Situation:

We learned in grade school that oil is a “nonrenewable resource,” that it’s sunlight turned into plants and animals all compressed and decayed over billions of years, or something like that. It’s the concentrated energy of the life that existed on planet Earth, and over half of it has been used by humans in the past century. Oil is what made our rapid industrialization possible: without this concentrated, cheap source of energy, there’s no way this globalized society could have been constructed.

Meanwhile, our appetite for oil-energy keeps rising: in the past 50 years, global demand for oil has increased sevenfold.[1] The U.S. already uses a hugely disproportionate share of the world’s oil, and as other countries modernize, they too are thirsty for oil. Aaron Naparstek, writing in the New York Press, explains:

“Economic growth, as we have come to know it, is entirely dependent on a vast, continuous flow of remarkably cheap oil. As Simmons says, "Peak does not mean oil has run dry; it does mean that growth is over. Who would like to get on the plane and go tell India and China, sorry guys, your spurt is over. We used your energy."”[2]

Peak oil means an increase in global tensions, as nations compete for a dwindling resource. The oil wars have already begun. Why do we consider oil worth dying for?[3] Why does it have such an important role in our lifestyle?

Let’s look at the three main things it’s used in: transport, food, and plastics. When people hear about rising oil prices, it conjures imagery of gas pumps. But transport means much more than personal transport: it means the shipment of goods, and when you’re sitting at a table manufactured in Sweden with dishes from China eating an orange grown in Israel and a salad from Californian vegetables and some soup made from beef raised in Texas on grain grown in Kansas… you start to realize that when the cost of transport goes up, the cost of everything goes up.

Even though transportation is necessary in our globalized society, it isn’t as necessary to the human organism as that other source of energy, food. However, our food supply is based upon cheap oil. How many ways did that cereal you ate for breakfast rely on oil? Even if you walked to the store to buy it, trucks drove it from the factory to the store, and perhaps from the fields to the factory. Also, the fertilizers and pesticides that enable food production on the level of modern agribusiness are made from natural gas and oil: our soil is literally drenched in petroleum derivatives. Plus, the machines that sowed and harvested the seed run on oil. Consider:

America's biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can't eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can't eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don't. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it's about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food. …… The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.[4]

Just as we don’t often think about the oil that goes into our food, we don’t always think about the oil that our food goes into: those plastic bags from the grocery store, which often collect under our kitchen sink until we muster the energy to go recycle them. Look around you: what in your immediate surroundings is made from plastic? I’m sitting in a café in Grants, New Mexico, considering the table, the flooring, the light fixtures, the cheap tablecloth, the flowerpots, even the flowers on the table: all created from oil.

By now, you’re probably getting a picture of what a world without cheap oil looks like. It’s not just the end of the personal automobile, it’s the end of an entire era: agribusiness and cheap, diverse food; plastic and disposable goods; cheap international travel; the suburbs, with their housing developments and big-box stores all spaced out… none of these things will be possible. “Suburban blight” will be a common phrase. I won’t cry over the plastic flowers, or the traffic jams… but already I see the airline industry collapsing, and think about how the next generation’s children will be incredibly lucky to look out an airplane window and look down at the cloud-landscape. Et cetera. At this point you’re probably asking…

Is this for real? Isn’t this controversial?

Yeah, it sounds pretty hard to swallow, but I’m not making it up. It’s surprisingly less controversial than you’d think—most of the people trying to bring peak oil to public consciousness are former oil-execs. I strongly urge you to research this topic for yourself. You’ll probably come across the work of Colin Campbell, a geologist who is the former executive-VP of Total; and Matthew Simmons, who heads an energy investment firm, and advised Cheney’s Energy Task Force in 2001. You’ll also come across a lot of articles from the British press—the Guardian and the BBC—which show that the idea of peak oil is pretty well respected among geologists (and that people abroad are more conscious about this than their American counterparts). And you’ll come across information from the oil companies themselves, who are urging people to think about this: I refer you to Chevron’s surprising website, www.willyoujoinus.com, which explains, “Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century, and one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over. What we all do next will determine how well we meet the energy needs of the entire world in this century and beyond.” It continues, “We can wait until a crisis forces us to do something. Or we can commit to working together, and start by asking the tough questions: How do we meet the energy needs of the developing world and those of industrialized nations?” I’m not suggesting Chevron doesn’t have its own agenda, but you know that if the oil companies are writing things like this, they must know something is up. Please see the footnotes for starting points on your research.

Don’t we have other technologies we can use to deal with the energy crisis?

Not really. We have some ideas in the works, but none of them can replace oil. If we implemented them today, we could make a more peaceful transition to a lower-energy lifestyle, but the political will to do so is lacking. It is important to understand that none of the technologies available can replace oil. “Fossil fuels have met the growing demand because they pack millions of years of the sun’s energy into a compact form, but we will not find their like again,” explains Michael Parfit in National Geographic[5]. So, what do we have to work with?

Conservation, Efficiency, and Other Fossil Fuels

Conservation of what we do have left is crucial, but the best it can do is postpone the inevitable; the same goes for increased efficiency. (Readers should take note of Winning the Oil Endgame, which is a Pentagon-sponsored report, available at www.oilendgame.com, that describes the great potential for increasing energy efficiency—and why it would be an economic benefit, not a detractor).

What we might see is a return to coal, at least for a while, which would be tragic because coal is a terrible pollutant. There’s natural gas, but it is peaking also. Shale oil is complicated to process and requires large amounts of water to transform into usable oil (water being another dwindling resource); the oil sands require two tons of sand to be mined for each barrel of oil, and have a disappointing ERoEI.[6] At any rate, all of these continue to create the third major problem that our planet’s facing (along with the energy crisis and the water crisis)—global warming.

Alternative Technologies

I don’t have space here to evaluate the merits or flaws of these, but here’s a brief summary of some of the more notable options. Biomass includes ethanol, biogas, and biodiesel. Biodiesel would be the easiest fuel to use in our existing transportation infrastructure, but the problem with these is that at our current energy consumption, we’d have to devote all our land to growing biofuels (and while the first-world is farming to run cars, people are starving from lack of grain). Ethanol’s a net energy loser made famous by the corn industry. Nuclear power is an option, and 16% of the world’s electric power is generated by nuclear plants, but it’s not renewable—the readily available uranium will only last about 50 years.[7] We haven’t really figured out cold fusion yet, and hydrogen is a carrier of energy, not a source of it. Solar and wind technologies are quite promising, and they are getting cheaper; the main problem with them right now is that we don’t have a good system of storing the energy that they generate.

Alternative technologies are promising: no doubt. Still, it’s not likely that we can implement these and build a new infrastructure before the current oil-dependent infrastructure collapses. I don’t mean to discount the efforts of the many scientists and innovators that are working hard on sustainable technologies, but consider this:

First, many of these new technologies are nowhere near ready for prime time, and exist mainly in the conceptual stage, if that. Second, of the alternative fuels and gadgets that are technically viable today, many simply cannot compete with fossil fuels or existing technologies. Third, while the market is indeed a marvelous mechanism for bringing innovation to life, the modern economy doesn't even recognize that the current energy system needs replacing. You and I may know that hydrocarbons cost us dearly, in terms of smog, climate change, corruption, and instability, not to mention the billions spent defending the Middle East. But because these "external" costs aren't included in the price of a gallon of gasoline, the market sees no reason to find something other than oil, gas, or coal.[8]

Don’t the people we trust to run our country have some plan for this? If this oil crisis is really happening, why haven’t they told us about it? Why are we still living this way?

In fact, the people in charge have known about petroleum depletion for years, and it’s clear that foreign policy is based around oil (see Iraq). The thing about our democratic system is that it elects people who tell us what we want to hear—and few of us want to hear about how our way of life will change. It also puts into power people who are thinking of acquiring power for four or eight-year terms—they’re not thinking about your children. (In truth, most of them aren’t even thinking about you, unless you’re suitable to recruit to fight their wars.) We’re still living this way because we have a massive case of denial, and nobody wants to be the one that spoils the party (except a growing handful of writers and journalists, who have nothing to lose, and some concerned scientists). It makes an insane sort of sense, once you accept the premise that the people we expect to care about us really don’t (and even if some of them do, they all have a worse case of denial than we do, since they’re rich and have even more to lose from an economical collapse). On the sunny side, as peak oil comes to public awareness our leaders will be pressured to do something—and there are many scientists and companies working to bring the issue to light. BP (who switched its name from British Petrol to Beyond Petroleum) has a new slogan: “Time to go on a low-carbon diet.” And a quick glance at the newsstand reveals cover stories like “After Oil” (National Geographic, August 2005), “”Crossroads for Planet Earth” (Scientific American, Sept. 2005), and “Can Technology Save the Planet?” (Sierra, July/Aug. 2005). Will our leaders get their act together before things fall apart? I want to maintain some kind of optimism, but I don’t want to pretend this will happen—there’s just no evidence to suggest that “they” are doing anything (besides starting wars).

In the future, you can’t count on a “they” to tell you anything, or look out for your interests. There is no they. There is, however, your own critical intellect and intuition, and the families that make up your community, and you will learn to rely on them.

So what’s going to happen?

It’s a chaotic system we’re dealing with, but people have made a few guesses. It’s suggested that it won’t be a smooth ride downhill; something will happen to stabilize the situation for a little while, and then there will be another price shock. We’ll be on an “economic roller-coaster” for a while, and then move into a serious decline—a Great Depression without an obvious way out. Food, energy, transport, and pretty much everything will cost more; we will face collapsing investments, and unemployment from general recession. Even though oil is responsible for only a small percentage of electricity generation, natural gas is also peaking, and the energy crunch will put a strain on electricity—anticipate blackouts. Geopolitical tensions will rise; meanwhile, global domination will be harder to maintain since it will cost more to mobilize and run a military force. Psychologically, the impact upon Westerners may be high, since they have been brought up to expect a certain sort of future and a certain level of comfort. Things will shift to locally grown and produced goods, the suburbs will become vacated due to impracticality, and there will be a lot less plastic used. Futurist Paul Thompson posits an interesting (if dramatic) model in which there’s an ordered transition—the state steps in, organizing emergency food and fuel supplies, rolling blackouts, and martial law—then, things become anarchic for awhile, the state gets desperate, and people take the law into their own hands[9]. After that, he predicts a time of scavenging, where people live off the remains of all this; finally, small, self-sufficient communities develop.

What should I do?

Educate yourself on the subject, and then determine how much or how little you want to change your life right now. You could learn a skill and move to someplace where you can grow food, or you could sit back and watch. You could become an apocalyptic survivalist, or ignore the problem; you could fall into a mood of never-ending gloom, or learn from the immigrants and people of the “third world” how to make merry music in times of desperate hardship. In any case, we can all love and enjoy what you have while we have it, and be ready to gracefully adapt to something else when something else arises.

[1] qtd. by Naparstek, Aaron. “The Coming Global Energy Crunch.” New York Press, 1 June 2004, archived at www.energybulletin.net.

[3] Obviously, you and I might not want to sacrifice our lives for our oil-based lifestyle, but the people who run our country have no problem with us dying to support their lifestyle.

[4] Manning, Richard. “The Oil We Eat.” Harper’s, Feb 2003, archived at www.energybulletin.net.

[5] Parfit, Michael. “Future Power: Where Will the World Get Its Next Energy Fix?” National Geographic, Aug. 2005, see the entire issue for a report on what comes after oil.

[6] Heinberg, Richard. “The End of the Oil Age.” Earth Island Journal, 18.3: Fall 2003. See also Heinberg’s book, The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies.

[8] Roberts, Paul. “Over a Barrel.” Mother Jones, Nov/Dec 2004, also on the web at http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/11/10_401.html. See also Roberts’s book, The End of Oil.