Peak Oil: Will action come too late?

Some November within the next few years, the economic/oil situation will have become so bad that a real debate over real solutions will begin. Demagoguery — “cut taxes,” “subsidize the oil companies,” “invade somebody” — will be recognized for what it is and will no longer help get people into office.

The Peak Oil Crisis: Polity on Trial

Written by Tom Whipple
Originally published in the Falls Church News-Press
Wednesday, 05 March 2008

The coming storm will bring one of the most severe tests of the cohesiveness of governments and peoples that the world has known for a long time.

Over the last century, the industrial societies have built extremely complex and specialized civilizations. A simple example is that here in America only two percent of us now live on farms where they presumably are capable of readily producing their own food. Only 0.3 percent of Americans now claim to be farmers. The remaining 99+ percent of us are dependent on oil-based food processing, storage, and transport for our daily sustenance.

The fate of most of the world’s peoples is going to depend on how well we, as societies — here and around the world — get our collective acts together over the coming decades and organize to survive the transition to a post-oil world.

Currently the body politic in America is paralyzed by a rough political balance between those clinging to 20th or perhaps even 19th century concerns and those who, however vaguely, understand that things must change. So far the U.S. Congress has done little to prepare for the massive changes to our economy and lifestyles that are now only a few short years away.

Some government money has been spent researching for improved sources of renewable energy, but the centerpiece of recent energy bills – ethanol and higher mpg cars - are either absurd or too little too late. The current effort to reduce a billion or two in tax breaks during a era of $100 billion oil company profits likely will founder at the hands of lobbyists or a Presidential veto. Very few among the members of Congress and those that send them there as yet have a clue as to what is about to befall us – but this too will change.

Candidates in the current race for President are circumspect on real energy issues for obvious reasons – no one ever got elected by being a bearer of bad news. In Iowa the candidates praised ethanol with nary a nod towards what it is doing to food prices. In Ohio, they have bashed NAFTA to the point where Canada’s trade minister started hinting about what could happen to the 2.5 million barrels of oil they are obliged to send us each day. No one, as yet, seems to be talking of the only possible short term solution: massive conservation.

(More here. Tom Whipple is a retired US government analyst who currently writes a weekly column on peak oil for the Falls Church News Press. He also edits and distributes the weekly Peak Oil Review and daily Peal Oil Notes for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & GAS – USA.)