The peak oil crisis: priorities

Posted on March 16, 2010
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In the next few years, most of us are going to have to make many important decisions that will profoundly affect the rest of our lives. How soon these decisions come will depend on one’s individual circumstances.

If you are one of the millions who have lost their jobs or homes in the last year then you already know that something is happening. Returning to the way we have lived for the last 100 years simply is not in the cards. The world is entering a great paradigm shift and our place in it will be markedly different 10 or 20 years from now. The most alarming thing to remember is that 95 percent of us have not discovered that major changes are underway and are waiting for economic recovery and new jobs to open up.

A professor out in California just published a paper concluding that the current economic downturn was caused as much by the $147 oil we saw last summer as it was by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. It doesn’t much matter if he is right or not. What is important, however, is that hardly a day goes by without another major oil production project being delayed or cancelled due to low prices. The death spiral for the oil age has begun.

The U.S. is currently losing about 600,000 jobs a month. If we did the bookkeeping a bit more honestly, to account for the discouraged or those forced into part-time work, the real total is probably closer to 1 million a month. This hemorrhage may slow for a time when our trillion dollar stimulus catches hold, but there is nothing out there to suggest that spending borrowed or printed money for a year or two is going to turn anything around. The trends all suggest that unemployment is going to continue rising and that social unrest is not very far away.

Someday, many years or decades from now, all this is going to stabilize. Just what the world will look like is impossible to forecast. Will there still be 6.7 billion of us around or will the world’s population have declined from deteriorating climate conditions and a lack of food. The only thing for sure is that there is going to be a lot less fossil fuel around to do the heavy work for us.

The last 100 years, particularly the last 50, have been a magic time. The exploitation of fossil fuels has given mankind an era of incredible riches and, for many, unprecedented freedoms to pursue whatever they choose. Now that time is over and humanity is going to have to reprioritize to the basics of life — food, warmth, shelter, health care, sanitation, and security.

If the oil age had come and gone in a few decades mankind would not have had the opportunity to reorganize our lifestyles so dramatically from the way we lived in the 19th century, but it is too late now. Recent estimates say that nearly half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas where they are dependent on others for food. In America, only three percent of us are left on farms to feed the other 97 percent. This is going to be a real problem for if there is anything we really need to do every day, it is to eat.

more: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48577