This is a few days old, but nonetheless very much worth sharing:
When historians glance back at 2007 through the haze of their coal-fired stoves, they will mark this year as the onset of the Long Emergency – or whatever they choose to call the unraveling of industrial economies and the complex systems that constituted them. And if they retain any sense of humor – which is very likely since, as wise Sam Beckett once averred, nothing is funnier than unhappiness – they will chuckle at the assumptions that drove the doings and mental operations of those in charge back then (i.e. now).
These are the words of Jim Kunstler–sometime Rolling Stone writer, suburbia-hater, peak oil hardliner and author of the doom-enthusiast’s bible, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. His blog post goes on and on and on, but the gist of it is this: Peak oil is now clearly upon us, so let the collapse of Western society begin.
Now I’m still mighty dubious of the second part (although I reserve the right to chuckle at my current assumptions as I forage for grubs 20 years hence), but the man is onto something about peak oil. I’ve just been reading through the coverage of and some of the presentations from the annual Oil & Money conference held in London earlier this week, and it’s hard to come away with anything but the impression that world oil production–currently about 73 84 million barrels a day–is never going to go much higher than that. Much of the talk was couched in terms of shortages in production capacity, petroleum engineers, etc. That is, not the actual supply of oil under the ground. So maybe this would be more a plateau than a peak. But with oil consumption in the developing world going up at 3% a year (it’s more or less flat in the wealthy countries), even a plateau would mean higher and higher prices over time. You ready for that?