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Mad Max or Knitting

Peak oil - What happens when the oil runs out

If you are reading this and are under thirty then best you start looking up old relatives and ask about the good old days or catch up with those hippy friends of yours, the ones that darn their own socks and brush their teeth with sticks dipped in salt. They might have useful living tips to gather because, oh crap, we are all going to run out of stuff.
It’s the oil dudes it’s all gonna run out. There is only so much of the stuff in the ground and the amount that is being found has decreased steadily over the last fifty years. We are about to hit something called Peak Oil any time in the next ten – twenty years, after that point less and less oil will be available. If you are thinking – yay that‘ll stop global warming well that is the bummer, it takes about thirty years for the CO2 we chuck up in the air to have it’s effect and as the last thirty years have been the most polluting we’ve got a lot of warming up to come – the seas are likely to rise enough in the next fifty years to make Gt Yarmouth vanish, so there are benefits.

It’s not just oil that's peaking, there’s about 10yrs of Indium left (the stuff in flat screen TVs – so that is a crisis); probably a similar reserve of Gallium which is in solar cells and LED, so best we don’t rely on their help to counteract CO2 emissions. The same for Terbium, which makes fluorescent in fluorescent bulbs, which is also fast running out. The big problem in all these is that the Earth has a certain amount of stuff and if we use more and more of it the stuff runs out. Then we fight over the scraps – the Tantalum in mobile phones encouraged the war in the democratic republic of congo and a certain country called Iraq just happens to have the 2nd largest reserves of oil and there is a bit of a scuffle going on there at the moment, because, of all the resources running out, oil is the biggy.

We use oil for plastic, paints, inks, grease, medication etc but the real impact is the energy we get from it, not just the obvious effect scarcity will have on the fuel pump price and the price of transporting food, goods, water etc but on the power for factories, homes, even the TV. As oil peaks it’s gonna get scarce and expensive, but while it might end up like Mad Max here in the UK it’s more likely to end up like the 1950s. There will be less of most things and we’ll end up living in a sepia tinted world. Although things might not become impossible it will be a big jump back wards from current consumption. And that’s the thing, how are people going to take it?

Chances are we are going to keep running full tilt forward until we hit the crunch, politicians and commerce want growth and we want new things. Fuel crises are already hitting a number of poorer countries and anytime now the UK will need to import more oil than it exports as our own oil production peaked a few years ago. But there are plans to do something: The International Energy Assoc has an emergency treaty (Agreement on International Energy Programme) that the UK has signed which laid down plans in 2005 for rationing, selective banning of car use and increasing police numbers.

There is also another group interested in what will happen. In conversation about this, someone told me the BNP leadership have a keen interest in all this and for an obvious reason – as the crunch comes and things, energy and journeys get more expensive it won’t be the rich or the more well off who suffer. They will still get their goods, flights and new TVs the rest of us will be fighting to retain our life styles and the BNP want to stir the shit and exploit that pissed off feeling.

So what to do?
You could hope for other power sources to pick up the slack: renewals if you are a greeny, nuclear power if you are a tech head. In this country renewals make up 4% of energy and of that 70% is actually burning waste! (yes the govt counts that as renewable) So it is going to take some time and a lot of new turbines. As for nuclear that depends on uranium which, like everything else, is a finite resource. As countries increase nuclear use to compensate for oil reduction there could be as little as 20 years of that left too. You could fit low energy lights and turn off the ‘stand by’ – well that covers a massive 2% of household energy, or turn down the heating which is where most house energy is used and wear a jumper. Your efforts will help a tiny bit but most energy is used by industry and more power is wasted at power stations and refineries than is used by our homes.

The answer might be that people are going to have to get used to having less. As things get used up, growth slows and we will have to use less anyway. As this paper has a high hippy reader ship a number of you are probably already low users of energy well don’t keep it to yourself, you hippy fucks could yet be the role models for the future as long as you don’t piss people off with any lectures. The rest of us might have to start learning how to grow our own food, wear brown clothes and finding out how to knit or at least start stashing fuel for those molotovs we’ll need when it starts to get dicey.