Look
around you: what do you use that doesn’t currently depend
upon oil?
We
have experienced unprecedented growth of technology, wealth
and comfort over the last two centuries which has accelerated
further within living memory. Information technology, transportation,
breakthroughs in health and industrial agriculture have all
lead to an expectation of a standard of living that would
have astounded pharoes and emperors.
Clever
as we may be, ingenuity alone can't take the credit for our
modern comforts; energy is at the heart of the matter. The
hydrocarbons that drive our modern economies outperformed
human and horse power in such a way that it is as if the modern
westerner had a whole village of labourers slaving on their
behalf.
All of
human life depends on the energy of the sun, captured by photosynthesising
plants. Even the energy in coal and oil is sunlight captured
by plants, only in a very concentrated form. For millions
of years human population was limited by the available plant
'energy' - in other words how much land you could farm. All
that changed when we learnt to use the energy in coal and
oil. In the two hundred years since we have used up roughly
half the earth's oil supplies, equivalent to millions of years
of plant growth in one great energy surge. Human population
has rocketed, and our level of consumption has increased to
well beyond the carrying capacity of the planet.
When the
cheap concentrated energy runs out, what will we do?
Millions
of years of plant growth are compressed into a source
of energy so concentrated that a few drops of it can
make a steel car full of people leap down the road much
faster than any animal that has ever been fuelled by
plants alone.
A
Historic Change
We have
known for a long time that the oil supplies are finite. In
fact geologists have had a good idea since the 1970s of how
much available oil there is to be extracted globally and everyone
is agreed that we're more or less half way through it. We
may still have the other half left, except that half is not
easy to get at - it's the left overs. It's not the stuff that
gushes out of the ground when you drill a hole and if we do
manage to extract it, supplies will still be dwindling over
time. It is a very real posibility that the days of cheap
abundant energy have gone.
But this
might not be the catastrophe it sounds. If we extricate ourselves
from oil dependence we can also address the problem of global
warmer and perhaps improve our local communities into the
bargain.
Which
bits of our lives may have to change? Take a lookround...
The food
you eat will have been fertilised by chemicals made directly
from oil. It will have been managed cheaply of farms of few
people and many oil powered machines. It will have been driven
or flown from where it was grown to your kitchen, often refrigerated
on the way.
transportation
is of course totally dependent upon oil. The clothes you wear
may well have been made from nylon, polyester or other materials
made from petrochemicals. If their cotton, they will have
been farmed, processed and shipped at great energy cost.
From heating
and furnishing, to education and medicine; all parts of our
lives depend upon oil. Can we change that dependence?
This is
the question that transition towns are trying to ask. Weening
ourselves off 86 million barrels of oil a day won't be easy,
but it's going to happen one way or another. Lets decide how
it happens - it could even do us good!
A really
clear and short video that sets out the issue very well
Peak
Oil, Visually Explained by Scott McLean
Industry
Insider View
For anyone
wanting to look further into the issues, here is a video from
a much longer interview with Dr Colin Campbell, Geologist,
talking in 2002 about oil, its production, peak, and the politics
of its extraction.
'Oil discovery
peaked in 1964' (whole series of 13 parts is very good)
Economy
And here,
Dr Colin Campbell again, in a very short clip from 2005, which
appears to predict the economic crisis that we're experiencing
now.
