The End of the Age of Oil: Will It Be a Soft or Hard Landing?

Forbes magazine writer Christopher Steiner has set up a useful heuristic device–the escalation of the price of oil in two-dollar increments, from $4 to $20–to speculate about the changes in our lifestyle we might see at each stage of the price increase. At $4, some of the tougher choices might still be unpalatable, but with the continuing increase in price, more radical changes will become necessities, if we are to survive as a civilization at all.

Others have written much in the last few years about peak oil scenarios; the most persuasive such analyst has been James Howard Kunstler, particularly in The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Atlantic Monthly, 2005). Kunstler wrote before $4 and $5 gas at the pumps was a reality; as time goes by, his projections about a winding-down of mechanistic civilization as we know it, driven by oil in every aspect of our existence, appear more and more prescient, and even reasonable-sounding. There has been an undoubted element of glee in Kunstler’s analysis; he, for one, would be glad to see the return of smallness, locality, and manual survival skills allowed to lapse in the machine age.

Steiner’s book agrees on the basic premise, that the end of oil is bound to come sooner rather than later (we can disagree on the exact date oil extraction peaked, but its arrival at some point is indisputable) and that we had better prepare for the day of reckoning.

Reading $20 Per Gallon makes us realize how contingent our way of life is, and how uncertain its future prospects are. Connecting each phase of the price increase with a particular form of reliance, Steiner tries to move us from denial to acceptance. We will not be able to live the way we have been for the last century, driven by the stored excess energy of oil, built up over millennia. No new form of energy currently on the horizon competes with oil for its cheapness, efficiency, ease of use, and broadness of applicability. At the same time, cheap oil has engendered a variety of grotesque behaviors, from the way we eat our food to how we move products around the world, that make no sense in the absence of underpriced oil.

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