Best-selling author James Kunstler appeared before the Green Mountain Global Forum last week to launch a broadside against American culture and taste, while noting gleefully that the American way of life is about to crash, due to the coming tsunami of peak oil, the point at which petroleum will grow ever more expensive and rare until it strangles our economy.
In a sense, Kunstler is right. We are addicted to oil, consuming ever greater amounts every year. We have foolishly built our communities so that cars are necessities, not luxuries. Outside of certain core urban areas, it is almost impossible to live without owning an automobile. Modern roads and highways open new lands to sprawl, which creates the need for more roads and then more sprawl and so on.
But oil became our fuel of choice for a more primary reason. Petroleum is both energy dense and available in huge quantities in the earth’s crust. As soon as it became available in bulk, it quickly set about replacing coal as a transportation fuel and a means of generating much of our heat and electricity.
But being useful does not mean that it is infinite. Some economists criticize the peak oil theory with classic economics saying that the main driver of price has been supply and demand. This may be so, but oil is a fixed geologic commodity. There may be a pool of oil the size of Lake Champlain waiting to be discovered somewhere, but the consensus among geologists is that there are few large oil discoveries left to be made and that future oil will be drawn from increasingly remote or politically hostile locations or be of lesser quality.
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