Yesterday I had an intense discussion with a friend about the oil pipe disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
He recommended a shut down of all drilling immediately because of the safety risks and the subsequent risk of disaster. I suggested he look outside at the stream of cars driving by or contemplate the chipboard walls, paint, plastic chairs, plastic straws, the lights, our clothes, debit cards, jewelery, shoes, etc. How did this stuff get here? That stuff goes away without oil to produce and/or deliver it. I don’t see drilling stopping until the drilling becomes so expensive that it’s no longer viable in any market. Even at that point, governments will continue to subsidize drilling in order to keep it coming. In other words, we’ll pay whether we want to or not.
I’ve been told we’re living in an information economy, a gift economy, a hybrid economy, and a finance economy. Seems as though whatever the academic “expert” is studying is the dominant theory du jour, and continues to prove nobody really knows what the fuck he’s talking about.
We’re living in a natural resource economy. We always have, and we always will. It doesn’t matter what spin we put on it or how compelling the powerpoint is, our world is dictated by our ability to extract and use natural resources. The Industrial Revolution birthed the mechanization of humans and the factory worker mentality, and the Industrial Revolution would not be possible without….you guessed it – oil. What if oil was priced according to its total cost? What if tomorrow a gallon of gasoline cost $1000?
Sadly, I’ve observed absolutely brilliant Academics who know absolutely nothing about natural resources and probably couldn’t tell the difference between a cowbird and a cowpie with a gun to his head. However, these are the people dominating the world economy who couldn’t give fuck-all about a Midwestern farmer or a group of “radical” peak oilers. As a quick example, I recently asked the President of the NY Mercantile Exchange (the largest commodities futures exchange in the world) what he thought about the Peak Oil Theory. “I’ve heard of it, but don’t really think it makes sense.” Really?
I bought you a present. It was sort of an impulse buy, but like this website, it has a genesis in frustration at the status quo while sitting in the back of a dismal classroom. I purchased a site called oilzenith.com, and it’s intended to provide the best content on the web regarding these issues. The problem is, it’s still a mess, but you’ll get the idea. Please enjoy oilzenith because there’s a lot of good content that stands in contrast to the current thought paradigm, and if you’ve got input please provide it as it grows into something useful. The trick is to use this type of information to actually change something that you control. Everybody controls something.
There are a lot of people talking about these issues, yet I don’t see a whole lot of real traction. Our job is to design the systems that fuse humans back to reality and out of the machine mentality. Our job is to ease the transition back to sustainability because, like it or not, that’s where we’re headed. Our planet will not allow us to continue business as usual, nor should she.
This current oil disaster if absolutely no different than the slow disaster we’ve been living for the past 100+ years. The difference is a matter of scale and reduction of time in the pollution process rather than the complex process of pollution we’re used to in the vat of slow-boiling frogs.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Don’t forget about the “consumer economy” or the “service economy”.
It’s ironic that u r n the AF, maybe the biggest consumer of oil world wide. I feel our oil will be nationalized, in order to feed the war machine.
Oil Zenith looks like a great website. I think I could spend a few days there catching up on resources I hadn’t found yet.
Dashui,
I forgot about those.
Yeah, that is ironic… something I think about everyday, but thanks for pointing it out.
In a way, our oil is nationalized because big biz and the military industrial complex are spooning lovers.
There is no such thing as a ‘service economy’.
Something or somebody has to make the tools and the food and energy for the servicing to happen. The only real ‘service’ economy was in the garden of Eden, and we know how that turned out…
Well, let’s not be too cavalier about dismissing the “information” or “service” economies. It is all layered on top of previous economies, and requires the foundational layers beneath them to work, and well. The model I use is more akin to a pyramid, with extraction at the bottom, manufacturing atop that, and service/info/digital whatever on top of that. With all the talk of the “creative” class or creative economy, it is easy, as Tommy posits, to forget the importance of the underlying strata. In order for the digital economy to work, we need to assume that extraction is humming along efficiently and consistently, that manufacturing is humming along efficiently and consistently (in ChIndia I guess). If those are going ok, then Apple can make the Ipad.
Peak Oil may well be the burp that disrupts the lower strata, causing disruption farther up.
You’re friend who wants to stop all drilling is smoking crack. S.he simply does not understand the scope of this problem.
Hey Tommy. thanks for running the free advert for Survival+ as long as you did.
Oil. Nobody will believe it’s not abundant until it’s not. Then it will be too late to adjust except via carpools and behaviorally.
Deepwater drilling makes very little difference. Once the big supergiant fields stop producing, a billion barrels 18,000 feet down is rendered meaningless. A billion barrels is less than 2 months of US consumption.
I predict rationing is just around the corner, say by 2014-15 when global production drops below 80 million barrels a day. One way to respond is to get ready now for a lifestyle in which 10 gallons a week of petrol is enough because that’s all we’ll get (with larger allotments for family farms of course).
I’m down with 10 gallons a month.
Michael: It isn’t that we’re dismissing the information or services: just that they don’t constitute an ‘economy’ unless you create an artificially narrow scope to define what an ‘economy’ is. If you say that an ‘economy’ is the exchange of value, that’s easy to apply in any number of ways. However, if you say “The” economy, it has to include how total value is defined, and that requires real needs, real resources, and real people, not the artificial exchanges of artificial value (lacking future usefulness) that only provide usefulness in the definition of “someone can make use of it” that the patent office allows, rather than “someone NEEDS to use it” which nature provides through meeting real living demands. Your pyramid description makes it quite easy to illustrate this hierarchy (Maslow?).
Charles: I’d go even further: If a farm needs more than 10 gallons per month of petroleum for farm use, then it’s too big. Over the course of a year, I’m close to that average on the farm: not more than double it, for sure, depending on the year and the crops. Some of the highest energy use agriculture is directly related to government/corporate incestuous systems of regulations that detached people from their food (centralized processing, automated cleansing, etc).
We have spent the last 100 years replacing the usefulness of people’s labors with oil and other energy ‘comforts’. As oil gets scarce, we will be reversing that to some extent (unless the ‘aliens’ let us have what they’re smokin’).
Absolutely correct. It’s just a quibble over how to define it anyway. And either way we talk about it, the main point – that folks are ignoring the ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL health of the production of our requisite resources.
And, one you set oil in your sights, it’s easy to see that the entire modern world comes down to fossil fuels, with an increasing concentration on oil. Not just for transportation – although that is our most immediate problem. Converting our grid to a decentralized homebrewed + nuke system so that we can all drive Chevy Volts will require an infrastructure overhaul amounting to a rebuild from the ground up.
But what about the equation: oil=diesel+fertilizer+ herbi/pesticides+processing+ transportation=food
Waiting for Obama and the small planet vegetarians to tweak that equation might take a little while.
“But what about the equation: oil=diesel+fertilizer+ herbi/pesticides+processing+ transportation=food?”
It won’t really take so long. The major use of oil in the farming industry is in processing and fertilizers. Meanwhile, the concentration of animal units (based entirely on oil) created things like burning manure for electricity to heat the water to clean the pipelines. Something that SEEMS to be efficient (from a university grant money standpoint) is really just stealing organic matter from the soil. The herbicide/pesticide thing is a direct replacement of labor which is at this moment hanging around on street corners looking for work to do.
I don’t expect anything from Obama or the small planet vegetarians. I expect the changes to come from Tommy’s ghetto friends and the corporations that produce the food when the two realize they can work together as a remedy for the lack of petroleum. Obama’s job is to ensure the Bill of Rights is upheld as things change. (There is no “I” in “team”, but without “me”, there’s no “meat” in it.) The constitution can keep our oiligarchy from becoming a feudal society, but only if upheld. Harvey O’Connor wrote a book in the ’50′s called “Empire of Oil”, which outlined the power oil companies had over our government when the world was only using about a million barrels per day. Now they have nearly 100 times that power, and it will take 100 times the effort to remove that influence.
I’m a bit concerned that the current meme is that fertilizer comes from petroleum. It is primarily natural gas that is used in the Haber process to synthesize ammonia (nitrogen). Other than the fertilizer factories running on petroproducts, I don’t see how the argri is any more affected than other crtitcal wastern depencencies like electricity and pharmaceuticals.
Virgo: You are correct in that sense. Most of us tend to use ‘petroleum’ when we should say “fossil fuels”.
In addition, the biggest problem with fossil fuel fertilizer is not so much the availability, but what it does to the soils, and how that affects our physical bodies through malnutrition. There are many reasons to shrink the size of the ag systems, most of all is this: “If our food makes our children lazy and stupid, how will they ever find out?”
Too late.
Beautifully written:
“Our job is to design the systems that fuse humans back to reality and out of the machine mentality. Our job is to ease the transition back to sustainability because, like it or not, that’s where we’re headed. Our planet will not allow us to continue business as usual, nor should she.”
This is also the answer to GOING BEYOND the un/underemployment situation, the crisis in the Gulf, on Wall Street. Some of us are working on the “design the systems that fuse humans back to reality” part. Once that process has begun, We the People are ready to engage in perhaps the first truly meaningful work of our lives.