The peak oil crisis: a letter from Baghdadby Tom Whipple
A couple of weeks back the peak oil community received a letter from an officer serving with our forces in Iraq.
Despite numerous distractions in Iraq these days, this officer is so concerned that peaking world oil production will soon become a serious problem that he began discussing the future of America's energy supply with soldiers in his unit. What he concluded has a message for us all.
He found that most people have no trouble accepting the premises of peak oil- that there is a finite amount of crude underground, that the easy and cheap to extract oil is nearly gone and that world production will go into an unstoppable decline. The disconnect from reality, however, comes when contemplating the consequences of this event, for nearly all believe there are many obvious alternatives to oil. We know what they are: nuclear, solar, wind, waves, tides, shale, oil sands, coal-to-liquid, biomass, etc., etc. In the mind of most, it is a rather simple matter of switching from oil to any or all of the alternatives so that life-as-we-know-it can continue without missing a beat.
The more likely consequence, that peaking of world oil production will cause severe economic hardships that will take decades to mitigate is simply not a future that most are willing to entertain. Arguments that oil consumption has grown so large in the last 100 years that once depletion starts the development of similar amounts of alternative energy will take a very long time are simply not believed. This micro-survey makes an important point because it mirrors the common sentiment across the land as reflected by the media and political leaders. Even if oil should go into depletion someday --- there is simply not a problem.
Our letter-writer believes the reason for this commonly held opinion is the saturation of TV and the print media with the message that our oil companies are hard at work getting ready for the next generation of energy sources. Should we ever need alternatives to oil, all will be in readiness. Millions are spent on a continual drumbeat of such ads each month. They are impossible to avoid and have left most with the impression that all will be well - your oil industry is on the job.
This all-will-be-well message is always bereft of detail. Nowhere is there mention, of the vast amount of oil being consumed around the world each day, anticipated rates of depletion from existing oil fields, nor of the trillions of dollars that will be required to finance the next round of exploiting increasingly more difficult to recover oil. From time to time, the message is punctuated with the word "technology". Not any particular technology, just the implication that the technology which has brought our civilization this far will be there when we need it.
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