Peak oil changes everything

…Hubbert believed a conversion to solar power would replace fossil fuels, but such a conversion, at the massive scales required today, may not be practical.

Unfortunately, simply getting the millions of modules required to support a portion of the country’s present electric economy shipped across the planet from where they’re made, Japan and China, might not be practical, even if political stability is maintained to allow such trade.

Civilization lived with 100 percent renewable solar energy from the dawn of time until the beginning of the industrial age in 1750. Human population of the planet during that time never exceeded about 500 million people . This was the carrying capacity of a totally solar-powered world.

Total energy input globally is today many orders of magnitude larger than it was before the oil age began in 1860 — close to 10,000,000,000 tons of petroleum equivalent BTUs per year. Two-thirds of that input comes from oil. Coal, generating electric power, is a distant second and two-thirds of coal’s energy is lost at the power plant as waste heat.

Oil has allowed the human population to exceed 6 billion, far more than a solar-powered, green, renewable energy planet ever took care of. Oil and gas based fertilizers, pharmacuticals and energy intensive farming and public health systems have increased the planet’s capability to support the human experiment.

Now that we’re close to (or have passed, which I believe is the case) oil’s peak production, there will be far less cheap energy available for factory farming, fertilizers, pesticides, and every other aspect of our sprawling, global lifestyles.

The decline will not be smooth. We are already well invested and engaged in energy wars (Iraq, Afghanistan and with the formation of the U.S. African Command (AfriCom), that continent will probably see increased U.S. militarization. Politicians will not discuss the impact of the loss of cheap oil on our suburban economy in public, since there are no alternatives to the decline of our two generation old oil-based civilization, but the policy in place to try to sustain it is obvious.

Vail Daily