Preparing NYC For the Coming Energy Crisis

President Bush’s belated admission that we are addicted to oil is correct in part, but does not go far enough. We will have to break the addiction, not just to Middle Eastern oil, but to all oil, and sooner than expected. If we deal with the other parts of the energy dilemma he didn’t address, we can make the transition less difficult than it will be otherwise.

During the 20th century, oil became our energy source of choice. Consider how much of human activity completely depends on cheap supplies of fossil fuels, and the depth of the addiction is clear. Further, we take it completely for granted until our access is constrained, which happened in the last few years, with oil prices climbing from $28 to over $70 a barrel. Goldman Sachs has warned of higher prices for at least five more years and spikes to over $100 per barrel, which is probably too conservative. Why?

The world’s steadily increasing demand for oil has grown to nearly match the combined production capacity of all oil fields, which means that reserve capacity has virtually disappeared. National security experts predict that even fairly small fuel supply disruptions caused by natural disasters and political conflicts can have surprisingly disproportionate, severe economic impacts. We’ve seen this theory confirmed by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. With the Gulf of Mexico a bowling alley for climate change-amplified hurricanes, and growing tensions with Iran and Venezuela, it’s just a question of time until a new crisis will test the theory again.

In the past we could get out of this bind just by finding and drilling more oil, but that option won’t exist for long. Oil, gas and coal were all formed millions of years ago, and only finite quantities exist. Most of the easily accessible fuel supplies were found a long time ago, and now, new discoveries are small and few. When half of all the earth’s oil is used up, production will decline, and the remaining oil will be increasingly expensive to extract. The U.S. Geological Service predicts that world oil production will peak in 2037, but the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, an international group of geologists and other scientists, claims that peak will arrive by 2010.

Peak Oil NYC