A View of the Future

• With the approaching oil scarcity, what substitute for oil is there that can be used to manufacture the goods and provide the versatile fuel to which we have become accustomed and "need", in the quantities required to meet ever-expanding global demand?
• What will homeowners use to heat their homes and water and to cook their food when oil and natural gas become scarcer and electricity gets costlier?
• How will life in the automobile-centric suburbs be affected when (not "if") the price per gallon of gasoline reaches $5, $10 or even $20 dollars per gallon or when there is none? Will our suburbs, isolated from employment, schools, agricultural properties, and commercial centers, shrivel on the vine and become ghost towns, as the suburbia routine becomes unsustainable?
• From where will our food come, once the cost and availability of oil for fuel and for fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides make it impossible to continue to run industrial farms and ship crops around the country and the world?
• Who will prevent our public parks, national forests, and wilderness areas from being decimated and left barren, as homeowners are no longer able to afford the cost of conventional fuels for home heating and cooking?
• What will happen to people stranded in the cities, facing increasingly scarce food, unreliable amenities, little income, and nowhere to go?
• When oil becomes in short supply and energy-intensive industries cannot procure adequate petroleum-based fuel and feedstock to run their enterprises, where will their employees find employment?
• With jobless rates soaring in the midst of expanding populations, reduced employment opportunities, growing lawlessness, and intractable problems caused by mounting costs or increasingly difficult access to petroleum products, who is going to ensure law and order in the street? Or will gangs and anarchy prevail among those with no stake in society?
• Should governments continue to spend their scarce financial resources to expand costly highway, bridge, and airport projects when, in several decades, the increasing cost of fuel will significantly reduce the need for, and use of, road, and air transportation?

At least one person in the U.S. Government, Energy Secretary, Samuel Bodman, was recently identified as having recognized implications of rising oil demand on the economy and asking the National Petroleum Council for a “big-picture look” over the next “several years”.⁴ While it is gratifying that the government is starting to realize a storm is brewing on the horizon, they need to focus far beyond the next “several years” and recognize that the effects of decreasing oil supply extend far beyond the price of gasoline tomorrow, but rather to the very survival of U.S. and global societies as we know them.

Conclusion

Many believe the future will generally be an extension of current trends, propelled onward at an increasingly hectic pace by what appears to be our mesmerizing mastery over technology and the elements. This is normal, since this belief simply reflects our personal life experience. Aside from occasional bumps along the way, most of us see global society as continuing to develop and advance, ultimately striving to provide all of mankind with a chance to attain a satisfying quality of life.

Yet observing events around the world today, dark threatening clouds roil on the horizon. This imminent storm is in part caused by our utter dependency on oil for much or most of what we consume, use, or do and the fact that this resource will virtually run out in a matter of several decades. Then what? The problem is exacerbated by the lack of viable technological "fixes" ready to replace oil as either a fuel or a raw material in the quantities to which we have become accustomed and need to meet global demand. Many purported fixes, such as growing soybeans for the manufacture of plastics, are themselves heavily dependent on abundant oil and therefore hold out little hope for salvation.

While the approaching end of abundant oil in several decades will be serious enough to bring the world to its knees, still other factors are contributing to the looming storm. These have been referred to as the "converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century".⁵ These include inadequate supplies of fresh water, decreasing area of arable land, AIDS and potential pandemics, global warming, health implications of polluted environments, the collapse and break-up of failed nation states, and loss of genetic biodiversity, all of which have already begun making their impact. The one catastrophe that exacerbates all the others is a population so massive that it has long exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth.

Unfortunately, most of mankind seems dangerously ignorant of our enormous dependency on oil. We are unaware of the major disruptive implications that rising oil prices will have on our way of life, as oil reserves diminish and competition increases. We fail to realize that the impending depletion of oil threatens us with an unimaginable, yet certain, political and socio-economic disaster beginning within our lifetime. We seem to have forgotten that great civilizations of the past—the Roman, Mayan, Sumerian, or others—have come and gone and that our present global civilization is not exempt from this trend. As inconceivable as it may appear to us who have become used to a comfortable lifestyle, this disaster portends a return to the Dark Ages, one with vestiges of the technological age through which we will have just traversed. We will be embarking into a situation that will be more uncertain, unstable, challenging, and grim than we realize. And little now stands in the way of our embarking on our descent into this abyss.

Because of the seriousness of the problems we will be encountering, they will not be resolved by burying our heads in the sand and hoping for the best or by taking up token ”green” interventions that assuage our guilt but are ineffective and inconsequential as they stand. We must seize all pulpits to immediately demand that our governments refocus their priorities and enter into a committed partnership with the private sector and the populace to focus all resources on addressing critical needs crying out for resolution. Interventions are needed both in the technical realm—finding sustainable alternatives that can realistically and fully meet the needs currently met by oil as an energy source and as a feedstock for industry—as well as in the social realm—reducing our insatiable appetite for “stuff” that ultimately will end up in the landfill anyway and to reduce population by empowering women, promoting family planning, and advocating for equality and education for women.

The government must redirect its attention, resources, and energy away from addressing relatively trivial distractions—fighting terrorism, rebuilding New Orleans, Iraq, teaching of intelligent design, etc.—to assessing how we will survive the end of cheap oil and the other impending catastrophes. They must then implement programs to effectively achieve this. This is a serious undertaking, literally a matter of life or death. It also requires we realize that, ultimately, peace and security is best ensured by assuring justice for all and not through the barrel of a gun, and that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually by government around the world for armaments and supporting armed forces is senseless and should largely be diverted to this new “war” for mankind’s survival, a sort of Manhattan Project in terms of magnitude of commitment, but for noble and constructive rather than for destructive ends.

These efforts should be initiated as immediately as possible. The longer we wait to act, the more will we be squandering our remaining oil on excessive consumption today. Rather, we should be utilizing a portion of the remaining oil resources for developing alternatives to oil in preparation for a more hopeful tomorrow. The sooner we embark on reversing disastrous trends, the better the chance of limiting the depth of our descent into the Dark Ages.

We now find ourselves in the same predicament as did the Easter Islanders. They failed to heed the warning flags when the last trees on the island were being cut and the last wild birds were being served for dinner. Consequently, they descended into the dark ages of destruction, war, and cannibalism. Similarly, we are not heeding the warnings signs of the approaching end of oil (and the other converging catastrophes). And we can no longer plead ignorance. The consequences of continuing to consume our finite oil resources with reckless abandon and to contribute to the world’s population are becoming abundantly clear. And unlike the case with the Easter Islanders, mankind will not be able to count on anyone beyond planet Earth to rescue us from our self-made predicament. There will be no second chance.

NB. In growing literature on the topic, some individuals—frequently with personal interests in the oil sector—interpret the claim that the era of oil may virtually end in several decades as indefensible.⁶ Rather than entering into a measured discourse on this issue to assess its validity and its implication for where we are heading, the tendency is to denigrate those suggesting that our oil tank is already half empty. They fail to acknowledged that it is perhaps time to ponder future trends and how best to prepare for them with our remaining resources. They try to lay the issue to rest simply by referring to the immediate peaking of oil production as “a recurring myth” or by calling those suggesting the end of oil as being part of “a catastrophist cult”. They discount the possibility that there may be some truth to what others are saying.

Until sound arguments can be made otherwise, I stand by my interpretation of coming events described in my essay. I see those discounting the approaching end of oil as relying too much on the hope that technological "fixes" will take us off any hook. They fail to understand the complexity of global socio-economic development, that the end of oil is only one disturbing trend (it is joined by other approaching “catastrophes” referred to above) that could lead to a serious reduction of our living standard. They forget that the wisest action, irregardless of the precise date of peaking oil production, is not to promote oil as if there were no tomorrow but to use the remainder as best we can to prepare for the undeniable eventuality that oil will become less available. And they often equate technically recoverable reserves as usable oil, forgetting that a point exits where cost of oil extraction and processing exceeds returns from sales, no matter how much reserve remains in the ground.

If anyone would be willing to share with me their insights where I may be wrong, I would appreciate them. I would only be relieved if my impressions about mankind’s demise could be proved false.

NOTE:

The above is a shortened version of the complete document in Microsoft Word which can be downloaded by clicking HERE