Peak Oil

This image is from Wikipedia.

What is the hoopla about Peak Oil?

Books like The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler, describe a bleak future after we have reached Global Peak Oil. This is the point at which we, on planet Earth extract oil at the highest rate we ever will. By definition, at no point after that will we extract it at a higher rate. In fact, the rate will decline rapidly.

In The Long Emergency, Malthus is mentioned. His essay proposed that human populations grow exponentially in an environment of plentiful food. After that, we have the Malthusian Catastrophe if and when the food production fails to keep pace with the population growth.

I remember my high school biology teacher asking the class, if a bacteria is growing in a petri dish, and it only takes it an hour to fill the dish, and it's population doubles every minute, then, at what minute will the dish be half full? (Answer: minute 59.)

As the rate of oil extraction declines it is believed that life will become more difficult due to a reversal in the Green Revolution which is based on the availability of cheap fossil fuels such as methane. This is one of the points Kunstler makes in his book.

I see the wisdom of the current trend of people buying more organic food. They may be unwitting visionaries. This trend is in anticipation of cheap pesticides no longer being available, and, an old way of farming, hopefully benefiting from our new wisdom, coming back into vogue.

Humanity will have to be smarter and more efficient in how the energy that planet Earth provides is utilized. Food that you eat will be grown locally. Transporting consumer goods across the globe will be a thing of the past. Suburbia will fade into the mist of picturesque memory.

And, I think, there will be quite a few more windmills in West Texas, cranking out electricity. Our economic system will no longer be based on cheap oil which was really subsidized by bloated military adventures anyway.

Perhaps, in the near future, people's skills will be utilized maintaining a sustainable electrical grid and repairing windmills. For this, Texas has a unique geographical advantage. We are at the wind corridor. We have plenty of sunlight for solar generation. And, there is still the long coastline and harbors.

Perhaps Galveston will once again become a charming Victorian city sustained by the commerce brought on ships. What is old may become new again. Perhaps.

Interesting Sites for Further Reading:
Student Magazine of Otaga University

Terms:
Global Peak Oil: When half the oil that has ever existed in the world is gone.