Eating and drinking oil
June 26, 2006
End of Cheap Oil, The Global Energy Crisis and Climate Change
The increase in oil prices has led to protests, which have moved to the center stage of Indian politics, displacing the protests against reservations in medical and engineering colleges.
Increase in oil prices translates into higher prices of all commodities. As Hindustan Times reported oil price hike turns cereal killer (Hindustan Times, Wednesday, June 14, 2006, p.2 table). Yet the increase in oil prices in world markets is inevitable because the resource is dwindling and supplies have peaked, peak oil means the end of cheap oil, and an end to economies organized around the increasing availability of cheap oil.
Oil is a non-renewable resource. We have always known that yet the world has been behaving as if oil is in endless supply. And we in India who have lived in a biodiversity and biomass energy economy are rushing into oil addiction precisely when the global oil supply is running low and prices are running high.
The Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), an umbrella organization of oil expects, mainly geologists who helped find oil fields are now warning us that there are only a trillion barrels or less of oil left, and the supply will peak within this decade. “Peak Oil”, or the topping point, is the highest amount that can ever be pumped. Beyond “peak oil”, there will be an overall decline in production and an increase in oil prices. Oil that costs $5 per barrel to extract could become $ 100 per barrel when confidence in supply erodes and demand increases, and there is recognition that we are in a world of shrinking oil supplies, not growing supplies.
Why are we as a country tying our future to a resource that must shrink and become more costly? As we build more superhighways and mega cities, destroying the decentralized fabric of our socio-economic organization, we need to ask how long will this last?
There is another reason to stop this frenzy of oil addiction, and that is climate change, or more accurately, climate chaos. Climate change is caused by fossil fuel emissions, and stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions is an ecological imperative. This is why the Kyoto Protocol to the climate change convention was signed. The insurance industry, which takes over $ 2 trillion in annual premiums, and is bigger than the oil industry, is now a major player in addressing climate change since they have to pay billions out in insurance as cities flood, cyclones such as Katrina uproot entire communities and heat waves kill.
The costs of climate change to the people of India are extremely high. The 1999 Orissa super cyclone and the Bombay floods of July 2006 are just two better-known extreme events linked to a changing climate.
This winter, we had no rains during the wheat season, and heavy downpours during the wheat harvest. Heavy rains before the monsoon in the catchments of the Ganga and Yamuna destroyed crops so that farmers did not even FULL ARTICLE
Sam:
Let me propose a simplified and only partial answer: after the fall, Adam and Eve realized they were naked, and were ashamed. Similarly, independent India, China, and other non-industrialized countries realized they were not developed–machine and technologically speaking–they felt primitive, backward–naked–and were ashamed. The West is beginning to understand that the great experiment is fundamentally suicidal–not the governments of course, but certain elements. As for the East, they still want to experience the Wal-mart life.
28 June 2006, 6:41 pmjay taber:
If you can get your hands on a copy of the 2002 film War & Peace by Bombay filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, you won’t be disappointed.
28 June 2006, 8:45 pmJorge:
Peak Oil article at Lew Rockwell:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/giles6.html
Non Peak Oil
by George Giles
6 July 2006, 4:08 pmStan:
Giles spends most of his time denying global warming, but I see he’s found a new pasttime — disseminating the deeply-debunked gibbery of Thomas Gold.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011205_no_free_pt2.shtml
Gold also postulated a “steady-state” universe and moon dust that would prevent spacecraft from landing there.
What is unfortunate is that people on both sides of this debate are employing illogical arguments, and positing conspiracy theories. Peak oil-ers sometimes subscribe the US-planned 9-11 notion. Abioticoids claim peak oil is plot by oil companies to raise prices (forgetting that no one would buy oil stock if that were true, and that oil companies are the most vocal in denying peak oil).
The science, however, is quite clear and massively available online. The claim by abioticians that peakers are saying we will run out is false.
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php
Discovery has been in precipitous decline for 35 years, in spite of ever more aggressive exploration with every better technology. I guess we’ll have to speed up the earth’s rotation to centrifugate some more of Gold’s abiotic oil within reach of the drills.
Per capita consumption has fallen, while demand has risen. Do the math.
6 July 2006, 5:31 pmlapetrov:
Better batten down the hatches, oh wait, that’s for at sea! …if we’re gonna be spinning faster, gravity is sure to change.
The crazy thing is you know if they could somehow swing that -squeeze a few more drops by changing the earth’s rotation speed, they’d do it! -no matter what the greater cost to the world or its inhabitants might be. And “they” are not the ones trying to achieve “walmart life” -they’re the ones trying to keep their “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”
It’s a sick mentality of single-minded greed, that is about to kick into high-gear. Demand is up, supply is stagnant; prices and profits increase. And we -the little people- are screwed. Am I understanding it right?
6 July 2006, 6:28 pmSam:
Actually, Palast’s remarks are in two parts; here’s the first part:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=505&row=1
11 July 2006, 2:11 pmSam:
Here’s the second part of Palast’s take on peak oil:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=506&row=1
He’s wrong, of course, but he’s influential. Richard Heinberg just wrote an excellent open letter to him:
http://www.energybulletin.net/17914.html
11 July 2006, 8:17 pmSam:
More commentary on Palast at:
http://www.energybulletin.net/17914.html
11 July 2006, 8:18 pmComandante Gringo:
Contrary to official dogma — and access and funding — the jury’s still out on the ‘Big Bang’ vs. ‘Steady State’ theories of the Universe. And no way did 2 planes take down 3 buildings — the 2 targets being also the STRONGEST, most massive buildings in the world. They fell like empty, talcum powder sandcastles, didn’t they?
And so the Left remains divided.
That’s also quite some sequence of non sequiturs, there, jumping around thru all these conspiracy theories, tarring them all with ‘guilt by association’ logic.
11 July 2006, 10:57 pm