Putting Things In Perspective

This posting is a direct response to the Five Different Worlds posting on the WWO, and more generally to the apocalyptic, survivalist viewpoints I can't help but noticing around here.

Here's the thing - This thing is bad, but it's not the end of the world. Things seem like there careening towards destruction right now, but that's just because we're still in the "shock" portion of the "oil shock." Some points I'd like to make:

1. We're going to run out of oil. What we're experiencing is Peak Oil, with emphasize on Peak. It means that we've used half the oil available. Half. Now, every barrel of oil we get out of the ground is going to be more expensive than the one before that and with increasing demand we're probably going to burn through it pretty quickly, but there is still plenty of oil physically in the ground. And talk of demand brings me the second point:

2. Demand for oil will drop. Because it's so expensive. Honestly, the fact that oil costs $4.62 has less to do with the amount of oil available than the fact that every almost every single American needs a couple of gallons of it every day. But as people are discovering, that's quickly becoming an unaffordable expense. As I said above, people haven't change yet because we're all still in the shock. But given time, people will change. They'll start biking, or walking, or taking public transportation. They'll move out of communities were driving is required and into places were they're close to their work. This will take time but we're already seeing it. Every time a person decides to stop driving to work, the price of oil goes down a tiny amount.

1 + 2 = We (and by we I mean everybody as a civilization) can keep making plastics and fertilizers and transporting stuff from one place to another for a while now. Oil's never going to be as cheap and plentiful as it used to be but once America's car culture dies off, the price of oil will stabilize to something that means we can keep having our lives until bioplastics and alternative energy can pick up the slack. And they will pick up the slack because they'll have to and because whoever does will stand to be make gobs and gobs of money.

As an aside, I have to say that I totally support the movement by the Agricultural Industry to get preferential access to fuel. Honestly, getting the food grown and transported to your local store is just simply more important than letting civilians have it. It's not nice but eventually we're going to have start prioritizing.

3. With all this talking about a World Without Oil, it's worth thinking about the World Before Oil. There was a time when we didn't drive cars and didn't use oil (at least not at the extent we do now). And we still had nice things like cities and international/cross country travel and science and all that. Our food was transported by trains and cross-atlantic travel was done by boats. It's not like you need oil to have civilization, or even a civilization with many of the things that you and I would point to as important. We've done it before and we can do it again. Also, they had zeppelins back then which were really cool, even if they were never that effective.

Of course, all of that depended on rail lines and fleets of shipping boats and trolley systems which have fallen into disrepair. They'll need to be rebuilt which will take time. More on this in the end.

4. This is more a comment of survivalism than on our current situation, but it's worth stating: any plan for long term survival which doesn't involve cities is just frankly stupid. A lot of people seem to reacting to this with a strong cry to head for the hills. Go out into the countryside, make your own farm, grow your own food. And while we certainly need people to do that, the fact remains that the majority of people are still going to live in cities. Cities are vital producers of innovation and if we're going to save our civilization we're certainly going to need innovation. And cities are better for the environmental than rural areas - the per capita environmental footprint for cities dwellers is smaller than rural dwellers almost everywhere, for a thousand reasons ranging from the fact that city dwellers drive less since everything's closer together to that city dwellers need less heating because their waste heat heats their neighbors.

Suburbs, on the other hand, can feel free to shrivel up and die. They're a product of cars and therefore oils and their days are numbered. Good riddance. I never liked them anyway.

So, in conclusion, everything's going to work out fine. Eventually. Given time. In a few years. And there lies the potential for people to help things, in two ways that I see:

1. Help speed the process: The world's going to see some radical social changes driven by economic pressures over the next few years. These changes can happen quickly or slowly, smoothly or kicking and screaming the whole way. The faster people give up their cars or the faster people start moving out of the suburbs, the better this whole things going to be.

2. Prevent things from getting too bad: There going to be a lot of chaos connecting to all this. Rioting, theft, hoarding, people holing themselves up in the mountains with guns, that sort of thing. If it gets too bad, we may never pull out of this crisis simply because things aren't stable enough. How are we going to keep everything from exploding? I don't know. Do you know?

Man, that ended up long. Any comments, questions, strong disagreements? Please send them, I desire them.