to get all Zen about it, get over the humano-centrism, and put your perspective outside the confines of considering only that which impacts humanity. Otherwise, humans pretending that they have any real lasting (and I define “lasting†in millions of years, not decades) impact on this planet is as ridiculous as two fleas arguing over which of them owns the dog.
If, on the other hand, your concern is purely for human civilizations / culture / societies, then I concede there MIGHT be cause for concern. I agree that things are going to change; either due to humanity realizing the need for change or the change being forced upon us as the petroleum dries up and those ASPECTS of the environment on which homo sapiens depend on for survival continue to be degraded (but note that disaster for us does not necessarily equate to disaster for every living thing on the planet; if you can avoid the acid rain and slash-and-burn techniques, it’s a good time to be a plant). But I disagree that the changes spell the end of the human race or even civilization as a whole for that matter. A study of human history is full of examples of civilizations collapsing only to have new ones take their place (and, where the policies of certain world superpowers are concerned, that may not be a bad thing). One also can’t overlook the verifiable fact that, prior to the establishment of static agrarian societies which paved the way for monolithic civilizations ~10,000 years ago, homo sapiens managed to survive quite well as hunter-gatherer tribes for the previous 190,000 years. And life in general has been doing just fine, asteroids and mass-extinctions included, for ~ 2.5 BILLION years prior to even that timeframe.
So the issue isn’t really about survival; of the planet or the human race. It’s about whether or not we will get to continue living the comfortable, climate-controlled, ready-access-to-energy lifestyles we’ve (collective “we”) become accustomed to (also touched on in the previous response I mentioned above). The answer is probably “no”; at least in the short term until we sort it all out over several generations of energy wars, rationing, rioting, genocide pogroms, cultural and social collapse, etc., etc., etc. You don’t dig yourself a hole, as we have done, without having to put in a lot of effort to climb out and fill it back in; a lesson lost on the current instant-gratification culture (but about to re-learned in a big way). I don’t deny there will potentially be problems; big problems as measured in human terms, but relatively minor and lasting the blink of an eye as seen from Earth’s perspective. But waiting on the other side, once all that pain is suffered through (and we are going to suffer; we overbuilt a civilization on “energy credit” and soon it will be time to pay up), is a future free from petroleum and that’s a win-win for all concerned.
Fear. The cultivation and promulgation of it, instilling the belief that you are a powerless, helpless victim of circumstances beyond your control, that you can’t change anything or any effort to do so is doomed to failure, that your only hope and salvation lies in signing over some degree of freedom to someone else in exchange for “securityâ€; these are the weapons of the “expertâ€, the politician, the salesman, and, sadly, the environmental propagandist. Stop listening and take back control of your own life before you try to tackle something as big as ending environmental destruction. Change the things you can and learn to divest yourself of the crippling guilt and sense of personal responsibility over the things you can’t. You didn’t make this mess, but wallowing in hopelessness and despair over how bad it is won’t make it any better either.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, educate yourself, do what you can to lessen your impact on the planet, teach your children the same, and you and yours should come out OK. And for your own sake and sanity, ignore the “THE END IS NEAR†predictions. That’s just someone trying to sell you something; even if it’s only their own ideology they’re hawking rather than a product.
So that there is no doubt that I’m just talking off the cuff without really having a clue about what I’m suggesting, I’m perfectly at home in the outdoors and able to survive off the land if necessary. I have plans drawn up for a 100% off-grid solar home. Even if petroleum runs out, I’ll still be able to keep on going. I might have to make some changes, adapt a little (which is something humans have historically been very good at), but I’ll manage; I know how to make or procure the 3 necessities of food (including potable water), clothing, and shelter. And I’m not alone in this; there are plenty of other people out there who know how to do the same. If the majority of the rest of the overweight, couch potato US population can’t do the same, then maybe they should have stayed awake in Biology class during the section on natural selection and evolution. So I reiterate; I welcome the day the oil dries up.
I completely agree CCB (at least with what I got from skimming — comments shouldn’t really be essays if you want them to be read fully). Jan really does know what he is talking about and has worked with many of the most respected experts in the fields of social anthropology and psycho-sociology, and he (like me) certainly does NOT equate humanity with civilization. It’s very interesting that you got the opposite impression — kind of suggests you are still imprinted with the very misconceptions you rail against, but probably not for want of trying to avoid this.
Humanity is not dying, but if civilization is allowed to continue then it will cause an almighty crash that will bring a hell of a lot of people down with it, along with a pretty high percentage of the world’s species. I don’t think any species but Homo Sapiens Civis deserves that.
Keith