Are oil supplies going to drop soon? Does it matter?

Do you ever see the latest news and feel sick with dread? Do you see the glass as not just half empty but also leaking fast?

Here’s just one possible concern: how much oil have we got left? Has production peaked, meaning we’ll never again have so much available? Are private cars and foreign holidays shortly to become extinct for all but the very rich? If so, does it really matter? After all, if we keep burning oil at anything like the present rate it looks like we’ll change climates, increase extreme weather (like hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding) and reduce land area round the world. (There’s a related post I wrote in July here. It’s called ‘Environmental Confusion’.)

So are we running out of oil? A number of people have produced convincing evidence we are. To redress the balance Michael Lynch has written an intelligent and straightforward article for The New York Times. He called it ‘Peak Oil Is a Waste of Energy’ and you can find it here. The article is dated 24 August 2009.

Of course Lynch is focussing that article on the oil supply debate. If we accept his reasoning then we need not worry for some decades at least that oil might run out. We just need to worry about global warming, pollution, and so on.

I used to get really panicked by this sort of thing. Now there’s other stuff I add to the mix, and it helps:

There’s the historical perspective

From the start our human race has faced catastrophes. By and large societies have survived them – although some have disappeared. The difference now is that the problems are working on a world-wide scale. This means able people throughout the world are working on them. There will be change and some aspects of the change will be unpleasant, but that has been true throughout our history.

Change focus

We tend to focus on what we can see and hear and touch. Actually we tend to focus on ourselves, and a bit on our families. Well, I do. Part of depression is a withdrawal from life and an obsession with just our one person. This of course makes us feel worse. What I find helps is to get my focus right. I’m no one special. It’s time I started caring about the people round me more and fussing less about my own relatively trivial problems. Yes I know, easier said than done. Give it a try. Work at it whenever you can (which may not be often but that’s fine). Seeing everyone else as equally important, and doing stuff to benefit them without looking for any return: believe me, it changes how you feel, and for the better.

Get the facts

For a novel set in the near future I read many books on environmental problems, how societies collapse, and so on. Much of it made me feel pretty negative and worried. But. That only lasted for a few months. I kept going and found that once I’d taken the pessimistic stuff on board I actually felt more relaxed about it all. I guess I went through the sequence of emotions often experienced by people who are told they are dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. (There’s a Wikipedia article on that here.)

Live today

We’re built so we can only experience life and the world in the present. Let’s do just that. Making plans for the future based on available information is wise. Spending the present worrying about what might or might not happen is not. We have right now to live our lives and as Ghandi said: there is no dress rehearsal, today is a day in our lives. Let’s enjoy the colours and freshness of spring when it’s spring, the beauty of a sunrise when the sun is rising, the tastes and textures of each meal as we eat it. Let’s get on with being a valued part of the human race right now, do what good we can while we’re here.

Go for it.

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Really?

“Yes. Did you know they take forever to degrade after they’re thrown away?”

He’s right, but his emphasis on just one aspect of preserving the environment took me back to some confusion I felt when researching the topic for a novel. Almost every book or article I read seemed obsessed with just one of the many factors. Media articles in particular seem ignorant of their own blinkered approach. They sometimes promote one aspect of preserving the environment with no apparent awareness that what they propose would cause problems in some other way.

One (understandable) example is the advertising of electric cars as ‘green’ on the grounds that they do not burn a fossil fuel but just use ‘clean’ electricity. This unfortunately distracts from considering how the electricity was generated. Maybe it came from a coal or nuclear power station. Even if the source were a hydro-electric power station or wind/tidal power a great deal of energy will have been required to build the generating system, and that typically comes from oil-powered equipment. An electric car may well be greener than a petrol car, but it is not completely green.

Here is a list of various factors. They interact, so trying to affect one will typically have some kind of effect on the others:

• Global warming is becoming an urgent consideration. Burning fossil fuels (oil, petrol, diesel, coal) puts back into the atmosphere carbon dioxide which had conveniently been stored away within the earth’s crust. The increasing carbon dioxide levels contribute to global warming which has such knock-on effects as raising sea-level, changing climate too rapidly for some natural systems to cope, changing weather patterns, and increasing the frequency of extreme weather conditions (leading to more drought, flooding, storms). As climate change reduces available food in some areas there are likely to be mass migrations of hungry and desperate people.
• The earth can only supply a limited amount of food and drinking water each year. Being human we’re very bad at getting what is available distributed fairly.  U.N. predictions suggest that the best we can hope for is the world population rising to 7.8 billion by 2041, and then starting to reduce. At the worst we may be trying to support 10.6 billion people by 2050. Current world population is estimated at just under 6.8 billion, and over a billion of us are trying to stay alive with inadequate nutrition.
• We are using up non-renewable resources fast. It’s likely that more than half the oil it’s practical to get at has already been pumped. Copper is essential for efficient electric circuits, there is no alternative material, and limited stocks are declining. It goes on.
• We are damaging renewable resources such as water and soil. Excessive pumping, typically to increase the amount of crops grown, is draining natural underground reservoirs called aquifers, and these take many years to be restocked naturally. Soil is being damaged or lost through some modern bulk farming methods.
• Pollution is causing increasing damage to the environment and to us.
• The world’s economy is now largely a global entity. Problems in one country can cause significant damage in many others. Keeping this wild beast tame enough to survive is not easy, and may prove impossible.
• The differences between the most comfortable parts of the world and everywhere else are massive. I never go to bed hungry while elsewhere people are starving to death. This has been true for a long time, but now the poor are increasingly aware of how badly off they are. We shove it in their faces with magazines and newspapers, television, films, and the internet. This may lead to global unrest and possibly war.
• We are throwing away stuff which the earth cannot recycle within many lifetimes. We throw away a lot of metal including odd bits of electrical cabling, and we’re going to need that metal. We throw away old CDs, and they are not going to rot. In some countries we’re just beginning to try rather primitive recycling schemes, but as yet we’re not really prepared to pay for them. Paying means accepting a reduction in comfort and convenience and some changes in life style. Ultimately that will be payment towards keeping some of our high tech civilisation running, keeping some of our present comfort.

People told they have terminal cancer typically go through a series of stages in how they think, starting with failure to accept the information (denial). We need to allow ourselves to progress through these stages in relation to information about our environment, and the severe problems to come. It’s not easy, it is painful and frightening, but it is worth reaching a stable understanding and acceptance of the real situation.

Three of the books I read were particularly interesting and informative:

The Upside of Down

The Upside of Down : Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilisation is by Thomas Homer-Dixon.

Plan B 2.0

Plan B 2.0 : Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble is by Lester R. Brown. Version 4 is about to be published. Lester has an interesting web site.

The Long Emergency

The Long Emergency : Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century is by James Howard Kunstler.

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