The End of Cheap Oil: My Peak Oil OpEd

It is hard to overstate the impact the impending decline in global oil production will have on society. We tend to take all the modern inventions and conveniences for granted, but many are only possible with cheap energy. Our current standard of living should really be viewed largely as a historical anomaly caused by an unprecedented energy bonanza, not as a midpoint in a linear pattern of human development. Remove the cheap oil bonanza and all bets are off. As a report by the Department of Energy stated “The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem.”

I wrote the following oped on peak oil for my local paper. hey printed it but did not post it on their website (I shortened and edited it slightly for Daily Kos).

When oil production first started on a large scale in Pennsylvania in 1859, it started a incredible transformation of the global economy. Suddenly we had a massive influx of cheap, safe, and transportable energy, representing solar energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years (some estimates place the energy content of a barrel of oil as equivalent to the work of eight people for an entire year). This bonanza was unprecedented in human history and was largely responsible for rapid industrialization, an increased standard of living, and drastic changes in transportation, agriculture, and geopolitics.

This cheap and abundant energy also allowed us to isolate ourselves from our food sources, create petrochemicals to increase food production, develop a system of global trade, quadruple our population, and move increasingly long distances from our places of work. Unfortunately, these adaptations also had the unintended effect of making us increasingly reliant on oil. The U.S. uses 25% of the world’s oil making us especially dependent on cheap oil. And, because our economy is based on constant growth, we not only need oil, we need larger amounts every year

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