Oil Consequences

I know a couple of people who are on the pess­im­ist­ic side of the Peak oil hypo­thes­is, and a couple who are equally fer­vent in their optim­ist­ic belief (the idea being that we’ll always find more and/or tech­no­logy will save the day). As is my wont, I’m some­where in the middle, think­ing we’re likely to find more oil and nat­ur­al gas, but that it should still be con­served, at least until we have more pro­gress on the vari­ous replace­ment tech­no­lo­gies. Someone (I for­get who) recom­men­ded I read James Howard Kunst­ler­’s book “The Long Emer­gency” (Amazon US link, Amazon CA link). It’s an inter­est­ing read, albeit a little dated (it was pub­lished in 2006). He tends to skim over some issues such as the import­ance of the trans­ition from lots of oil to little oil, and the writ­ing does tend to the breath­less (although it’s far bet­ter in the book than on his blog). I’d recom­mend at least skim­ming through it if you’re inter­ested in the issues, maybe bor­row it from the loc­al lib­rary as I did.

What the book did accom­plish was to make me think about the con­sequences of a world in which oil is much more expens­ive than it is now. It does­n’t need to be the case that we can­’t find any more; a ser­i­ous insur­rec­tion in Saudi Ara­bia that caused major dis­rup­tions to the flow of oil is not out of the ques­tion these days, and China is using an ever-increas­ing pro­por­tion of the world’s oil, which will auto­mat­ic­ally res­ult in price increases.

Some of the ques­tions are easy to ask: What hap­pens if the cost of ship­ping cheap goods from China trebles, or quin­tuples, or worse? What hap­pens to com­muters when the cost of get­ting to work is mul­ti­plied by 3, or 5, or 10? As the cost of heat­ing goes up, how many more people will die of the cold in unheated, unin­su­lated, houses? What hap­pens to the cost of food (a large factor of the Tunisi­an upris­ing) as the cost of the fuel rises, giv­en that the Green Revolu­tion that saved so many lives depends on cheap pet­ro­leum-based fertilisers?

The price of oil has­n’t gone below $50 per bar­rel for the last 5 years (accord­ing to http://www.oil-price.net/). We don’t know what’s next: it may hov­er around $100 per bar­rel for a while, or leap to a much high­er level; either way there should be at least some dis­cus­sion of what oil is best used for, what we can sub­sti­tute oth­er tech­no­lo­gies for, and an invest­ment in those tech­no­lo­gies before we need them. There are options already for power gen­er­a­tion, even if most of them also have issues, but there seems to be less focus on food and trans­port (both people and goods), and if any­thing, there seems to be an ever-increas­ing use of pet­ro­leum-based plastic mater­i­als. I don’t see much pro­duct­ive dis­cus­sion around these issues — any­one got good point­ers that don’t veer off too much into apo­ca­lyptic fervour?