The Peak Oil Crisis: Sustainability

It does not take much thinking about the implications of peak oil before the concept of sustainability arises.

For many centuries now mankind has been using the earth’s resources – trees, fertile soils, wildlife, and fossil fuels – at a prodigious rate and they are just about gone. Some of these resources such as trees, fertile soil and fish can be restored in a few decades, or perhaps centuries, with good conservation practices. Others, such as fossil fuels and some minerals are close to being gone — period. Some of our minerals can be recycled and as time goes more and more probably will. It is the energy that is going to be a problem.

We all know about renewables – solar, moving air, moving water, biofuels, and geothermal heat. The rest of the 21st century or perhaps longer is going to be about shifting life to sustainable sources of energy and phasing out the fossil fuels.

Food production is frequently discussed as the key area of human endeavor that will need to become sustainable if we are to continue eating. For the last hundred years agricultural production has boomed as we have dumped vast amounts of petroleum-derived chemicals and pesticides on the world’s crops. Then we have piled the resulting crops into fossil fuel powered trains, planes, ships, and trucks and after much energy intensive processing and packaging have delivered them to consumers 1,000s of miles away. This too will have to be phased out as the energy involved in all this becomes so expensive that we can no longer afford to eat. Many see the return to sustainable agricultural practices in the midst of global warming as by far the biggest challenge our descendents will face.

There is, however, more to the sustainability problem than just renewable energy, transportation and food – and that is our infrastructure. Large agglomerations of people living under reasonable conditions in the 21st simply cannot continue in a healthy, sustainable state without clean water, sewage, electricity, communications, a source of warmth and a transportation network to move life-sustaining supplies about. Most of the infrastructure in use today has been built in the last 150 or so years.

Falls Church News-Press