PEAK OIL - EPOCHAL EVENT OF OUR LIVES

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great read futrcash

I searched for the link to your story because I wanted to see the graphs. In doing so I came across this older story but it too is a great read...

Solar Mobility and Shock Therapy: The Great Electric Transition

Submitted by julian darley on November 11, 2007 - 12:23pm.

US oil price recently had a close encounter of third kind: the price nearly reached three digits (eg $100) on November 7. This has occasioned a flurry (but not a tsunami) of articles attempting to explain why the price is so 'high'. The neo-conservative Heritage Foundations offers: "Tensions between Turkey and the Kurds of Iraq, production problems in Mexico, activity among Nigerian rebels, Iranian saber rattling, an intemperate outburst from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez" and we can add refinery problems, storms off Norway, continued unsporting demand growth from China (used to make the stuff we buy), Middle East security issues, speculation, dollar decline (partly fuelled by oil price rise), and falling stocks.

What is almost invariably missing is any reference to peak oil, though falling stocks is most likely a symptom of peak. Indeed, since the evidence mounts that we have already peaked, it may be time to talk about post-peak or oil decline. We now enter the post carbon age, which will last until either the human species is no more or natures sees fit to bestow new oil deposits under the ground.

The lack of mention of peak oil (or any other reference to supply limits) remains a puzzle to many of us. But to put the question another way around: imagine that suddenly everybody is talking about peak oil in a way that they now do (belatedly) about climate change. What difference would that make? Possibly quite a lot: oil peak and more pointedly the decline of oil supply causes one to re-think the entire provisioning system and all its complex supply chains. If one accepts that oil is now in decline it also lends an extraordinary sense of urgency and scope to analysis and action. One no longer thinks woefully of needing say a 60% cut by 2050 (the very aggressive target of the UK), but rather of getting off fossil fuels altogether starting immediately.


This sounds absurd today, but if oil declines from now on at 4% per year, as may be the case (and it may decline even more quickly) that means that global oil supply will be halved by 2025. It is very unlikely to be a smooth decline and there may troughs of supply which look and feel like short-term or even prolonged shortages.

This implies an emergency transition away from oil (and coal and gas may be far more limited than heretofore thought) and towards reduced consumption and local production of necessities, including energy. Part of this transition will mean a kind of 'shock therapy' in which we subsitute fossil mobility for solar mobility and use muscles where we can and where we can't, we substitute electric motors running on renewable energy. Everything becomes geared to our current solar income, hence solar mobility.

Since so many industrialised places have been built for petroleum mobility, the transition away from that will require substitute motors to some considerable extent. Since there has been far too little investment in battery research, that will be a great challenge. Another challenge and grave danger is that a move to electric motors will just increase demand for coal and nuclear fuels. This has an ominous parallel with the way that industrial biofuels have increased the demand for land, destroying millions of acres of tropical rainforest in the process and pitting food against fuel production.

The electrical transition needs to be a solar transition if it is not to fall into similar traps.

http://www.postcarbon.org/solar_mobility_shock_therapy

http://www.postcarbon.org