Oil Crisis.

[Mister Joy]

I fancy a debate on this subject because it caught my interest recently and I've been reading a lot into it. I'll try not to go to far into my own point of view or it's justifications until things get rolling (I find it handy to keep a few cards up my sleeve ).

Basically, anyone who's done even a smidgen of research will more or less agree that if we haven't hit the peak of global oil production already this decade (which we wont know until later) then we're going to by the end of it, most likely. The only people who disagree with this, really, are free market economists, politicians & those who are simply ignorant/indifferent about the whole thing. So the debate is not will oil run out but how and to what degree will this change the world we live in? Opinions seem to vary from "We're all going to die! Go hide in a bunker! etc." (a bit depressing and slightly unrealistic) to "Yeah we'll have to make some changes but ultimately it isn't going to have a huge effect on our standard of living or lifestyle" (that, if you ask me, is naive). My own opinion is somewhere in the middle, though sadly leaning more towards the former end of the spectrum:

I think that the changes to society everywhere in the world will be astronomical and that the shift from one to the other could be devastatingly difficult; also that a lot of people gravely underestimate this. I've arrived at this point by simply examining the role that oil plays and has played in building and maintaining almost all major civilisations on the planet since the birth of industry, how we have come to depend on such a powerful source of energy and the likelihood stroke impossibility of being able to replace it adequately with other sources. Also, while I acknowledge that a serious global effort to buffer ourselves to the changes (Ie. conservation, trying to increase the usage of other energy sources, action on the part of the state and free market etc.) would help a great deal, I remain cynical about whether such an effort will ever actually be made until it's too late to matter. It's also important to note that many of these endeavours will, rather ironically, depend on fossil fuels & when it comes to alternative sources of energy (wind turbines, solar power etc) people tend to focus on electricity alone and forget about industry. Since they're both entirely interdependent with each other and almost all other aspects of our lavish lifestyle, this winds up being slightly self-defeating.

I don't see this as the end of the world though. A new and very different age for mankind maybe but all is not doom and gloom.

Richard Heinberg has written a very informative series of books (The Party's Over, Power Down & The Oil Depletion Protocol) in an attempt to echo the warnings of under-represented petroleum geologists. These are good: very factual and unopinionated. Another book that's interesting, at least, is Vernon Coleman's Oil Apocalypse, for the extreme doom and gloom side of things, though I personally view all of Coleman's writing with no small amount of scepticism. He can be extremely annoying, pompous and scaremongering at times; often very biased & over the top. If you can cut through the crap though it's still worth a look.

Onto the next thing: how do you guys think we aught to prepare for this on an individual basis, given that all sides tend to agree on preparation being the key? My family is basically purchasing as many industrially made tools as possible, as well as many other things that could be useful (medicine and so on) trying to become more self-reliant, trying to learn any additional skills that might come in handy and we already grow a lot of our own food et cetera. This is a sort of fail-safe investment really since, in terms of economic implications, I'm sure that the cost of living is going to steadily increase from now on: many of the things we can easily get now will be simply unaffordable and inaccessible to the masses in the future.

[tacoma_kyle]

One other old fart on a Toyota 4wheeling board always said learn and develop Fusion power technology then we will have all the necessary energy to run hydrogen.

He didnt ever state this, but also electrical. Being a wheeler you can just plug in out in the woods.


If it got real bad, take a hour and ride a bike to work when needed and get in hellova lot better shape while your at it. Buy a street bike/dual sport. Convert you vehicle to propane/hydrogen. Biodeisel.... and so on.

The options are getting wider by the week.

[Kona]

I think we are probably looking at a slowing down of oil production coupled with the accelerated rise of alternatives.  Alternatives, chiefly being composed of wind, wave and solar will find their way to the consumer level as production is scaled and price pressures push consumers to buy their own energy generation devices.   There are some great things on the horizon for solar (thin film organics) that will make home solar cheap and small wind turbines are already popping up in Europe.   Distributed energy networks from wind farms and solar concentrators will be able to replace a lot of fossil fuel used in power generation, but that will take decades to bring online.  Of course the big ace up the sleeve is clean coal technologies since we have about 3 centuries worth of that laying around the USA.  All forms of recoverable fossil fuels leave us far away from their end unless we decide global climate change is more pressing than our need to tap into them.  This may sound all rosy, but I think we will adapt when really pressed to do so and necessity is the mother of invention.

[pjkeeley]

This may sound all rosy, but I think we will adapt when really pressed to do so and necessity is the mother of invention.

Necessity can also be, sociologically speaking, the mother of big huge wars.

I'm pretty pessimistic that the social and political changes necessary for a world after oil will be as smooth as the technological ones. Considering the way in which oil determines global politics and the economy, there's no way the political and social world order is going to remain the same it is now. This could be a cause for optimism however, as it may be replaced by something better. Or, as Mister Joy pondered, we may all die.

[Mister Joy]

Yes, we'll adapt (ain't the end of the world; I do think it's the end of growth, though, and the beginning of a decline to more basic principals) and I also agree with you regarding individualised power sources. Things like solar panelling do not provide as much power (not enough to keep up the average rate of consumption) but they're free in the long term, after the initial cost, and there are people out there who use them in entirety and manage just fine. Better to get these sooner rather than later though because they're production is industrial, so they're gonna get pricey.

The same goes for biofuels. If you wanted enough to feed just the US motorists (just motorists, here; disregard machinery and so on) at their current consumption rate you'd have to cover the entire country in fields leaving no room for food crops or even cities come to that. It isn't as efficient as oil; nowhere near. Obviously that isn't going to happen, so demand for biofuels will rise at a rate that supply can't keep up with, thus making the price shoot ever higher. Driving, therefore, is going to be a luxury, especially when you consider how most biofuels will be needed to power things other than cars like industrial machinery (something which will also become infinitely more costly, kind of defeating the whole point of it).

What concerns me is that with the growth of industrial societies, many skills, trades and aspects of people's lives became vestigial and have been phased out. As all this starts to change, we'll need them back again. A very simple, materialistic example is agriculture in the UK: our idiotic leaders have all but destroyed it and we now mostly depend on foreign imports. How are we supposed to get these imports without planes or sufficiently large ships (baring in mind we're an island)? Firstly there's the problem of inventing new forms of biofuel/new types of ocean crossing vehicles which work with one another, then there's the problem of having enough of it to fuel even one journey across the English channel, let alone on-going exchanges all over the world. I doubt that'll be realistic. And the population is too large to be fed by nothing but the exploits of row-boats, that's for sure.

[Mister Joy]

Necessity can also be, sociologically speaking, the mother of big huge wars.

I'm pretty pessimistic that the social and political changes necessary for a world after oil will be as smooth as the technological ones. Considering the way in which oil determines global politics and the economy, there's no way the political and social world order is going to remain the same it is now. This could be a cause for optimism however, as it may be replaced by something better. Or, as Mister Joy pondered, we may all die.

Agreed. Oil wars are going on already. I'm expecting a big one though; a sort of WWI-esque build up, something little happens to give our leaders an excuse and boom.

And I also agree, as you imply (I think), that the change over from oil-dependant to oil-free is not going to be sudden or painless.

[Kona]

What concerns me is that with the growth of industrial societies, many skills, trades and aspects of people's lives became vestigial and have been phased out. As all this starts to change, we'll need them back again. A very simple, materialistic example is agriculture in the UK: our idiotic leaders have all but destroyed it and we now mostly depend on foreign imports.

I suppose this is one reason that agricultural subsidies will remain in place in the US...as a national security issue and not necessarily as patronage to agribusiness. I don't know what the hell I would do for clothing since most of it comes from E. Asia.  Hell, even the Mexicans are complaining about the Chinese taking work from them.....freaking jalapeños are being imported from China to Mexico.  In the big, big picture we are probably looking at reduced worldwide energy output (hopefully due to conservation and slowing growth), reduction in population (war, famine, disease mostly in the 3rd world), and a return to something akin to self-sufficiency visa vie re-invigoration of our manufacturing base in the US and limiting global trade. Of course, this could all be nixed should we figure out fusion power or cheap hydrogen production.  If you were to find away to produce high temp. superconductors cheaply, then you can add about 40-60% energy savings just through mitigation of electrical resistance in the power grid.  Just as the atomic bomb changed the world, so an equivalent invention in the material sciences could free us from fossil fuel in a peaceful manner.  Wars have been fought over much less than the impending energy crunch that is just around the corner (20-40 years).

[LARA]

After Peak Oil, we might not have the same energy resources we had in the past, but we will still have the knowledge we gained during the growth phase of industry.  It's pretty obvious that things are going to slow down, we'll have to implement all forms of wind, geothermal and solar and go to electric vehicles and mass transit.  Even with this we'll have to use some of our fossil fuel resources to get the ball rolling in the manufacture of these products, but the sooner the better.  And we'll have to face the fact that we simply won't have the same kind of lifestyles we did in the past.  Modern marketing techniques like planned obsolescence will have to become a thing of the past as efficiency becomes highest priority.  None of this is going to be easy, especially when you have a society made up of people more interested in lining their own pockets than working for a common good.  We need to adjust our attitudes fast.

I spend a good deal of time reading on solar and wind and one of the biggest stumbling blocks for me putting a system in is simply the cost.  But there are workarounds for people with technical know-how who can build the systems themselves.  I would imagine that being able to wire a solar panel or build a windmill would be a highly desired skill in a Peak Oil economy.  Gardening, animal husbandry and other basic farming skills would also be good to pick up, although these do take access to property to put into place.

At one time, telephones ran by hand cranks and your car had a crank ignition, too, instead of a battery.  There are ways to keep small devices running without sun or battery.  There will be similar workarounds in the future.  We don't have to lose our technology, just make it more efficient.

War is the stupidest strategy we can have right now, the best is to let go of our greedy oil economy and work together as a society to use our brain power to find solutions to the energy crisis and share technology openly.  The more minds on a problem, the faster we can move to an efficient lifestyle that retains essential technology as opposed to destroying all we have built just to live like a Luddite on a dirt farm somewhere.

Unfortunately, I think we all know the inevitable fighting and wars are going to occur, as we know they already are, ridiculously wasting the resources we do have to try to secure more for the future, which isn't going to help anyway.  I wonder what the world would look like today if we had put all the resources used fighting the war in Iraq into alternative energy solutions.  But it's already been wasted and it's time to look to the future.

[Mister Joy]

Wars have been fought over much less than the impending energy crunch that is just around the corner (20-40 years).

Agreed, though I don't think there's likely to be an oil 'crunch' so much as an ever tightening oil 'squeeze' if that makes sense . It's peak oil that's going to be the real turning point and that's much more likely to have already happened (won't be sure until years have passed) than 20-40 years in the future, unless you go by some government statistics or the claims of free market economists, both of which are extremely untrustworthy in this context. The oil age will be over long before oil itself has completely run out. In fact, chances are, oil never will run out. It'll simply become too costly to use, there'll be no point in extracting it, etc.

It should also be kept in mind that the potential of alternative energy sources - though they are almost certainly going to be useful to us - are vastly exaggerated by the public and private sector alike. In the case of the state it's to shut us up and keep us happy in the false knowledge that nothing much will change and in the case of the free market, of course, it's to keep us consuming.

Another dilemma: our economies are built on the assumed promise of constant growth, which is, unfortunately, unrealistic. It isn't surprising though, since the global economy has been growing at an alarming rate since the industrial revolution and before, though nowhere near as steeply. In the four and a half thousand years prior to the birth of industry, standard of living and GDP, overall (so averaging out the ups and downs), is roughly estimated to have doubled, but since then it's been doubling every other decade or so. That's why whole nations allow themselves to get into extreme debt (the US, especially, is in quite a bad position here), banks allow such lavish mortgages etc. and it isn't just lending and borrowing, either. It's safe to expect huge economic turmoil in the future.

After Peak Oil, we might not have the same energy resources we had in the past, but we will still have the knowledge we gained during the growth phase of industry. It's pretty obvious that things are going to slow down, we'll have to implement all forms of wind, geothermal and solar and go to electric vehicles and mass transit. Even with this we'll have to use some of our fossil fuel resources to get the ball rolling in the manufacture of these products, but the sooner the better. And we'll have to face the fact that we simply won't have the same kind of lifestyles we did in the past. Modern marketing techniques like planned obsolescence will have to become a thing of the past as efficiency becomes highest priority. None of this is going to be easy, especially when you have a society made up of people more interested in lining their own pockets than working for a common good. We need to adjust our attitudes fast.

It will become an increasingly major issue from now on, I imagine. So presumably people's attitudes will eventually change (let's hope sooner rather than later) and increasing pressure will be put on politicians to do their jobs properly. I think that once this starts to really set in, many of the major issues of today - such as the 'war on terror', global warming, and even the squabbling between different religious subcultures within nations - will all start to look increasingly trivial. Also, once people start to realise what's really going on, political parties are going to have to start thinking of much better pretexts than "we will fight the evil ones" if they want to go marching into the East trying to secure pipe lines.

Unfortunately, I think we all know the inevitable fighting and wars are going to occur, as we know they already are, ridiculously wasting the resources we do have to try to secure more for the future, which isn't going to help anyway. I wonder what the world would look like today if we had put all the resources used fighting the war in Iraq into alternative energy solutions. But it's already been wasted and it's time to look to the future.

Let's take bets on whether they'll stop at Iraq, though. Call me a pessimistic old git but I think Iraq is only the beginning. Plus, there is a large subculture of bigoted, nationalistic (under the guise of 'patriotism', completely disregarding the difference between the two terms) & easily influenced fools in the world who's blind irrationality & self-assuredness allows them to be effortlessly led into supporting pointless wars and tightening 'security'.