Peak Oil -- And What Do We Do Now?

Tipping points abound: oil, climate, water.

Peak oil will be the tipping point of cheap petrol. A wonderful book, A Thousand Barrels a Second, on peak oil speaks to the "economic restructuring" that is guaranteed to occur when we hit peak oil. The book shows how that after the 1973 oil shock, our energy infrastructure was rebalanced so that for every output in our economy, fewer fossil fuel inputs were required. The economies in Europe and Japan get quite a few more outputs per fossil fuel input than in the U.S.

The problem is that a restructuring historically takes 10-15 years, and involves some economic dissolution due to continued reliance on a now vastly more expensive energy input.

We need to make the switch before peak oil, to say nothing of the climate crisis, because the vast majority of Americans who rely on the auto will see their disposable income plummet. This will be harmful to the economy, and switching to renewables will insulate us from deterrents to long term growth. Not that I am an advocate for growth. But even the deniers ought to be able to understand this language.

So vastly reducing our dependence on oil need not even need to bring the climate crisis into the conversation. But of course, given that the continued quality of life for all humans for the foreseeable future is on the line, I'm tend to think we should do something climate change yesterday.

Tipping points are interesting things, as Paul writes so well about in The Ecology of Commerce. Here's a previous meditation of mine on ecological vs. societal tipping points:

Ecosystems are not linear systems. Neither are human societies. They are both complex systems, and I will posit here that they function in a similar manner.

Ecosystems tend to accept pollutants and continue functioning until a certain threshold is reached, the tipping point. Once this point is reached the system quickly deteriorates, often with positive feedback, meaning degradation begets degradation.

An example we all remember from An Inconvenient Truth is that as polar ice melts, there is less ice to reflect away the sun, meaning that the remaining ice melts faster.

It certainly seems reasonable to assume that our climate system works in the same way.

Yet, given all that we know, our society has not reached a point where it will commit to solving this problem. Our society still has a great inertia traveling in the direction of fossil fuels, inefficiency, and pollution. Our collective minds, thus, have a resistance to accepting this change of consciousness due to this societal inertia.

Hope resides in the capacity for this film to spur movement on the issue. When sufficient momentum is achieved we will break through this societal inertia, the societal tipping point. When we have passed this tipping point, people will not be satisfied with half-measures and placating solutions. This is the most important movement of a generation, critical mass is not a question of if but when.

The biggest question our culture has ever faced:

Will the societal tipping point precede the climate's tipping point?


Also, see a an interesting article on the gap between politics and reality by Bill McKibben
http://stepitup2007.org/article.php?id=522

Im not going to read that post either dan. make a wikipage from this group and call it something poetic and perverse like: "Tipping Points abound: oil, climate, water - Dan Bell's weekly outpouring of useful knowledge."