Beyond the Peak
Oil is the foundation of, and is present throughout, the edifice of human civilization. There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy – oil and natural gas – in every calorie of food you and I eat in the industrialized world. Fertilizers are made from natural gas. Pesticides are made from oil. Oil-powered machines are driven to plant, plough, irrigate, harvest, transport, package. You wrap the food in plastic – that's oil. All plastic is oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every car tyre. Oil is everywhere; it's ubiquitous. And it's because of oil that there are almost seven billion people on this planet right now.
The arrival of this cheap and easy energy which is equivalent, by the way, to billions of slaves working around the clock, changed the world in such a radical way over the last two centuries that the population has gone up 10 times. But, by 2050, oil supply will be able to support less than half the present world's population in their present way of life. So, the scale of adjustment to live differently is enormous.
The world is now using six barrels of oil for every barrel it finds. Five years ago it was using four barrels of oil for every barrel it finds. A year from now it is going to be using eight barrels of oil for every newly-discovered barrel.
What is disturbing is the lack of any real effort from governments and industry leaders worldwide to do something different. We have these attempts to build more wind power and to maybe do something with tidal power, we've got attempts to make cars a little bit more efficient, but there's nothing which really looks like a revolution coming along; it’s all pretty minor tinkering, which is pretty frightening given the circumstances.
Governments, driven by economists who don't really appreciate the issues at hand, are trying to stimulate consumerism to restore past prosperity in the hope that they can restore the past. They're printing yet more money whilst lacking any collateral at all. So, if the economy improves and recovers and the growth returns, it will only be short-lived because within a short period of time it will hit the supply barrier again, there will be another price shock and a deeper recession. A series of increasingly vicious circles ensues.
You have economic growth, followed by a price spike, causing great hardship. That's where we are now. But what we also have now is this situation where there's no more ability to produce cheap energy. We're at the peak – soon to hit the down slope of oil production. Oil cannot be extracted any faster which means that things shut down, the price of oil drops (which it did in early 2009) but then as you have a “recovery” the price of oil starts to come back. It's recently been hovering at about $100 a barrel and what we see is that, at this cost, with the financial and economic collapse, people are having a hard time affording that.
World oil production right now is about 86 million barrels a day. Over 10 years, you're looking at roughly 14 million barrels a day having to be replaced. There's nothing around which can come within even 1% of meeting that sort of demand. If we don't do something pretty quickly there's going to be a huge energy deficiency. The big mistake was in not recognising a decade or so ago that a concerted effort needed to be made to develop these sustainable forms of energy. That’s something our grandchildren will look back on with total disbelief. They will know we were dealing with a finite commodity, and wonder how we could possibly have built our economy around something which was going to eventually disappear.
For the first time in human history the species is now faced with the depletion of a core resource central to our current system of survival. And the punch-line of the whole saga is that, even with oil becoming more scarce, our economic system will still blindly push its cancerous growth model, so people can go out and buy more oil-powered cars, exasperating the decline. Are there solutions to replace the hydrocarbon economy? Of course. But the path needed to accomplish these changes will not manifest itself, since new solutions can only be implemented through the profit mechanism. People are not investing in renewable energies because there is no money in it in both long and short-term. And the commitment needed to make it happen can only occur at a severe financial loss. Hence, there is no monetary incentive and in this system, if there is no monetary incentive, things do not happen. On top of it all, Peak Oil is just one of many surfacing consequences of the environmental-social train wreck gaining speed today.
Other declines include fresh water - the very fabric of our existence - which is currently showing shortages for 2.8 billion people, and on pace to reach 4 billion by 2030. They also include food production: the destruction of arable crop land, from which 99.7% of all human food comes from today, is occurring up to 40 times faster than it is being replenished. Over the last 40 years, 30% of the world’s arable land has become unproductive. Not to mention that hydrocarbons are the backbone of agriculture today and, as they decline, so will the food supply.
As far as resources in general, at our current patterns of consumption, by 2030 we will need two planets to continue at this level. Not to mention the continual destruction of life supporting biodiversity causing extinction spasms and environmental destabilisation across the globe. Alongside all these declines we have near-exponential population growth, where by 2030 there may be over 8 billion people on this planet. Energy production alone would need to increase 44% by 2030 to meet such demand.
And again, since money is the only initiator of action - are we to expect that any country on the planet is going to be able to afford the massive changes needed to revolutionise agriculture, water processing, energy production and the like, when the global debt pyramid scheme is slowly shutting the entire world down? Not to mention the fact that the unemployment you currently see is going to become the norm due to the nature of technological unemployment. The jobs are not coming back. And finally, on a broad social perspective, from 1970 to 2010, poverty on this planet doubled due to this system and, given our current state, do you honestly think we will see anything less than more doubling, more suffering and more mass starvation?
We must do all we can to avoid that condition. It's clear we're on the verge of a great transition in human life. What we face now is the most fundamental change we've known over the last century. The "in" group will do all it can to stay in power; they'll use the army and navy and lies or whatever they have to use to keep in power. They're not about to give it up because they don't know of any other system that will perpetuate their kind. But when things get so bad that people lose confidence in their elected leaders, they will demand change. Something’s got to give.