blog

Life During The Oil Crash?

Posted: 29-07-06

Wellington is currently playing host to the New Zealand Film Festival, a festival of those not-so-mainstream movies and docco's that are frankly far more entertaining and informative than Pirates of the Caribbean could ever hope to be.

I've just arrived home after having watched "OilCrash" with a friend at the Paramount theatre on Courtenay Place. While the movie contained nothing new for me, much of it having been learned in the last twelve months or so from non-mainstream Internet resources like fromthewilderness.com and others, it was interesting to see some of the more vocal "Peak Oilers" being interviewed in person: Roscoe Bartlett; US Republican politician, Matt Savinar; founder of lifeaftertheoilcrash.net and Colin Campbell; former Executive Vice President of Fina Exploration and now of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre.

Many of their views predictably enough were in the 'realist-negativist' camp, that is; those that view much of the planet and its societies as being wholly reliant on abundant and cheap energy, almost totally comprising Crude Oil and Natural Gas - societies that are also overdue some sort of major, perhaps war-led or war-orientated upheaval due to a deep-rooted and inherant reliance upon unsustainable fossil fuel.

But I think they wrongly assume that we as a global society will continue to demand this lifestyle at all costs. I think that they believe humans will always do their darndest to find replacements in order to continue along the same energy intensive paths, to produce products and services that we have all gotten used to. And from this premise it must therefore follow that more centralised power stations producing more energy will be required, more areas of centralised food growth and of course tighter controls over existing fuel sources will be needed in order to perpetuate the status-quo.

While this 'need' for a certain lifestyle continuation may well be the case under an established subset of 'Post Peak' scenarios (see dieoff.com and lifeaftertheoilcrash.net), it isn't the only scenario. This state of affairs only need be the case if, as some of these folk predict, humankind continues to demand the kinds of energy and resources it has done in the past and seems to be doing at present - especially and perhaps understandably in light of the so-called 'Chindia' syndrome - where China and India's industrial and economic growth continues at what no-one doubts are wholly unsustainable levels. (Not that any other industrialised country can claim to be much different mind).

The problem with much of this, and I must emphasis that given current information, data and attitudes of everyone from politicians to the man on the street - I can fully understand why, is that it relies on 1950s-like predictions of 'how the world might be' in x number of years - the obvious problem being that any idea formed at any given point of time, be it at periods of change or otherwise can only be based on present knowledge and present attitudes. They take no account of small 'injections' of general and socio-political change that happen along the way.

My hunch then is that yes, while there will be areas of the global population who undergo extensive, perhaps deep-seated change of a kind that perhaps they would never have expected to happen in their lifetimes - many others may simply adapt. Global markets may adapt. People's attitudes may adapt And I talk very pragmatically about decentralised entities in this context: I don't see any need to try and replace the 'fuel' (no subject-specific pun intended) of one state of affairs with another 'fuel' only to maintain a status quo of inefficient modes of living - which let's face it, exactly describes the nature of every vaguely 'westernised' or 'conventionally industrialised' society.

The film mentioned a need to replace modes of energy production presently derived from fossil fuels, using solar panel fields 'half the size of California', of the potential need to construct 'a thousand Nuclear Power Plants of the highest known power yield' simply to maintain current and growing energy demands. But such decision-making to ensure this happens, let alone its construction, hasn't even begun. If it were to have any affect, and according to the first US Department of Energy's commissioned "Hirsch Report" in 2005, such replacement technologies really needed to have been devised and retrofitted into existing global infrastructure as far back as fifteen or twenty years ago.

So instead of a continued escalation of energy and power demand and its generation, I see a time, fairly soon in fact - where demand for less energy becomes more apparent. And that energy which is demanded may come increasingly from decentralised utilities - larger numbers of smaller wind farms for example and even individually sourced power on a home-by-home basis. No need to repeat a large-scale deployment of expensive power stations and associated transportation systems.

Businesses that produce, package or otherwise market goods and services that can be described as non-essential will either go bust, or - as we know business tries to do at all costs - it may adapt to markets and consumers if it is to stay profitable. This means less products that we don't need, and more of those that we do. Supply and demand will dictate this. It'll probably mean more local business supplying goods and services for the locality and less of those attempting to supply on a national or even a global basis, because it'll simply become too expensive for them to do so.

Now I am not trying to breed any false hope here - I like aspects of my life, much like yours I suspect, as easy as it is; The ability to easily hop on planes, see friends and buy food - but I have come to realise that all this has been founded on very shaky ground. And although the ground becomes ever more unstable, it only does so for as long as a status quo is perpetuated. I agree that much of humanity is in for an inevitable change of some sort and to an extent this has already begun: Notices in my favourite Wellington cafe (Deluxe) that prices of ingredients for their delicious baking and coffee have gone up "due to increasing fuel prices", decreases in large-capacity vehicle sales and increases in hybrid car sales and the like are quite telling to my mind. (A single Honda Hybrid car has just appeared at a dealership down the road from me). While this is only the very tip of the iceberg, I would be wrong to try and predict which way society will actually go and this is how I perceived the overall message of the OilCrash movie today.

I am simply attempting to see as I always do, another point of view using much of the very same resources as the movie, as a basis for my reasoning. In this case perhaps more than any other I have ever considered, I think it an extremely valuable issue to be debating. To this end I seek your views and the views of my other friends, family and colleagues on this and related issues. Please email me using my address directly or the contact form here on my site, as I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading though regardless,
Russ