Peak Oil And The Generation Gap

Discussions of survival tactics in a post-oil world can be categorized in many ways: pessimistic and optimistic, pacific and militaristic, technophobic and technophilic. But a curious dividing line can be seen between older and younger speakers. The old tend to think of little more than their bank accounts, often to the point of dismissing all else with the comment, “Well, anyway, I’ll probably be dead before much happens.” The young, on the other hand, expect to be entering a strange new world – if they think anything at all. The difference can be seen in terms of whether one expects to be living mainly before or after the end of the money economy.

We stand on the peak between the rise and the fall of the Oil Age, and descriptions of the future may be either scientific analysis or science fiction, the latter serving a useful temporary role when the former is insufficient. The many studies of oil depletion seem to indicate that the peak itself was around 2008, and that by about 2030 oil production will be about half the peak rate. An older person of today might not have to worry about that 50-percent decline in production. A 20-year-old of today, on the other hand, will be 40 years old at that time, still planning to live for another few decades.

I used to participate in an Internet forum that discussed this future, and while I constantly preached my sermons on such matters as the virtues of Mandan Bride over other varieties of corn, my colleagues were utterly absorbed in the minutiae of pension plans, mortgages, and medicare, as well as the various forms of legalized extortion known as taxes and insurance. For them, everything had to be evaluated in terms of money. My counter-argument was that money can exist only as long as there are such things as governments, stock markets, and currency markets (as George Soros explains in The Crisis of Global Capitalism), and that such things are not likely to last much longer. At the time, I thought of myself as approaching middle age. Does that mean that my colleagues were even older? I suppose so.

This” peak-oil generation gap” seems to occur around age 50, although my choice of this number isn’t based on any serious assembly of data, or on any proper statistical analysis. The old sit brooding in their counting houses. The young have a rather directionless anger.

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