Politics Peak Oil
Looks like the Seattle Times is currently running a great series of stories on America’s oil addiction (first published by the Chicago Tribune last month).
There’s a free registration required for reading the whole Tribune series online, but it’s worth it for the discussion of peak oil, something I got clued into two years ago when I reviewed these two scary books.
What is peak oil all about? Basically, the idea is that the world doesn’t have to fully run out of oil before our entire oil-based economy collapses. We only have to use up half of the planet’s reserves, and at that point (coming soon) — well, as the Tribune series describes it:
Permanent fuel shortages would tip the world into a generations-long economic depression. Millions would lose jobs. Farm tractors would be idled, triggering massive famines. Energy wars would flare. And carless suburbanites would trudge to their nearest big-box stores — not to buy Chinese-made clothing, but to scavenge glass and copper wire from abandoned buildings.
There’s some controversy about when (and if) peak oil is coming, but the controversy is starting to sound a lot like the global warming “controversy,” with independent experts saying peak oil is already here or coming within a few decades, and interested parties describing the independent experts as “alarmist.”
Anyway, props to the Times for running this series. Peak oil might just be the most important, least-understood phenomenon in the world today.
The Wikipedia pag does a pretty good job explaining it as well.
While I don't have any basis to discredit the idea of Peak Oil I've been turned off to it by it based on the fact that it's always presented as such a malthusian prophesy of doom.