End of the oil age, end of the Holocene
June 27th, 2008 by Jim JustIt’s now been five days since the oil summit at Jiddah – and today (Friday June 27) crude oil rose above $142 a barrel for the first time, touching a record $142.26 $142.93.
Michael Klare says this is not just a temporary crisis. It is the beginning of the end of the Petroleum Age. Many of the giant fields that have satisfied our massive thirst over so many years are experiencing diminished output. And although the major oil producers are spending more money each year to discover new reserves, they are finding less and less oil.
Luis de Souza at The Oil Drum: Europe reminds us the oil crisis is not about global production. It’s about global exports, which are already declining even if global production is not.
Mike Davis at TomDispatch takes an even broader view. Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended.
“[T]he Holocene epoch – the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization – has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.
“This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.”