Peak Oil: Half the Story

An observation worth noting … and pondering, from Andrew McKay.

There is no alternative to oil that can be as easily extracted, transported, stored and used as oil.  There is no alternative to oil that will let us continue our lifestyles unaffected. To misunderstand this critical point is to misunderstand the predicament that peak oil puts humanity in entirely.

For all the delirium expressed in artful, cherry-picking segments of the media about our abundantly vast endlessly massive awash-ness in shale/tight oil and how we’re all just a step or two away from unlimited abundance and energy independence because of our general magnificence, the great gods of fossil fuel technology, and the sheer awesomeness of human ingenuity, reality once again pokes a stick in the eye of all that exuberance.

As is the case with most of these hyper-optimistic assessments, the full story and all the facts somehow never manage to find their way into those same pronouncements. The uninformed are thus left with the impression that but for the general awfulness of President Obama and his America-destroying agenda, we would be jes’ swimmin’ in all the oil we will ever need, forever and ever.

High depletion rates, high costs per well, the need to maintain high energy prices (coupled with an explanation of why that’s good for everyone in and out of the oil industry), the inferior quality of unconventional sources, and assorted other facts [remember back in the day when those annoying things mattered?] are almost always glossed over, if they’re mentioned at all. Unfortunately, we cannot just click our heels together once or twice and have all that magically abundant lesser-quality and more expensive fossil fuel substitutes show up at our friendly neighborhood gas station.

And the corollary is that without the full range of facts and resulting appreciation for the challenges we’ll all be facing, no discussions take place on the scale and in the scope needed to prepare ourselves for the reality of what happens when billions of people continue to make demands on a finite resource for just about everything they need. The math doesn’t work.

Perhaps one of the easily-excitable mouthpieces for the oil industry can explain how making life more difficult for more people for a longer period of time at greater cost with more problems and fewer solutions, less time, and fewer resources is in our best interests now and in the future? Not holding my breath….

Peak Oil Matters