Peak-a-boo

A friend of mine recently read "The Coming Economic Collapse" and, in his words, has “been flipped out ever since”. I don’t blame him. He sent me a link to a web site which details most of what the book argued, and it is some scary shit. As in, "time to buy a bicycle, a shotgun, and a shit load of canned goods" scary.

Essentially, the problem is this: at some point within the next 20 years (and some people say we may already be at that point), we will reach what is known as “peak oil”, where the world’s oil production will reach the highest possible level, and then begin to drop off. In the meantime, of course, demand will keep increasing, and anyone who knows anything about economics knows that means that oil prices will skyrocket. You think $3 for a gallon of gas is bad? Wait until it becomes clear that HOLY SHIT WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF OIL.

I’ve known about this for a while, but until I read up on it I didn’t realize just what a huge problem it will be. Alternative energy sources like solar, wind, ethanol, and all that crap are nowhere near efficient enough to replace good old fashioned petroleum. Maybe some clever combination of these alternative energies can eventually replace oil, but the amount of time (multiple decades) and money (dozens of trillions of dollars or more) required to build up the necessary infrastructure is going to cause massive problems, particularly if peak oil is less than 20 years away. Fossil fuels currently provide 86% of the energy used by the US; do you really think a bunch of fucking windmills can replace that in the next few years?

So, even assuming that we actually start working on this right now, it’s pretty likely that we’ll be facing some serious problems in the coming years. Wars for the remaining oil will probably pit us against China, India, Russia, and maybe even the EU, with the poor suckers in the Middle East on the losing end. No wonder we don’t want them to have nukes…

In fact, the more you think about world events through the prism of peak oil, the more things start to make sense. It explains why the government doesn’t seem too eager to reign in rising oil prices (to get us used to it being ever more expensive); it explains why nobody has built a new refinery in the US for the past 30 years (by the time its done, we probably won’t have any use for it any more); it explains the strategic importance of a stable Iraq (which sits on top of one of the few remaining oil fields that could stave off the peak for a little while longer); it might even explain why we are so disinterested in reducing greenhouse gas emissions (in a few decades, fossil fuels will be so prohibitively expensive that we won’t be burning them much anyway).

Happily, I don’t expect to live long enough to experience the worst of the oil crunch. In fact, I just bought a brand new sports car that gets an awesome “fuck you” of 19 miles per gallon. And since I don’t have any children (and God willing never will), I don’t give a shit what happens to the rest of you morons once I’m gone.