Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation

Rising oil prices are hurting the public. Mainstream politicians and news media keep diverting attention from the real cause and real solutions. Yes, political instability in some parts of the world interfere with supply, and yes, oil companies’ profits are obscenely high, but those are not enough to cause the problem. The main problem is that the Peak Oil crisis is actually happening.

The harsh reality is that oil is a finite resource. Mother Nature spent hundreds of millions of years creating it underground. Industrial society has extracted half of the total supply in only 160 years, and demand is outstripping supply.

Any given oil well becomes less productive as it ages. At the aggregate level, the total of all the world’s oil wells have reached their peak productivity, and now they simply cannot pump as much as in previous years. Worldwide demand is still growing, so the law of supply and demand forces prices up.

Oil production in the U.S. peaked in 1971 and has been declining since 1971. After more than a century of intense exploration and extraction very little new oil and gas is being found anywhere in the world. Global oil discoveries peaked in 1962 (40 billion barrels) and discoveries have been declining ever since 1962. Now we are at the 1910 level of oil discoveries (10 billion barrels). The oil companies are investing less in exploration because they KNOW very little is left to be discovered. The Republican Party’s proposal of using our tax dollars to subsidize oil companies’ exploration is wasteful. For many years the oil companies have known about the coming peak oil crisis and the vast increases in oil prices, so they would have invested money in exploration, but they didn’t because they KNOW hardly any oil is left to be discovered.

▪ The last major oil discovery was in 1976 – more than 30 years ago.
▪ More than 70% of the present supply of oil in the world was discovered before 1973.
▪ Today, for every barrel of oil discovered, the world consumes FOUR barrels. This is NOT sustainable!

The U.S. has been the world’s major user of oil, but other nations are industrializing rapidly. On China’s east coast the sales of cars have been increasing 80% per year. Shanghai and some other Chinese cities have banned bicycles in order to make room for more cars.

We don’t “produce” oil. Mother Nature produced it. We just extract it from the ground. The Peak Oil crisis is a geological reality. Neither “the market” nor technology can fix it. There is only so much oil. We can’t ignore it or wish it away, any more than we can ignore or wish away the global climate crisis.

The early ‘70s OPEC embargo was a temporary disruption based on a political controversy. The crisis we face now is different from the OPEC oil embargo. Peak Oil is a geological reality – a hard limit. We are somewhere near the peak now. We might have peaked in 2005 or 2006. Existing wells are pumping all they can, and practically no new sources exist (without counterproductive economic and environmental costs).

The harsh reality is that the world will have to get by on less and less oil every year – and at higher and higher prices. The Peak Oil crisis will affect EVERY aspect of modern society, economics, and lifestyle.

Oil has been the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans. For 200 years industrial nations became accustomed to a seemingly endless supply of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). The US in particular designed our industry, transportation, and many other aspects of our society around the assumptions that oil would always be available and cheap – and that growth is necessary and can go on forever.

Over the coming years, prices for gasoline and everything made from oil will spike. This will cause economies to crash.
Transportation of people and goods will become much more expensive. Large-scale agriculture (based on fertilizers and pesticides made with oil and natural gas) will stop being cost-effective, so global food production will decline. Some experts predict that hunger will kill billions of people in a few decades.

We’re importing more and more of our oil from other countries – especially countries that are politically unstable. Wars for oil will ravage the globe. Indeed, they’ve already started as the US tries to conquer Afghanistan to build a pipeline and tries to militarily control the oil of Iraq, Colombia, and Venezuela. Iran is next, and the Pentagon is beefing up its presence in Africa. The U.S. foreign policy is very much bi-partisan. Both big political parties have shown they are willing to kill for oil.

The Peak Oil crisis will yank us out of our familiar world of energy growth and transplant us into a world of energy decline. We’ll enter uncharted territory. We’ll need to adjust our mental frame of reference to this new reality. We’ll need to rethink and redesign modern society. Government and the public have resisted the radical changes that are necessary.

Most of the commonly offered painless solutions are not realistic.

For example, ethanol costs MORE than gasoline and causes MORE air pollution than gasoline. Making ethanol from corn is driving up the cost of corn and other grains for hungry people around the world. But even if we devoted the ENTIRE U.S. corn crop to ethanol, it would provide less than 6% of the U.S.’s oil needs. To make ethanol from sugar and other crops, Brazil is clear-cutting jungles and causing environmental damage and the loss of plants that consume CO2.

Frankly, the odds are against us, and no solutions are cheap or painless. Some solutions are possible – but only if we generate the political will – and only if we start immediately!

We need to slash our oil consumption drastically, and we need to slash it immediately!

The Peak Oil crisis requires a radical change in the whole U.S. economy and way of life. Think on the scale of the massive changes during World War II.

The sooner we start, the sooner we can adapt to the new realities. We can’t fool Mother Nature. Either we deal with reality, or reality will deal with us!

A number of books and websites offer solid information. Contact the Olympia FOR for recommendations. Last September I conducted a workshop on Peak Oil that laid out the problems and engaged participants in generating practical solutions that we could start implementing at the local level. The workshop also addressed the feelings of fear, denial and powerlessness that prevent people and governments from confronting the Peak Oil crisis effectively. The workshop was very well received, and I’d be happy to conduct it again if people are interested.