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Jun 23, 2011

Know Your Enemy - pt 1

     Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be in a coma for several years and suddenly wake up?  Pretend for a minute that you hit your head in 2001 and when you open your eyes again, a doctor is telling you it's 2011...ten years have passed.  Here's what your conversation might sound like:

 "What happened while I was asleep?" 
"Well...", he thinks for a second, "A few months after your accident, radical Islamic terrorists destroyed both towers of the World Trade Center.  We responded by invading Afghanistan and later Iraq...over 7,000 soldiers have been killed so far."   
"Wait, what do you mean 'so far'?"   
"Oh, well the wars are still going on.  Anyway, Saddam Hussein was captured back in 2003 and executed three years later.  Since 2001 there have been other major terrorist attacks in Bali, Madrid, London and Mumbai.  The CIA now operates remote controlled planes that fire missiles at suspected terrorists hiding in Pakistan and Yemen, even though we're not at war with those countries.  This other agency, the TSA, do you remember them?  Well, they're in charge of keeping us safe on airplanes, so now when you go on vacation you either have to let them take naked pictures of you or feel around your crotch to make sure you don't have a bomb in your underpants.  Bush was re-elected in '04 and in 2008 Barrack Obama became the first black president.  He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and today he's funding a brand new war in Libya." 
"Wow, I sure missed a lot..." 
"Hold on a sec, we're not finished yet.  The stock market tanked hard while you were out and the country went into a huge recession." 
"Actually that started to happen before my accident, but I'm guessing it got worse?" 
"Huh...?  Oh you mean the dot-com bubble?  I forgot about that one.  No, I'm talking about the crash in 2008.  This will be hard to understand, but between 2001 and 2005 millions of people were able to get rich selling houses to each other and yet somehow by 2007 most of that money had evaporated into thin air. The situation got pretty ugly by 2009, but luckily the Federal Reserve stepped in to print lots more and saved the day." 
"So we're all rich again?" 
"Hmmm, your chart says you were a construction supervisor before your accident...I'll make a note to have one of our grief counselors stop by for a chat later.  Also, did you have any friends in northern Japan?  No?  That's good.  But where were we?  Europe is still trying to get on-board the economic recovery - they'll be alright if Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy don't go bankrupt.  Gas is fairly expensive today so you may want to trade in whatever old 90's car you have and get a hybrid.  I'd suggest either Chrysler or GM.  Since they're both heavily subsidized by the federal government now you'll get an amazing deal." 
"Doctor, stop...my head is spinning.  Just tell me what caused all this?" 
"Oh, well other than Obama's Peace Prize - which is still sort of a mystery - most of it was caused by Peak Oil."

Stop, halt, desist.  That's the second time I've brought up peak oil on this site, and now I'm claiming it's responsible for most of the major problems of the past decade?  How can that possibly be true?  It's true because of something people have been taking for granted for the past century;  that oil is the foundation for everything else in our modern society.  If you don't believe me, try to go one month without visiting a gas station.  Your productive activities will soon be limited to what you can accomplish around your neighborhood.  Your world will shrink to the places you can get to by walking or riding a bike.  Most of us can't do our jobs if we can't drive our cars to work, and the people who depended on the goods or services we had been producing will begin to feel the effects.

Now stretch your imagination further and pretend that all the oil on Earth suddenly vanished.  What would happen?  There would be almost no transportation.  Only a very few electricity providers - mostly wind and solar-based - would be operating since even coal power plants depend on diesel fuel to operate the machines that mine the coal and the trucks or ships that move it.  Modern agriculture would cease to exist, period.  No oil to power the drills that extract natural gas or the plants that extract hydrogen for chemical fertilizers.  No oil to transport those fertilizers to farmers or crops to the grocery store.  By the end of Day 1 without oil our lives would already resemble life at the turn of the twentieth century.  Except that in those days about 80% of the American population still grew at least some of there own food. What I'm talking about is a very fragile system.  If the world as we know it today is a Jenga tower, then oil is the only block on the bottom row.

Luckily, oil will not suddenly disappear.  There's at least enough oil in the ground today that people will probably be pumping it for another 80 to 100 years.  So what's the big deal?  First of all, oil production over the past century has matched population growth almost exactly.  Or was it that population growth has matched oil production...?  Actually it's neither.  Oil production has caused population growth.  You see, in the year 1900 world population was about 1.5 billion people and almost no oil was produced.  Sometime in 2011, world population will pass 7 billion people because we now produce around 88 million barrels of oil per day.  As I said earlier, without oil we wouldn't have cheap, abundant food, or any petroleum-based medicines, or any of the helpful everyday items made from plastic.  Cars, airplanes, huge container ships filled with Chinese goodies bound for your Wal-Mart?  Nope, nope and nope.  If oil had never existed in the first place, would we have 7 billion people alive today?  I'd guess more like 2 to 3 billion.

Now flip back to my prediction of 80 - 100 years more oil production.  If you look at the Hubbert's Curve cartoon at the top of this post, we're not quite as far to the right as the dialog bubble would imply, but probably somewhere right around the middle.  I've said that increased oil production is what caused the world population to grow, so therefore decreased oil production in the future should cause the world population to _______?  And the answer is not "party like it's 1999".  How does a world population of 2 to 3 billion in the year 2100 strike you?  All we need is for 4 or 5 billion volunteers to die off in an orderly fashion over the next century (90% of them will have to make their exit between today and 2050 for us to stay on track), with no more births along the way and whoever's left can still have plenty to eat!  Any takers?

As depressing as that is, it still doesn't explain why I'm blaming the wars and financial crises of the past decade on peak oil.  Or does it?  What if industry and government experts had known about peak oil theory since, let's say 1956 (they have), and they'd seen concrete evidence to back it up since maybe the early 70s?  (ok)  And what if, by chance we knew where in the world most of the remaining oil was located?  (right here)  Would we be more or less interested in exerting American "influence" (military) in that region?  Would the government go so far as to start a war by allowing terrorist attacks on American civilians?  (surely not)

I'll stop right there for now and allow you to draw your own conclusions.  In part 2 we'll explore the ongoing financial nightmare and discover that it too is related to peak oil.

Reading List

Population, the Elephant in the Room

The Peak of World Oil Production


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1 comment:

  1. Wow, the timing of this post couldn't have been more appropriate. In case you haven't heard, the IEA just announced an "emergency" release of 60 million barrels from oil reserves in various countries, including 30 million from the US alone. Paradoxically, this could prove to make oil much more expensive over the long-term as the IEA is basically admitting that production is no longer able to keep up with demand.

    Read more here:

    http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=17651

    ReplyDelete