Yesterday I began writing about Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and today I’m stuck at my desk, working on eliminating 4% of global CO2 emissions ... but looking at all those travel options on Amtrak gets my roaming gland going.
The quest I am on began a year ago when I followed a link Jerome a Paris had to The Oil Drum. Peak oil? I read a bit, then got out a notebook, a mechanical pencil, and I got an instance of the OpenOffice spreadsheet going, and pretty soon I was worried. I’m used to modeling large scale systems with diverse inputs and outputs; many of the things we take for granted now are simply going to go away in the very near future even if the mildest estimates are used.
What sort of things? I’m glad you asked ...
I was very much taken by the signature line that Burgundy uses at The Oil Drum: Triumvirate of collapse - Economy, Ecosystem, Energy. I knew we had environmental troubles but I was too lost in personal concerns to have noticed the sad state of the economy and the energy stuff was just starting to become visible in daily life.
So, just what exactly changes in a world with dramatically less cheap oil?
The big one that gets noticed first here is transportation. We’ve built ridiculous, sprawling residency, both in terms of the individual homes themselves and the distance between them and any human activity. The 15 mpg sport utility vehicle is doomed. This makes me unpopular, but so is the 60 mpg hybrid. If we were going to make a difference with hybrids we’d have needed to stay focused from way back at the first oil shock in the 1970s. A 4x improvement in efficiency in a totally unsustainable method of organizing ourselves can, at best, slightly delay the day of reckoning. I think the hybrids that survive will be along the lines of the Ford Escape, drafted for use in police, fire, and rescue work.
Those big homes, the great symbol of American success? Doomed. I lived in seven hundred square feet in 2006, one room in a large farm house for most of 2007, and now I’m all but a rubber tramp, wandering the wilds of urban New England in my little car. The big house went, for me, via divorce in the very first years of this century. I was angry at the time but in retrospect this dispossession ahead of the real deal was a blessing; I got that whole Buddhist concept of renunciation. If I’m warm, dry, fed, and holed up somewhere with a book that puts me among the richest men in the world.
Big box stores and global supply chains are already stretching under the pressure of spiraling oil prices. The global arbitrage of labor and hauling fresh lettuce home (In a plastic bag? On the front seat of your SUV? To your McMansion?) will be a thing of the past. We are, as a nation, screwed on this one as we’ve been breaking down and shipping out the local manufacturing for the last generation. Putting it back won’t be quite so tidy a process. If you don’t have a skilled trade working with your hands you should start learning ‘cause button pushing ain’t real work.
The American empire is finished. We rose out of the Great Depression seventy years ago due to the fact that our oil production was climbing. I’ve been watching our economic news pretty closely and I think we’re going into the Greater Depression. The Mexican state is going to slide into anarchy due to the impending failure of the Cantarell oil field, taking out 10% of our daily oil imports and leaving a failed state on our southern border. Canadian gas output is going to zero during President Obama’s second term and that will knock the tar sand production flat; stranded gas is the only reason that stuff was economically viable in the first place. You can do your own research on the failure of Ghawar, Burgan, Da Qing, and the general downward trend of oil production globally. And please don’t tell me it’s all speculators; that crap has been thoroughly debunked. The age of global empire is ending and it saddens me that Obama will preside over our descent.
Can’t believe it, eh? Geological ages end. Goodbye Holocene, hello Ohshitocene. Aren’t you lucky to be right here, right now, as we’ve knocked the carbon dioxide concentration a hundred parts per million beyond its normal range in just two short centuries in the process of exhausting a hundred million years worth of liquid sunshine? We’re going to see wonders, you and I ...
Makes you want to know how far it is to your nearest farm, greenhouse, doctor, hospital, and Amtrak station, doesn’t it? I'd suggest as you go about your daily business you consider this carefully: each thing you do, each item you handle, mentally ask yourself "How much oil is in this?"