The oil slickers will survive

PEAK Oil. Remember the phrase. Either capped, like this: Peak Oil, or probably soon lower case: peak oil, as it comes into common usage. Then as sub-editors come to grips with throwing the phrase into single-column headlines: PE, or maybe P-oil, then, finally, as we lose the art of making newsprint simply “poil”.

The idea behind the phrase is that we have already passed, or are about to pass, peak oil production on Earth. It took us 125 years to chug through the first trillion barrels of leftover dinosaurs and swamps that make up our oil reserves. These reserves were left either 300 million years ago or 5000 years before Jesus played full forward for the Israelites.


As China and India come online we will go through the next trillion barrels by either 2030 or next Sunday, again depending on whom you talk to and how recently they got out of economists rehab. By the way, the next trillion barrels also happens to be our last trillion, and I don’t see anyone pumping more dinosaur fossils into the Earth’s crust.

Within four days of the world realising we are running out of oil there will be savages outside your front door, armed with spears, bent on carrying off your womenfolk. Your property in the inner city will be worthless, because that is where most of the roaming armed bands will be concentrated. Well, before all this happens, you will have to relocate to somewhere you can grow your own crops, raise your own swine and tend your own steak. A place you can lay mines, set up claymores, string grenades in trees, and dig spider holes and pits full of punji stakes to stop incoming marauders.

Or so the increasingly hysterical Peak Oil believers would have us believe. Maybe I’ve steeped myself too thoroughly in Peak Oil lore, but it has made me think about buying 250 hectares or so well away from any population centre, stocking up the Prius with some canned goods and a bazooka or two, getting a couple of females of breeding age and clearing fields of fire around the house. Now is the time to get out of the cities, the Peak Oil websites say, because the planet is a sick old man with a weak heart, and oil is its blood supply. We are about to lose our blood supply.

The Australian