The growth of oil production is slowing, forcing up oil and gasoline
prices, firing inflation, driving unemployment, straining our global economy
and threatening to collapse our entire system.
We are reaching
Peak Oil and we need to prepare.
In a compact new 10 minute summary
video, Aaron Wissner explains the details of Peak
Oil: the evidence, the impacts and the solutions.
Peak Oil is something that has been, and is currently, changing your life.
“Peak Oil is a theory that goes like this: the
global production of oil will hit it’s peak and then start to decline.
Now, it doesn’t mean the world will run out of oil, but it means that
the world will run out of cheap oil.
“The idea’s been around since the mid fifties. Back then, a Shell Oil
geologist, named Marion King Hubbert, predicted that US oil production
could hit its peak in the early nineteen seventies. Well, remember that
oil shock back in the seventies? It’s nothing compared to what
supporters of the Peak Oil concept think we’re in for once the decline
starts: economic collapse, geopolitical conflict, and the end of your
lifestyle as you know it.
“Factor in the rest of the planet and their growth and their needs, and
what you’ve got is increasing demand and shrinking supply of a finite
resource.”
If you go to the
Internet and you search on
Peak Oil,
you’re going to get seven-million, five hundred thousand hits. The first web
site I went to, to learn about this, the
Wikipedia. From
there, I learned about, well, what’s the worst that could happen, and
there’s a web site written about that called
Life After the Oil Crash.
The Energy Bulletin is probably
THE BEST.
This
series of books, all coming, being published between 2003 and 2005 is
telling us that something is going on that we’re not being told about. The
media is not telling us. The government is not telling us.
People are not telling us about this.
WCCO
Television, they had a series where they talked about Peak Oil, they
talked about energy, they talked about renewables. There’s an organization
called the Relocalization Network,
has over a hundred groups in cities throughout the country that are working
to plan for Peak Oil. Community
Solution is putting together their third annual conference on Peak Oil.
We all know that gasoline prices and oil prices are going up. Natural gas
prices spiked last winter, and they spiked in previous winters, and it’s
very likely, in a year coming soon, the prices will just be unreasonably
high. We’ve seen a huge change in the sales in the automobile market. GM,
Ford, Chrysler: they have experienced major changes in what vehicles they’re
able to sell, and for what price.
Electricity is generated, of course, mainly from coal, but getting the coal
to the coal fired power plants, like our power plants along Lake Michigan,
does take other energy including petroleum resources. Heating, obviously, in
the winter, is getting more expensive for people.
There’s been an increase in unemployment, even unreported unemployment, and
clearly we’re seen a huge “softening” of the housing market. People are,
people are finding that there homes are worth much less than they had
anticipated. They’re having a lot more trouble selling their homes.
Peak Oil is tending to drive and change how much money is actually worth,
and that is via inflation.
Peak Oil is the point at which we reach maximum global oil production, and
that tiny little peak at the top, that’s the Peak Oil point. But when people
normally talk about Peak Oil, they’re not just talking about the fact that
someday we’re going to get to a maximum point, or a topping point, as some
people call it, they’re talking about all the impacts, and all the reasons
that surround that.
In the United States, the peak of oil production occurred in 1970. We had
more and more and more oil produced out of the ground in the United States
from the thirties right until the seventies, and in fact we were doing
fantastic as far as oil production in the United States. But no matter how
much technology we had, no matter what we did, no matter how many drilling
rigs we sent out there, oil production has declined ever since the year 1970
in the United States.
The United States does not have a whole lot of oil left to produce. In fact,
worldwide, the United States only has two percent of the oil reserves, and
yet we use twenty-five percent of the daily world oil. The United States,
back in the forties and fifties was the number one oil exporter. We exported
more oil than any other country, including the Middle Eastern countries, and
we had huge inflows of money and capital into the United States.
Since the fifties, since we’ve had a peak of production in the United
States, and production’s went down, we have become the number one oil
importer. We import more oil into our country than any other country, and
that means huge amounts of money flow out of our economy. They go from the
United States, to [places like] the Middle East.
Once we passed Peak Oil in the United States, we became vulnerable to oil
shocks, and there were two major oil shocks in the seventies, which drove
prices, gasoline prices, way up, and they drove inflation at such a high
rate, that a dollar in 1970 was not NEARLY worth the same as a dollar in
1980.
“Some say, that if we can put a man on the moon,
we can do anything. But, can we solve our energy problem, in time.
Nearly half of our oil is now imported. Much is wasted. We are
exhausting our irreplaceable energy resources. Do we have time? (What
then?) Think about it.”
Here’s a graph
showing world oil production, from all the way back in the thirties, right
up until now. You notice that we did have two oil price shocks and that
decreased demand for a certain amount of time, but ever since about the year
1980 we’ve had increasing demand for oil, and we’ve been producing
increasing amounts of oil... and the geologists tell us this [steadily
declining production] is what we’re looking at in the future.
If we are expecting to have more and more and more oil to do everything we
want to do with it, how are we going to cope with the fact that we’re
entering the Peak Oil era, and we’re going to be in the declining slope of
oil production.
Let’s imagine we could fix the price of oil at twenty dollars per barrel,
what would we demand, year after year after year after year at twenty
dollars a barrel. Well, we would demand more and more and more and more and
more and more and more and more and more. But what is the reality? The
reality is that we only have this [pointing to peak on chart] much to deal
with. So, we have to do something to make up that gap. And what’s happening
right now is: the price of oil is getting bid up, and that is lowering this
curve [the demand curve] to match the actual supply curve.
There are three parts to the equation: you have supply, demand, and price.
And if supply and demand aren’t matching, then price increases, or
decreases, to match the supply with the demand.
Oil prices, back about five years ago, were ten or twenty dollars per
barrel, and now they’re up to seventy-five, seventy-eight dollars recently.
“In June 2004, just one day’s worth of oil
consumption would represent a line of barrels long enough to encircle
the earth.
“With almost half used for fuel, and the other half used for plastics
and chemicals, oil is indispensable in every single aspect of our
modern, every day lives.
“The world population has been able to increase over the course of one
century from about one and a half billion to six and a half billion,
only because oil has allowed for more food to be grown and distributed
than ever before.
“[Michael Ruppert]
World food production is so dependent on hydrocarbon energy. All
commercial fertilizers are made out of natural gas, which produced
ammonia. All pesticides are made out of oil. Now, with agribusiness, you
drive an oil powered machine to plow, you drive an oil powered machine
to plant, then you fertilize it with natural gas, then you irrigate it
with water that’s pumped by electric pumps where the electricity comes
from burning natural gas or oil, in most cases, then you spray it with
oil pesticides, then you harvest it with an oil powered vehicle, and
you... The bottom line is that we eat ten calories of hydrocarbon energy
for every calorie of food consumed on the planet.”
[Clip from “The Oil Factor:
Behind the War on Terror” by Free-Will Productions]
We, every single
one of us, are dependent on an unsustainable, failed, global system...
providing for all of our needs... providing food, energy, shelter... all
these things, and this system is failing because it is based entirely on
huge quantities, and ever growing quantities, of oil.
The second part of this problem is that ever single penny that we use, every
single dollar we, we earn, or, or spend, that is driving this system... and
it’s driving it faster and faster... and so, the only way, really, to end
this system, is to stop doing that.
We don’t know how else to live without this system. How do you live without
the global economy? How do you live without oil? We don’t know how to do
that.
We don’t have a back-up system. We don’t have a “Plan B”.
We’re dependent on this system, this global economy, that has no future.
“(Oil. Black Gold. Soon, The World’s Oil Fields,
Will Be Depleted.)
“[It’s] a prediction of world-wide catastrophe in six years. I better
find out what this is all about.
“(And We Will Be, Running On Empty.)
“The demand is so huge. There is nothing that we can imagine to replace
oil in those quantities.
We need to make ourselves as independent as we individually can be, and then
work with community to make our communities as independent as they can be.
We need to develop sustainable, compassionate, local systems, that allow us
to continue living and surviving on this earth, while protecting it for
future generations.