Peak Oil And The Systemic Collapse Of Modern Civilization

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We were becoming more addicted. Like any previous civilization, ours required metals such as iron and copper. We dug miles into the ground to get those metals. All of this digging required powerful machinery. What was it run on? Oil. We have dug those metals out of the ground so much that they are becoming scarce, at least in their more-workable forms, and without that machinery we would have no metals at all.

We have also needed electricity, which acts as the nervous system of any machinery. The electrical grids, with their enormous towers, are by far the largest devices ever built by humans. But electricity is not a source of energy, it is merely a means of carrying energy. Electricity can be based on any form of energy, from dammed-up rivers to nuclear fuel, but most of it comes from hydrocarbons such as oil or coal.

Around 1950, a number of engineers realized that there were several ways of putting the history of oil use on a graph: the amount of oil produced, the amount that was discovered each year, the number of giant oilfields discovered, and so on. But no matter which data were selected, the result was the same: oil would start to run out soon after the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although this was learned around 1950, not many people talked about it, and even fewer people were listening. One of the oddities of corporate behavior is that shareholders start to panic when a company announces that production will decline: declining production does not necessarily mean declining profits, but the average shareholder cannot deal with such mathematics. So the oil companies said nothing. While the chronology of Egyptian civilization could be measured in millennia, that of our own must be measured in centuries or decades. We have burned up our resources with a profligacy that no TV program will reveal.

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