CC7
May 4 2010
Does the earth feel pain? Of course, if you believe what the Bible says in Romans 8: 22, where it is recorded that the whole creation has been groaning from pain. It must be screaming now that oil is destroying very vulnerable wetland in the Southern states.
What is the ultimate price we are willing to pay for oil, not only in dollars but especially in natural habitat destruction? The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is just the most recent The other costs are more hidden: air pollution, asthma, global weirding, so perhaps the latest news that we are approaching PEAK OIL should perhaps be regarded as Good News. The bad news is that the approach of Peak Oil means that the easy stuff is gone which increases the danger of getting out whatever is left.
Who says that we are approaching Peak Oil? The United States Joint Forces Command in a press release a few weeks ago has told the world that “a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.” It suggests that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day.” The report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under “the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand”.
Less available energy for the world’s household can be compared to a family suddenly facing job losses or decreasing wages. That would not in itself be a bad thing, if prices would also decline and so purchasing power maintained, but if the cost of living goes up, that family will experience a double whammy, and may be reduced to sudden poverty, it not worse.
A family needs money to operate, just as oil is needed to keep the world economy going: money can be created out of nothing, that’s why banks are so profitable, but that is not the case with Oil, which is becoming ever more difficult to obtain, while demand goes up, because India and China, with close to 40 percent of the world’s population, have an increasing appetite for energy, which will produce mushrooming prices.
Less oil will actually produce more pollution, because everyone, including China –already using 80 percent coal to generate electricity – will increase the use of much higher polluting coal, especially as electric cars become all the rage.
The recent eruption of that volcano whose name I cannot possibly remember, which stopped airplane traffic dead, is but a pinprick prelude of what is at store when high octane airplane fuel will no longer be plentiful and cheap. It will not disappear, of course, but tripling the cost of the airplane power source will put an effective stop to all but the most necessary air travel. And that will only be a minor nuisance compared to other inconveniences, such as food costs, or even its very availability.
During the past five decades agriculture has become energy-intensive in every respect. The earth we own has, by and large, lost its natural state and its soil has become a chemical soup laced with pesticides and herbicides – both synthesized from oil – and other chemicals. With the price of nitrogen fertilizers, produced from natural gas, increasing exponentially at the same rate as its carbon-brother oil, and tractors and other farm machinery burning diesel fuel and gasoline, with crops trucked long distances, and food packaged in oil-derived plastic, by the time it has traveled from land to mouth, very few people will be able to afford it.
One hundred years ago 70 percent of the population was rural. Today, 2010, in its US census forms there are so few full-time farmers, that such a category no longer is included in the list of occupations. It can be safely said that with no oil, or only extremely costly fuel, society as we know it, will cease to function.
Jeff Rubin, former economist with the CIBC, in his book, Why Your world is about to get a whole lot Smaller, oil and the end of Globalization, writes that our long-distance food supply, will cease to function and local produce, a 100 feet diet, will become the norm. With a 100 feet diet I mean that you will step outside your door into you garden and eat your own produce. Of course that will not be possible when you live on the 15th floor of a condo downtown somewhere, so, with high fuel prices, these places might not be your best bet anymore. Jeff Rubin sees 60 cents for a pound of bananas or $4 for a dozen oranges or cheap California lettuce or impossible to eat Mexican tomatoes as a quirk of history, only made possible through the temporary spurt in cheap fuel.
What should we do, in the light of these circumstances?
More about that in a next column.
Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) has a web site – hielema.ca – on which essays, books, and more than 500 columns are available free of charge.