Oil: Our greatest diservice to our children and grandchildren

In July, 2006, I was happily laying next to my new wife soaking in some honeymoon sun at a small resort on the Pacific Ocean in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. I had brought a bag full of books including Under the Banner of Heaven, A Brief History of Nearly Everything, All the Presidents Men and an energy policy book with an obnoxious yellow and red alarmist cover by the name of The Long Emergency.

Rarely does a policy book do more than just provide me with anything more than interesting facts for cocktail party banter but I had a visceral response of fear, dread and horror while reading the yellow book by James Howard Kunstler. Stephen King has nothing on Kunstler. The book outlines what "peak oil" does and will mean for western civilization. If you are not familiar with the concept of peak oil, it is a theory introduced  in the 1950s by Shell Oil geoscientist Marion King Hubbert suggesting we were quickly heading toward a peak in oil production.  The basic concept is this: there is only a finite amount of extractable oil on the planet, the peak of which is when production begins to decline. What made his claims all that more startling is that he accurately projected when the United States would hit peak oil (1970) which silenced a lot of his critics.

Consider the past three generations of Americans have only known a world with cheap oil. Think of a world without and that is what Kunstler outlines in his book.

Not to be too dramatic, but there has not been a day since reading The Long Emergency where I haven't thought about it. Kunstler's account is that powerful and scary. The reason why? Every (and I mean every) aspect of modern life is based on access to cheap oil. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the car you drive, all the plastic products you consume, the plane you fly, the electricity you use, the job you have . . . EVERYTHING! Even all renewable energy is dependent on cheap oil - you can't make large scale power plants without heavy machinery which cannot be operated on batteries (which, by the way, are dependent on oil for their production) . . . get the picture? Oil is also the most perfect energy resource to ever be found. It has an insanely high energy yield, is easily transportable and is relatively stable at room temperature.  There is nothing else like it on the planet (or any other known planet, for that matter).

America isn't just addicted to oil, our society and economy cannot exist without it. China, India, Brazil, etc. are all huge population centers trying to industrialize just as we did the past 150 years but in an expedited timeline. Who are we to tell them they can't? What makes this even more scary is reviewing population levels when the industrial revolution began in the late 1800s. There were a little more than 1 billion people people on the planet (it took thousands of years to get to 1 billion people) in the 1800s, today there are more than 6.5 billion (it took less than 150 to grow the world population 6.5 times because of oil).

The remaining oil will be consumed at a much more ferocious pace as before; there a more people and more demand. Affordable oil will be a footnote in a book before we know it. What will take its place is widespread famine, resource military conflicts and a dramatic scaling back of population. Many population scientists say that the planet without fossil fuels could sustain about 1.5/2 billion people, that's 4.5/5 billion less than are alive today.  A population purge is not a probability, it is a certainty.

And if you are thinking we will just replace it . . . think again. Inform yourself and you'll quickly realize there is no replacement, not even a blend of solutions helps because all of our solutions depend on cheap, infinite oil and fossil fuels. It is a simple equation, how much money and energy is used to extract a resource of energy.  Most of the "green" solutions use more energy in producing the end product (corn ethanol is a perfect example of this - my personal thought is algae ethanol is probably the only viable gasoline substitute).

What scares me most is that I haven't changed many of my habits, nor have I made any effort to acclimate to a world without cheap oil. I am not prepared, nor are my children for what will very likely happen sometime in my lifetime: the end of cheap oil. The prudent thing would be to find a skill, move to a relatively rural area and learn how to survive in a manner not seen in America for 150 years . . . either that or become Amish.

A guilt has set in about how we are wasting what might be the most important substance the planet has (aside from water). My fear is that future generations will be made to pay for our sin of gluttony with unimaginable pain. Conservatives speak of burdening future generations with debt, but this may be the biggest debt of all. We've created an unsustainable standard of living and we need to face the facts that it will end, when is a matter of debate but it will happen must sooner than any of us are willing to accept.

Okay, I recognize that I've become a bit alarmist but even if the oil industry is correct and peak oil isn't on the immediate horizon, it will happen sooner than later, it is only a matter of time. I can imagine 40 years from our grandchildren will look back at the at the late 20th and early 21st century shaking their heads thinking, "They wasted it, they wasted it all."

If you don't have time to read The Long Emergency, watch "A Crude Awakening" from 2006 or "Collapse" which outline the issues surrounding with the end of oil. They are alarmist but keep in mind, this isn't just a bunch of conspiracy theory hacks spewing fear, these are energy experts and oil company execs . . .