Peak Oil - the end of our civilization?
A good friend of mine, Steve, pointed me to a news item entitled Apeakolypse Now, which predicts the imminent collapse of civilization as we know it.
The premise of this report is that:
- Over the last 200 years modern civilization has evolved to become completely dependent on oil.
- The more oil we pump out of the Earth, the more oil energy it takes to get it out of the ground.
- When we get to the “half-way point” of our oil deposits, oil extraction will become unviable.
- At this point demand will out-strip supply, resulting in a crisis known as Peak Oil.
- Our dependence on oil is such that the effects of this crisis will lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Sites of interest include Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas and Life After the Oil Crash.
May 27th, 2005 at 11:41
Looks like the next big economic trend might be donkey-and-cart-start-ups, or grow your own wheat seminars!
Scary to think we are living in the golden era of technology and advancement… and our children could be living through the depressing era of devolution and resource war.
The expression “make hay while the sun shines” suddenly seems much more pertinant.
Edz
PS Fab Blog Stu
May 27th, 2005 at 12:08
Yeah, it is extremely thought (and bowel movement) provoking.* I can a great Stephen King novel being born out of the problem.
I believe that we are certainly headed for major change. It’s easy to disregard stories like this and lump them together with the conspiracy theories and the fools standing atop soap-boxes prophesying the end of the world. But this looming crisis is quite convincing. And it’s not prophesying the end of the world - just the end of the way we live in it, and the number of us that will be able to live in it.
The short of it is that we are reliant on a non-renewable resource; that this is a problem is without question. The question is, what can _I_ do to mitigate the problem? The answer, I fear, is “Nothing”.
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* For me these two activities are closely related.