Credit: Emrah Elmasli/COSMOS
It's impossible to escape the conclusion that we're steaming full speed into a train derailment of monumental proportions. Obviously, the world made do without oil for millennia; petroleum has been critical for a very brief period in human history. But there are many more of us today, and we are incredibly dependent on it now - and not just for transportation.
Consider the fact that the average food item travels 2,400km before it reaches your plate. Geologist Dale Allen Pfeiffer has pointed out that it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food eaten in the United States. Pesticides are made from oil, and commercial fertilisers from natural gas. Farming machinery runs on oil and was built using it.
Building a desktop computer consumes 10 times it weight in fossil fuels. A single 32-megabyte computer chip requires 1.6kg of fossil fuels to make. The average car consumes 27 to 54 barrels of oil … not on the road, but in the factory.
Because our way of life is so intimately connected to cheap oil, critics such as James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, see a profound realignment of society ahead. "We are going to have to live a lot more locally and a lot more intensively on that local level," Kunstler said in a 2005 speech in Hudson, New York. "Industrial agriculture … will not survive the end of the cheap oil economy. The implication of this is enormous. Successful human ecologies in the near future will have to be supported by intensively farmed agricultural hinterlands. Places that can't do this will fail … What goes for the scale of places will be equally true for the scale of social organisation. All large-scale enterprises, including many types of corporations and governments, will function very poorly in the post-cheap-oil world."
Kunstler may be understating the human capacity for ingenuity, and he quickly dismisses the potential for alternative energy, from wind power to solar and biofuels. It's hard to imagine, as he does, big cities and suburbs emptying out because we simply won't have access to cheap oil and can't keep the air-conditioning running. But it's far more likely a scenario than the cheerful Energy Information Administration charts showing ever-rising oil reserves in the Middle East, with production meeting demand simply because, well, it has to.
Jared Diamond discusses one of the critical stops on the road map to societal failure in his book, Collapse: "It turns out that societies often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived." What happens, he writes, is that "some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behaviour harmful to other people … The perpetrators know they will often get away with their bad behaviour, especially if there is no law against it or the law isn't effectively enforced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals." (see also COSMOS Issue 3, p54)
Diamond's scenario offers a precise explanation for the West's failure to act in the face of clear and present energy danger. With our leaders ignoring the issue as if it didn't exist, we may very well drift toward the kind of abrupt collapse Diamond documents as having taken down the Vikings, the Mayans and the mysterious people of Easter Island.
Instead of cryptic stone statues, we may leave behind rusting oil derricks and highways that lead nowhere.
Jim Motavalli is the editor of The Environmental Magazine, from which this article was adapted.
