Half the boats I work on are powerboats. The larger ones can consume over 750 gallons on a weekend outing. The energy consumption rate is a matter of boat design and physics. If you want to move a 37 foot boat across the water at more than 6 or 7 knots, you consume a serious amount of energy. Petroleum is the only sufficiently concentrated form of energy to make a fast powerboat possible. How many weekend trips will people be making when Diesel hits $15 / gallon or more.
At this point we seem to collectively assume the recession will end sometime within the next few years. Things will come back to a point we have known as "normal" for three generations. Well, maybe not.
Last night I watched "A Crude Awakening." This 2005 documentary about oil was eerily prescient regarding the economic crash of 2008. What is more real, the film asks at one point, finance or oil. I guess we have now proved the case for the un-reality of finance.
The case that we have hit and passed peak oil production is probably better supported than the case for global warming. Cities built before 1900 will likely continue to be functional as increasing oil demand hits the wall of decreasing oil production within the next 10 years. Suburbs will industrialize or rot. Or we will all be bicycling to the train station to get to work. My 80 mile commute will be economically unsustainable. For better or worse, the US will have to rebuild itself. All those freeways will probably get bike lanes. Can you imagine a much warmer Canada having to choose between ripping up the ground to mine oil sand or leaving it in place to grow corn? We can beat our junk cars into rails and bicycle frames.
Talk about an upset electorate? Rush Limbaugh for President, anyone? Maybe not him, but it could be someone who would actually make Bush II look good. Not a happy prospect, but perhaps I should trust the American electorate a little more. Maybe the Internet will actually stabilize us as a people.
New President Obama is currently fueling hope that most of us will get through the next 8 years relatively unscathed. Many of us would like to think that Obama represents a return to reason in the country's leadership, a reversion to the mean. We would like to think Bush II was the aberration. If gasoline hits $20/gallon which way do you think things will go? Today's people will readily accept alternative fuels, even much smaller, lighter vehicles. But getting back on bicycles? Perhaps we should have more faith in youth. My generation would never do such a thing, although I still have my mountain bike in the garage. Perhaps I should replace the tires and start riding again?
As this must-see documentary points out, the current population of the world can only be supported by the energy from oil. Global warming will also affect the ability of the world to support current population levels. As the available energy from oil inevitably declines, do you suppose all the extra oil-supported people are going to go away quietly? I think it more probably that we will see resource depletion driven genocide as the rule rather than the exception. Sort of a new hundred-year's war that ends when enough people have been eliminated and the rest are too exhausted and isolated to continue. Remember the 100 year's war? Look it up.
In my youth we worried about nuclear winter. We thought the hydrogen bomb would make the world unlivable. We thought the USSR and USA would mutually eradicate each other. Denial is a powerful thing and we are all still here, mostly not thinking about it. It could still happen. However, now I'd put my bet on a few new Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's, isolated horrors perpetrated by disaffected minorities on us and on each other.
Do you know of any weapon that was invented, perfected and never used? All that is needed is the weapon plus sufficient hatred, desperation and no regard for the consequences. Sound like any suicide bomber you've met lately? Do you know that Japan's use of suicide pilots late in WWII was considered a real aberration, almost beyond understanding? It was something that just did not happen. How times change. One can defend against almost anything except an opponent who will sacrifice his own life. The disaffected, unemployed multitudes provide lots of foot soldiers willing to die if they can take you with them.
We believe in helping poor countries. We believe in cutting infant mortality by the spread of better drugs. We know this promotes exploding populations but we believe solutions for this problem will be found in the future. Yes, as it turns out, solutions like war, starvation and genocide.
Perhaps help is really beyond our capabilities. Perhaps Darfur is the new norm. Our charity all rests on a foundation of cheap energy. This energy foundation is so pervasive and has developed so smoothly that we notice it no more than we notice the air. At a time when we use 25% of the world's oil and have two percent of the world's population (to use 2005 figures from the film), perhaps we should begin to doubt our charity is sustainable. This is to say nothing of our way of life.
The human race has not hit a wall, has not passed through a population bottleneck for some 50,000 years. We don't think it could happen again. No physical law says it cannot happen again. I think the possibility that human life will be extinguished on the earth to be almost vanishingly remote. I also think population could collapse to 1% of what it is now over a reasonably short time, say a century. That takes us back to the world population as of 1800. Maybe today's world is all just another cheap energy fueled bubble waiting to burst. 200 years to grow by two orders of magnitude, another hundred to collapse back. Doesn't sound unreasonable to me. And the population in 1800 was hardly a bottleneck. That's more like 5000 people, a level at which significant genetic variation is wiped out.
That's more or less the number of modern humans who walked out of Africa 50,000 years ago from whom most if not all of us are descended. The folks who's descendants eventually migrated into Europe and "displaced" the Neandertals. If the populations interbred, no genetic trace of the Neandertal can be found in today's humans. Racism is apparently instinctive in humans.
In 2009, "Globalization" is still accepted as the way the immediate future will proceed by the leaders of rich countries. I suspect we have seen it's greatest extent and will not be sorry to see it pass. We may not regret the disappearance of mass air travel. When the disaffected must cross oceans to strike at us - well, that may not be so bad.
Oh yes, you will say "the old man is depressed again and raving away at the keyboard." Perhaps, but that does not change the facts about energy. Oil is about to get more expensive again, soon, and we are hooked on it. Our entire way of life is supported by cheap energy. That is about to change. We'll find out who's lucky and who's not. For me, I'm not planning to buy another work van, even with 125,000 miles on this one. I think it will last as long as I can afford to drive a van. And for the record, I've enjoyed the cuisine, the house, the family, the whole ride. I'd give back the lawn.
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