The Fall and Rise of Peak Oil – Ecosophia
tl;dr is the conclusion:
What we can expect, though, is something far more terrifying to most people than the most lurid disaster a Hollywood screenwriter ever imagined: more of what we’ve already seen. The long, slow, unsteady descent that’s shaped all our lives for the last half century or more? That’s going to continue along the trajectory it’s already following, for the rest of your life, and into the lives of your grandchildren’s grandchildren.
In the light of that longer view, it doesn’t especially matter who’s in the White House, or for that matter who’s in the doghouse. It matters very little more which policies get put in place and which policies get chucked in the dumpster. There are still things that individuals, families, and communities can do to brace themselves for the future ahead, and some of those things are very important—we’ll get to them in future posts. None of these will affect the overall course of this nation or of industrial society as a whole. That train left the station long ago. Listen carefully and you can hear the distant whistle on the wind, fading to silence.
That doesn’t mean the fine details of the future are fixed in place. I predicted, some years ago, that the next energy crisis would arrive sometime around 2022. That didn’t happen, because we got the Covid crisis instead. Many of the same economic and social disruptions that took place following the dramatic spike in petroleum prices in 2008 had close equivalents in 2021 and 2022, and energy usage lurched downward in a very similar manner as air travel, commuting, and many other energy-intensive activities decreased. That bought some time. The Trump administration’s push to remove regulatory barriers to oil and gas drilling may buy a little more, though that will depend on variables that aren’t yet clear, and will have cascading downsides of its own. As a very rough guess, I think it’s possible that we’ll see another energy crisis (or some comparable disruption with similar effects) before 2030, and fairly certain that we’ll get one before 2035.
The fine details will have to be worked out mathematically by those who are adept at such things, the way Colin Campbell and his associates did in the early days of the peak oil scene, back before 2000. Fortunately there are still some active peak oil aggregator sites and blogs; you can find a more or less current list here[1]. I encourage my readers to visit them and start getting familiar with their contents. We’ll be talking more about peak oil later on—after, that is, we talk about some of the other factors that are pushing our civilization down the same well-worn chute. In two weeks we’ll turn to another of those, and talk about what’s been happening to the climate.
– 30 –
[1]:
https://www.ecosophia.net/blogroll-of-doom/
My comment: analogies between the financial collapse of 2007/2008 and early COVID are underrated. The only decent treatment I know is:
M&B Lectures | Perry G Mehrling (the nitty gritty)
and a short blog:
https://sites.bu.edu/perry/2021/05/19/new-lombard-street-ten-years-on/
Here is a web archive for the last ASPO website (2007ish)… apparently their last conference was in 2012.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080807163431/http://www.aspo-global.org/
Leave a Reply