Peak oil: even as prices soar, complacency reigns
May 8th, 2008 by Jim JustThis week oil prices reached record highs, almost touching $124/barrel. Yet when it comes to the presidential campaigns, complacency rules. Peak oil simply isn’t on any candidate’s radar.
David Cohen at ASPO-USA points out that mitigating anthropogenic climate change is central to all the presidential candidates’ campaigns, and their primary energy initiative is a carbon emissions cap & trade system. While a carbon tax or cap-and trade may be laudable, we have argued that a moratorium on and phase-out of coal would be a better, more effective policy option.
Problems arising from our oil dependency take a backseat to climate change. But unfortunately, given the urgency of the need for action, these are not perceived as urgent – the climate problem is seen as one that can be solved gradually. This approach to our “oil dependency” only makes sense from a climate perspective, which requires us to change our energy consumption and infrastructure over several decades.
John Michael Greer remembers that around 1980 we (and other industrial nations) made a fateful decision to turn back from promising steps toward sustainability made in the previous decade – steps that could have led to a non-disruptive transition to a post-petroleum world. We’ve wasted a quarter century. Now, the chances of transitioning to a non-fossil fuel economy without massive disruption are remote.
The future is uncertain. Constructing a strategy for coping with our future is equally fraught with uncertainty. Relocalization – retooling lifestyles to rely more on local resources and less on a far-flung and increasingly fragile global economic system – is likely to a pretty good strategy to deal with the cascading series of crises that are already unfolding around us (Greer lists “the peak of conventional petroleum production worldwide, soaring prices and incipient shortages in other commodities, spiraling breakdowns in the international debt market, and the fraying of America’s global empire.”).
The one reality that seems clear is that the days of cheap and abundant transportation fuels are over. A rational response to that reality is to begin now to build local economies that minimize the need for transportation, both of goods and people. Resources poured into more infrastructure to support the automobile and the auto-dependent way of life are surely being poured down a rat hole. And we don’t have time, money – or precious energy resources – to waste.
What could be more rational than a moratorium on road building and other automobile-supporting infrastructure such as bridges and parking garages? Our planning needs to be immediately retooled to accommodate development without the automobile rather than requiring accommodation for the automobile.
Truck gardens and organic food production on the outskirts of small and mid-sized cities may be well-positioned to thrive in a world where transport costs have become a major limiting factor. The growth of farmers markets, community-supported agriculture, and direct sales of local produce to local restaurants have laid the foundations upon which local and regional food production networks can grow.
We can be certain that planning for a future as a continuation of our extravagant energy-wasting lifestyles will lead to disaster.