Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

Peak Oil. It’s a term we’re hearing more and more these days. It refers to that point in time when we have passed the halfway mark in extracting the available oil still in the ground. At that point we will be going down the oily, slippery slope toward extracting the last of the oil available. But long before we suck it dry, it will be harder and harder to find, even as oil demand continues rising everywhere. Rising demand plus lessening resources—you do the math. This will lead inevitably to armed conflict throughout the world.

I have always pictured this in my head as all of us on a train, speeding toward the future. Up ahead, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred years, the track is out. We all know the track is out, we all know that if we keep speeding along we will suffer a horrible, devastating crash that we probably won’t survive. So what do we do? We put a brick on the throttle and pop a bottle of champagne.

I find it endlessly fascinating that people launch themselves into endeavors that we know, we just know, can’t be kept up over the long run. When are we going to step back and honestly ask ourselves where all of this is going to lead? When are we going to realize that our dependence on cars and oil is not sustainable? The answer is not until we have to, which is pretty much the only time we’ll face difficult things, when we can’t pretend anymore. But the unavoidable fact is that even when we realized that our car/oil/gasoline model was not sustainable, and by the 70s that was crystal clear to anyone paying attention, our response was to build even bigger cars, use even more oil, and burn even more gasoline. Why? Because it was profitable in the moment, the crisis was still sometime in the future, and, as humans have always done throughout our history, we put blinders on so we could ignore a difficult problem. What could we do? By that point in our history our entire lives, our entire economy depended on oil for everything. Our food supply had become oil driven; our distribution and transportation systems all ran on oil; our military ran on oil; most people depended on their cars or busses to get to work. If we didn’t have oil, we didn’t have anything.

Our government is finally at least talking about this problem. But at the same time it is subsidizing auto manufacturers so they can continue building machines that demand oil. The oil/coal lobby is so huge and so powerful that it’s next to impossible to pass legislation that would turn us away from business as usual. A recent article by Brian Merchant pointed out that Exxon, despite posting lower recent profits, outspent the entire clean energy industry in lobbying against the Clean Energy Bill.

If we wanted to we could create an oil-free society. We could stop the pollution, stop sending billions of dollars to belligerent countries; we could transform the paradigm under which we have been living and save ourselves along with the rest of the world. We have the brainpower, we have the resources, we have the technology. We just lack the will. We decided to send people to the moon, something most scientists at the time considered impossible in the given time constraints. We retooled our factories in weeks during World War Two in order to address and overcome a national crisis that threatened our existence. We can do it again.

Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore has called for a national referendum to free us from oil dependence in ten years. Thousands of people and organizations worldwide are raising their voices to demand that we stop pretending we can continue on our present course.

As it is, we are giving our children and our grandchildren, along with all the future unborn, a world of fear, scarcity, and unimaginable problems to contend with. There is lots we can do as individuals to help; there are lots of resources and information available. I have listed some of them here. Keep searching; ask yourself what you can do each day to help. One person’s effort, multiplied a million times, can make a difference.

Post Carbon Institute
http://www.postcarbon.org/

Dry Dipstick
http://www.drydipstick.com/peakoil-prepare.html

Oil Crisis
http://www.oilcrisis.com/

Green Living Tips

http://www.greenlivingtips.com/