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Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil
Martin Zimmerman, Los Angeles times
As forecasters take that possibility more seriously, they describe fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time.
The more expensive oil gets, the more Katherine Carver’s life shrinks. She’s given up RV trips. She stays home most weekends. She’s scrapped her twice-a-month volunteer stint at a Malibu wildlife refuge — the trek from her home in Palmdale just got too expensive.
How much higher would fuel prices have to go before she quit her job? Already, the 170-mile round-trip commute to her job with Los Angeles County Child Support Services in Commerce is costing her close to $1,000 a month — a fifth of her salary. It’s got the 55-year-old thinking about retirement.
“It’s definitely pushing me to that point,” Carver said.
The point could be closer than anyone thinks.
Three months ago, when oil was around $108 a barrel, a few Wall Street analysts began predicting that it could rise to $200. Many observers scoffed at the forecasts as sensational, or motivated by a desire among energy companies and investors to drive prices higher.
But with oil closing above $140 a barrel Friday, more experts are taking those predictions seriously — and shuddering at the inflation-fueled chaos that $200-a-barrel crude could bring. They foresee fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend our free time.
“You’d have massive changes going on throughout the economy,” said Robert Wescott, president of Keybridge Research, a Washington economic analysis firm. “Some activities are just plain going to be shut down.”
(25 June 2008)
The challenges of peak oil
Steve Yetiv, Houston Chronicle
We may not be doomed, but we also may not be ready for all of its effects
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Americans are feeling serious pain at the gasoline pump, and scratching their heads as to why. Part of the answer may be that we are approaching peak oil sooner than many people would have guessed.
Peak oil refers to a key turning point when global oil production peaks, signaling a future of slowly decreasing world oil production. No one can say when peak oil will arrive, but one fact at least suggests that it may come sooner rather than later: Until recently, the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries barely tried to stem the rise of oil prices from $50 dollars per barrel in February 2007 to more than $130 per barrel today.
… peak oil may be a factor. OPEC behavior may be a signal that OPEC cannot easily meet long-run global oil demand, on demand.
… If peak oil is creeping up slowly, does this mean we’re doomed? Well, no. But, depending on when oil does peak, it may produce some effects for which we are not prepared. Oil prices could spike possibly to more than $200 per barrel, triggering economic dislocation. Such prices will increasingly spur work on affordable alternatives to oil, as we are already seeing today in nascent form, but it will take a long time for such alternatives to penetrate the market. Our infrastructure is designed for oil. We can’t switch overnight.
In addition, Middle East oil will become even more important.
Yetiv is author of “Crude Awakenings” (Cornell, 2004) and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, “The Absence of Grand Strategy,” (Johns Hopkins, 2008). He is a professor of political science at Old Dominion University in Virginia
(28 June 2008)
Civilization’s golden era is teetering on collapse
Hans Tammemagi, Vancouver Sun
New millennium has brought a turning point in history, yet we ignore meltdown
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The period from 1950 to 2000 will be remembered as the Golden Era of modern civilization, the pinnacle reached by humans after a million years of evolution. This brilliant half-century was sponsored largely by fossil fuels, especially oil, which brought unprecedented economic growth, plentiful transportation and a rich and diverse lifestyle.
But the new millennium has brought the end of cheap oil, and civilization is suddenly teetering on the edge of collapse. Even if we manage to scrape through (and it would require heroic efforts), life will change. We’re at one of the most important turning points in history, yet we persistently ignore the coming meltdown and just want to party on. Nero would be proud.
So, why is civilization teetering?
First, peak oil has arrived.
(28 June 2008)
Hans Tammemagi is a writer, photographer and environmental scientist in British Columbia.
Oil disquiet on the Western front
Andrew Nikiforuk, Globe & Mail
Oil has fantastic powers: Like the genie from One Thousand and One Nights, it can grant impossible political wishes both fair and foul. This is why the U.S. oil baron John D. Rockefeller once, in a moment of reflection, called oil “the Devil’s tears,” and why Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, in a moment of exasperation, wished that Saudi Arabia had discovered water, and why the late Venezuelan writer Jose Ignacio Cabrujas, in a moment of subversion, wrote that oil can create “a culture of miracles” that erases memory.
Canadians, the newly minted inhabitants of “an emerging energy superpower,” now stand at the gas pumps cursing the price of oil and the prospect of shortened summer vacations. Yet they forget that many of our ancestors agonized about the price of slaves only 200 years ago. We too complained bitterly about the cost of feeding indentured labour, and dismissed the ugly rhetoric of abolitionists as offensive.
A barrel of oil, as analyst Dave Hughes often reminds me, equals 8.6 years of human labour. Think about that. “A human life span could produce about three barrels of oil-equivalent energy,” he adds. We often miss this Hummer-sized truth because, as the Arabs know, petroleum induces lazy thinking and even lazier economics.
In fact, the North American media take for granted how much oil undermines democracy, powers our food system, feeds our drug-addled medical industry and concentrates our cities like bovine feedlots. It has done so as assuredly as cheap labour built Rome. “Slavery,” a Wall Street Journal scribe recently wrote, “was the oil business of its time – profitable, essential, permitting piracy, demanding collusion in countless ills.”
Andrew Nikiforuk’s next book, The Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, will be published this fall.
(28 June 2008)
Bill Henderson writes:
You might miss this gem, buried in the Books section. We move on too fast and forget.
