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Page added on March 7, 2014
Peak Oil: Appreciating The Risks
An observation worth noting … and pondering, from Richard Steiner:
The first step in recovering from any addiction is to tell the truth — admit the addiction, acknowledge its consequences. Yet this is something we still seem unwilling to do with our addiction to oil….
The truth about oil is that while there are benefits — jobs, energy, government revenue — there are also enormous long-term risks, impacts, and costs. While government and industry extoll the benefits of oil, they remain unwilling to tell the truth about its costs.
More gradual, less visible costs of oil include ecological habitat degradation from exploration, production, and pipelines; health costs from breathing air polluted with fossil fuel emissions; urban sprawl and traffic congestion around all major cities of the world; and seemingly endless wars fought to secure oil supplies, like Iraq and Sudan, costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
Climate change from carbon emissions is incurring enormous present and future costs….
And wherever it is produced, there is a ‘socio-political toxicity’ of oil, a significant distortion of economic, social, and political systems.
Other than that, no problems!
The typical flow of information from those who know is to offer up misleading numbers about reserve or resources totals, usually couched in Happy Talk terms like “vast,” or “abundant.” A public already on overload about their own day to day challenges and allowing only snippets of information on “bigger picture” topics to filter through are thus left with vague assurances that energy supply concerns are nothing to worry about.
One less big ticket item to keep on plates already full to overflow. How comforting!
How misleading…..
As Mr. Steiner summarizes in his terrific essay, there are countless other costs imposed and ongoing problems in the making which will make today’s Happy Talk nothing but one more cruelty added to the burdens of meeting day to day challenges in the years to come. Tough to plan for and adapt to problems no one is telling you about.
While denying the effects of climate change and trivializing the other concerns raised in that essay is a convenient and too-often used tactic, none of those efforts make the problems disappear. They only grow stronger in the dark, and those in the know would be wise to consider how that reality plays out in the years ahead, and what responsibilities they will then be forced to bear as a result.
No one wants more challenges on their plates. But being kept in the dark and then being confronted with much bigger problems down the road, with fewer options then available with which to adapt, seems a much worse option for all of us.
More information is a good thing to have. What one chooses to do with that added knowledge is another matter, but having that choice in the first instance may not be the Right’s thing to do, but it is the right thing….
3 Comments on "Peak Oil: Appreciating The Risks"
Northwest Resident on Fri, 7th Mar 2014 6:10 pm
This article brings to mind the tobacco industry which knew for years and years that their product was devastating to the health of people who used it. But when confronted, they spent many millions of dollars on public relations and legal wars to HIDE the truth, to gloss the truth over and to do anything and everything they could do to avoid having to deal with the truth. What it boiled down to is that there were (and are) a lot of deep pockets getting a regular stream of revenue from the hacking and coughing and dying millions who paid for that addiction, and those deep pockets would rather keep the money rolling in, regardless of how many “little people” end up suffering and dying as a result. When it comes to peak oil and the future of a world with less energy, we still see the same dynamics at work. There are powerful vested interests, very deep pockets stashed with immense wealth, and they want to keep it that way, they don’t want to recognize or lend credence to the world with much diminished fossil fuel energy that is knocking at the door. They won’t deal with it until they are forced to, but by then of course it will be too late. Lots more “little people” dying will be the end result, same as usual.
ghung on Sat, 8th Mar 2014 12:44 am
But wait! There’s more. Steve from VA has updated his ‘Triangle of Doom’ to the ‘Trapezoid of Doom’. Instead of declining to a point, the oil/credit monster hits a brick wall around the end of this year.
“The premise of the Triangle of Doom is that fuel supply remains both plentiful and affordable until trends collide at the end of this year or beginning of 2015. This is a best-case scenario, with policy makers avoiding errors that damage credit or interfere with world petroleum extraction. Abenomics and the ongoing Russian fiasco in Ukraine look to be fatal errors, the best-case scenario has to be reconsidered, with the triangle morphing into a Trapezoid of Doom with a rapidly-approaching dead end….
… As the world burns through its affordable fuel supply the credit regime falls apart undone by diminished returns. Our surplus-cost-management economy cannot allocate resources that don’t exist, when confronted by scarcity managers punt. The command economy replaces credit with brute force. This is the process that has slithered out of the shadows in Ukraine…”
economic-undertow [dot] com
Davy, Hermann, MO on Sat, 8th Mar 2014 1:06 am
economic-undertow [dot] com
G, great site, thanks!