More on Impending Doom

A while back I wrote a couple of articles on energy, with a particular emphasis on transportation, so it’s probably time for me to follow up on those.  The question remains: what will the world look like when fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive if no alternative is found?  I’ve had a lot of feedback contesting the central thesis of my previous articles which was it is highly unlikely that there is any foreseeable alternative which can replace the system cheap oil allows us to operate.  Like hydrogen, I think the viability of biofuel/solar electric etc economics will fade with continued system analysis (with biofuel the first to die, methinks).  Don’t get me wrong, biofuels/electrics etc almost certainly will play a part in the future world, but they cannot replace the current oil-based system.  I still think I’m right and the correspondents I mentioned are wrong, so we’ve agreed to wait ten years and see what happens!

So, if I am right, is it just going to cost more to drop the kids at school in 2020?  Well, no… the end of cheap oil threatens the entire global economic system.  Conventional economics determines that unless we have continuous economic growth things are very grim indeed.  For this to occur more people have to consume more (of something) and since the industrial revolution this buy more/breed more has continued pretty much unchecked.  A lot of this growth has been on the back of cheap supplies of energy which is used in producing/growing goods and moving them around.  Oil allows economic growth, but it also can retard it as well.  As the economy heats up more oil is consumed and the price rises and this price rise eventually chokes off the economic growth.  Oil then falls in price (but never to the original level you might have noticed) and the economy picks up again.  And so proceed ad infinitum. 

As oil continues to rise in price, eventually we’ll need to take a serious look at the doctrine of continuous economic growth because it is, by definition, unsustainable (I hate to use that word because it is thrown around cheaply a lot these days, mainly by marketers trying to get you to consume something.   Nothing is really sustainable - entropy gets added every time for every thing).  We need to adjust the system we live in to make our resources last longer and as long as economic growth is the bottom line, I can’t see that happening.

In the future you’ll definitely travel around less (no more long weekends in Sydney) and you’ll live more locally.  Much of what you consume (especially food) will be produced more locally also.  There will be less of a marketing drive (no pun intended) to get you to buy the latest gadget which only makes you want the next gadget more.  There is no reason to fear this future, in fact I think it could be quite pleasant. 

There is an alternative which my father favours: he calls it the elephant in the green house.  It goes like this: we live in a green house with an elephant which feeds relentlessly on the diminishing vegetation therein.  The elephant eats, and shits, and the shit just keeps on piling up in the greenhouse.  There is nothing we can do to control the elephant.  Our own efforts to preserve the vegetation by not eating as much ourselves make a small difference, but not much.  The elephant's ringpiece continues to produce copious quantities of foul muck.  I’ll get flayed for this, but perhaps we should just gorge ourselves and hope we get fat enough to be floating relatively highly on the sea of shit when the elephant eventually drowns…