Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Published on Monday, September 27, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
A Great Future Is in Store for Us (If We Want It)
The distinctions between pessimism, optimism, and hope can make a
difference when it comes to envisioning the future.
A pessimist believes there is no hope while an optimist thinks everything will turn out all right. A person of hope, however, looks at reality and tries to solve problems with the faith that his/her actions will make a difference for a better future.
Richard Heinberg, senior fellow-in residence at the Post Carbon Institute, spoke in my town recently about peak oil and its implications for our way of life. Although this subject can be a real downer, he was actually inspirational and motivating as he sounded a clarion call for the audience to help create the next major era in our world’s history.
Peak oil is not for the faint of heart and in fact, government, the media and most institutions resist or actively try to shut down any talk about it. What a great disservice to the public that is!
Peak oil means that we’re extracting oil at the highest rate we will ever achieve. After peak, the rate of production falls even though there’s still a lot of oil left. That’s when the problems begin because our entire economy is designed to function properly only when oil supplies are increasing.
A lot of people are depending on technology to come up with alternatives to oil: biofuels, hydrogen, tar sands, switch grass, wind, solar and the like. However, these resources cannot make up for the huge demand for oil.
For example, Americans currently consume 19.5 million barrels of oil per day while the rest of the world consumes 85 million barrels. ()
To give some scale to this, the United States, the top consumer, uses almost as much as the next four highest consumers combined including China (7.8 million), Japan (4.8 million), India (3 million) and Russia (2.9 million).
It is important to note that peak oil doesn’t mean we will be without oil. It means that we are running out of cheap oil.
The oil we have been using over the past 150 years is the easiest to pump out and it’s called “light sweet crude” for that reason. You just dig a well and the oil gushes out. That’s why it is so cheap.
A land-based drill goes down into the earth 300 to 800 feet and costs $1 to $15 million depending on the well’s depth and difficulty. Compare that to deepwater rigs that cost between $200,000 to $400,000 per day with a single well costing $100 million.
Heinberg says that about a third of U.S. oil comes from off-shore drilling.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has shown how very risky offshore drilling is. Birds, marine life and the tourist and fishing industries on the coast near Louisiana have been devastated. Meanwhile, the media and politicians have glossed over the fact that the Gulf of Mexico has almost 4,000 rigs operating under the same set of loose safety and regulatory requirements and enforcements as the Deepwater Horizon.
What are the chances of another spill? A second spill occurred in June, southeast of the Mississippi Delta, before the first one had been stopped!
Many people think the high price of oil is due to greedy oil corporations. What is not understood is that more and more oil is being produced by difficult and involved processes like the tar sands (a.k.a. oil sands). They are literally ripping the earth apart over 54,132 square miles of Alberta, Canada, to scoop up a heavy and viscous mixture of sand, clay, minerals, water and bitumen that are then treated and sent to refineries to produce gasoline and diesel. Each day 1.31 million barrels of bitumen are extracted (2008). Total reserves are now estimated at 171.8 billion barrels or about 13 percent of total global oil reserves (1,342 billion barrels), second only to Saudi Arabia.
Many people think biofuels will save us but they evoke some uncomfortable dilemmas. Land for biofuels would compete for space with land for growing food. Secondly, it takes more energy to produce ethanol than it gives. Finally, using land to grow fuel for our cars creates a moral and ethical problem when we consider that in 2008 there were riots in 20 countries because of food shortages.
In the 1930s, America used to supply half of the world’s oil, said Heinberg. However, the U.S. rate of production peaked in 1970. Now we import 65 percent of the 19.5 million barrels of petroleum that we consume each day.
When we talk about running short of oil, people’s eyes usually glaze over—and for good reason. Nearly everything we do and have is dependent on dread and/or disbelief, which means we will need to confront many difficult questions about our way of life.
For example, how can we commute long distances by car or travel by jet? How will we heat and cool off our homes or power our cities and institutions? Most of our food is trucked 1,500 miles before it gets to the local grocery store. How will we stock our shelves? Many consumer products are made from oil like our clothes, plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, cosmetics, deodorants, detergents, carpets, toothpaste and shoes. What will we have to give up?
What Heinberg makes clear is that the oil we use today will not be available for us tomorrow. The Post Carbon Institute recently ran computer-generated scenarios to explore the prospects of replacing our current economy and it could find none. None! So that means we must change our way of life such that we depend less and less on oil.
The primary strategy available to us is conservation, said Heinberg, and he mentioned many grassroots projects that have already begun:
Many people also fear peak oil because it means the loss of more jobs. However, as a new society emerges, we will require new types of jobs and different skills. Heinberg suggested that the future calls for farmers, energy coaches, home heating/insulation specialists, solar/wind engineers, railroad construction workers, auto and pavement dismantlers, psychotherapists and recyclers to name a few.
However, Heinberg’s most hopeful message was that human beings as a species are made to adapt to changing environments and circumstances. We’ve been through hard times before, he said, and have succeeded in adapting because we are resilient, intelligent and hard working. And, with the future’s new challenges, we have an opportunity to re-make our society, which has the potential of improving on our current one.
Truly, we’re in the driver’s seat on this one, so to speak, and that gives us a lot of freedom to act rather than rely on someone else, government or some organization to solve our problems.
The solutions to our energy future will require vision, initiative, experimentation, and courage. We can start by talking with our families, neighbors and friends about how to reduce our energy consumption as individual households and in our communities. We can also remember that when it comes to running our own lives, we have the power. Let’s use it!
A pessimist believes there is no hope while an optimist thinks everything will turn out all right. A person of hope, however, looks at reality and tries to solve problems with the faith that his/her actions will make a difference for a better future.
Richard Heinberg, senior fellow-in residence at the Post Carbon Institute, spoke in my town recently about peak oil and its implications for our way of life. Although this subject can be a real downer, he was actually inspirational and motivating as he sounded a clarion call for the audience to help create the next major era in our world’s history.
Peak oil is not for the faint of heart and in fact, government, the media and most institutions resist or actively try to shut down any talk about it. What a great disservice to the public that is!
Peak oil means that we’re extracting oil at the highest rate we will ever achieve. After peak, the rate of production falls even though there’s still a lot of oil left. That’s when the problems begin because our entire economy is designed to function properly only when oil supplies are increasing.
A lot of people are depending on technology to come up with alternatives to oil: biofuels, hydrogen, tar sands, switch grass, wind, solar and the like. However, these resources cannot make up for the huge demand for oil.
For example, Americans currently consume 19.5 million barrels of oil per day while the rest of the world consumes 85 million barrels. ()
To give some scale to this, the United States, the top consumer, uses almost as much as the next four highest consumers combined including China (7.8 million), Japan (4.8 million), India (3 million) and Russia (2.9 million).
It is important to note that peak oil doesn’t mean we will be without oil. It means that we are running out of cheap oil.
The oil we have been using over the past 150 years is the easiest to pump out and it’s called “light sweet crude” for that reason. You just dig a well and the oil gushes out. That’s why it is so cheap.
A land-based drill goes down into the earth 300 to 800 feet and costs $1 to $15 million depending on the well’s depth and difficulty. Compare that to deepwater rigs that cost between $200,000 to $400,000 per day with a single well costing $100 million.
Heinberg says that about a third of U.S. oil comes from off-shore drilling.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has shown how very risky offshore drilling is. Birds, marine life and the tourist and fishing industries on the coast near Louisiana have been devastated. Meanwhile, the media and politicians have glossed over the fact that the Gulf of Mexico has almost 4,000 rigs operating under the same set of loose safety and regulatory requirements and enforcements as the Deepwater Horizon.
What are the chances of another spill? A second spill occurred in June, southeast of the Mississippi Delta, before the first one had been stopped!
Many people think the high price of oil is due to greedy oil corporations. What is not understood is that more and more oil is being produced by difficult and involved processes like the tar sands (a.k.a. oil sands). They are literally ripping the earth apart over 54,132 square miles of Alberta, Canada, to scoop up a heavy and viscous mixture of sand, clay, minerals, water and bitumen that are then treated and sent to refineries to produce gasoline and diesel. Each day 1.31 million barrels of bitumen are extracted (2008). Total reserves are now estimated at 171.8 billion barrels or about 13 percent of total global oil reserves (1,342 billion barrels), second only to Saudi Arabia.
Many people think biofuels will save us but they evoke some uncomfortable dilemmas. Land for biofuels would compete for space with land for growing food. Secondly, it takes more energy to produce ethanol than it gives. Finally, using land to grow fuel for our cars creates a moral and ethical problem when we consider that in 2008 there were riots in 20 countries because of food shortages.
In the 1930s, America used to supply half of the world’s oil, said Heinberg. However, the U.S. rate of production peaked in 1970. Now we import 65 percent of the 19.5 million barrels of petroleum that we consume each day.
When we talk about running short of oil, people’s eyes usually glaze over—and for good reason. Nearly everything we do and have is dependent on dread and/or disbelief, which means we will need to confront many difficult questions about our way of life.
For example, how can we commute long distances by car or travel by jet? How will we heat and cool off our homes or power our cities and institutions? Most of our food is trucked 1,500 miles before it gets to the local grocery store. How will we stock our shelves? Many consumer products are made from oil like our clothes, plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, cosmetics, deodorants, detergents, carpets, toothpaste and shoes. What will we have to give up?
What Heinberg makes clear is that the oil we use today will not be available for us tomorrow. The Post Carbon Institute recently ran computer-generated scenarios to explore the prospects of replacing our current economy and it could find none. None! So that means we must change our way of life such that we depend less and less on oil.
The primary strategy available to us is conservation, said Heinberg, and he mentioned many grassroots projects that have already begun:
- Co-Op Power (New England) is building a community-owned sustainable energy cooperative (http://www.cooppower.coop/)
- Mission Mountain Food Enterprise (Montana) is the go-between producer and grocer for local foods (http://www.mmfec.com/)
- Avego is a company that provides tools using private cars for public transport (http://www.avego.com/)
- Bicycle Kitchen (Los Angeles) teaches people how to repair their own bicycles (http://www.bicyclekitchen.com/)
- Transition United States provides networking and training for more sustainable living (http://www.transitionus.org/)
- Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association educates, advocates, promotes, and publicly demonstrates renewable energy technologies (http://www.glrea.org/)
Many people also fear peak oil because it means the loss of more jobs. However, as a new society emerges, we will require new types of jobs and different skills. Heinberg suggested that the future calls for farmers, energy coaches, home heating/insulation specialists, solar/wind engineers, railroad construction workers, auto and pavement dismantlers, psychotherapists and recyclers to name a few.
However, Heinberg’s most hopeful message was that human beings as a species are made to adapt to changing environments and circumstances. We’ve been through hard times before, he said, and have succeeded in adapting because we are resilient, intelligent and hard working. And, with the future’s new challenges, we have an opportunity to re-make our society, which has the potential of improving on our current one.
Truly, we’re in the driver’s seat on this one, so to speak, and that gives us a lot of freedom to act rather than rely on someone else, government or some organization to solve our problems.
The solutions to our energy future will require vision, initiative, experimentation, and courage. We can start by talking with our families, neighbors and friends about how to reduce our energy consumption as individual households and in our communities. We can also remember that when it comes to running our own lives, we have the power. Let’s use it!
- Posted in
Comments are closed
30 Comments so far
Show AllHOORAY!!
Finally an article about Peak Oil explicitly on this site and
not just in the comments!
Now we also need to realize that we need to drastically change
our auto addiction by running public transit, trains and
supporting walkable and bikeable communities to stop wasting
the precious oil we have left and also avoids its greenhouse emissions!
Electric cars are NOT going to do that!
It still takes way too much energy to power something like my
3062 lb Prius- no way your solar cell on your house is
going to power currently size electric cars for the day.
You might power golf cart or bicycle sized electric vehicles
with it.
The problem is, the article sounds like it was written for 12 year olds. I think we need a helluva lot more forceful and critical Straight Talk concerning this issue, and sadly, we dont get it.
No need to make it more complex than it has to be to get the point across.Who knows, somebody might actually read it. A smart twelve year old is pretty smart.
A 12 year old might just go into severe depression if they were presented with ALL the factors working against the manifestation of the rosy scenario presented above with such bubbly, cuddly enthusiasm, which has little chance of happening at this point.
Would YOU care to explain to the average 12 year old that we are ruled by psychopathic monsters on Wall St and the Pentagon that could care less how many people have to die just so long as they can preserve their system?
When I was twelve,somebody told me about Hiroshima, and on my own I discovered what had been done in the death camps in Germany. It was startling, traumatic, and did not imbue me with a lot of faith in adults.But yes, I could take it. Maybe I wasn't the average twelve year old.
Actually, due to higher efficiency eelctric cars use much less energy than a IC engine powereed counterpart. An electric motor and battery pack is at least 85% effieicnt, compared to 10% effeciency for an IC engine in trafic. This doesn't include the electric generating/transmission efficiencies, so the actual efficiency gains are smaller, but still substantial.
But youu are corect, why a big car anyway, for a single person? Electric scooters and morotcycles are emminently practical and avaialble right now. I use an electric scooter for all local chores over 3/4 of the year. I might buy a few gallons of gasoline once every 6 weeks or so - its not even a blip on the hosehold budget.
There are lots of other, quality of life reasons to get rid of cars from the urban instrastructure. Good public transit makes even a scooter redundant. I never considered one in my old neighborhood - I could walk or take the bus to any local location I wanted to go.
Peak oil? Bring it on!
I have a mechanic friend who drives every day to work and back on a glorified bicycle with a small two-stroke motor,from the 1940's.I say 'glorified', because it's a little heavier than an ordinary bicycle of the period, and has a girder fork which provides some suspension. He hasn't bothered to figure out his fuel consumption, but it's so negligable that he fills the tank once a week.He lives and works in the city (no freeway driving), and enjoys his putt to work and back, weaving in and out of the bicycles.Seems a little Forties austerity goes a long way these days.You can hear him coming,which is a safety feature which bicycles and electric bikes don't share.
What you are describing is called a moped - a proper moped - not the misuse of the term to mean a motor scooter. A owner of a vintage lambretta will get quite pissed off if you call his scooter a "moped". They still make mopeds - although thay can no longer be 2-stroke due to emissions requirements.
I like quiet. Noise is not that much of a safety feature, and it reaches a level of absurdenty when those deafening harleys with straight pipes are called a safety features.
No, this is not a moped, which is a single speed machine,generally 50cc or less, started by bicycle pedals.It has a two-speed gearbox (with tank shift!) and a proper kick-start. I would be hard pressed to call it a motorcycle though,although some might.Anyone who has been surprised by a silent bicycle (or electric bike) in a cross walk would appreciate the gentle ring-dinging that my friend's bike (?) makes-just enough noise to let you know he's there, but nothing like an asshole on a Harley you can hear from blocks away.It's not Harley's fault: its the jerks who remove tha factory mufflers and run straight pipes.San Francisco is full of mopeds-in fact I just a saw a herd of several hundred of them on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge last Sunday. Now that is a truly inefficient way to move that many people around, and noisy too.I think the "Moped Army" must be holding a gathering in town.
I think your mechanic friend is riding a Whizzer. I've seen them in motorcycle mags, cutest thing ever. Pure fun.
I'd like to see a motorcyle with an enclosed, streamlined body... say a Kawasaki Ninja 250, where the shell's rear slides on rails, you'd pull it closed like a fighter-plane canopy; the clear windscreen-part would come up to your helmet's chinbar (height-adjustable for individual riders); held by bungees, it'd slide forward so no injury in a crash. Behind the rider's helmet, at the shell's top, would be a streamlined fairing, that could be slid back to make room for a passenger's helmet.
The shell's inner face could have padding for some impact- absorbtion; you'd put your feet down through openings styled like the huge slash-cut exhaust pipes on hotrods, that's look pretty cool. And storage space would be decent as long as no passenger.
Give it some reflective tape like police cars or road signs, and those nice strobey flashers you see on bicycles now, you're ready to go.
First I build my new kind of riding-suit, then the shell thing. Styling could be very sharkey, and applied to a Ninja 250 I'd expect 100 mpg hwy.
Not going to happen. Instead, people will turn to false leaders like Palin and increase their energy use. 'Mericans real "mericans don't believe in Glow ball warming or Peek Oil kinds of stuff. They believe in JESUS and OIL not necessarily in that order. Oh and they also believe in the 2nd amendment.
Well there is NO WAY I am voting for Obama, and if that results in President Palin so be it. I think a Palin presidency will be most instructive for all those who refuse to face how dangerous the Fundamentalist Christians really are, and how they have been the stormtroopers for the corporate fascists since they helped put Reagan in office. When Palin attempts to put their agenda into law, people will then see the pure unvarnished truth. Maybe THAT will be what it takes to really wake people up to action and succeed in creating a Progressive Revolution.
The fundamentalists - who have been trained to regard the rest of us as minions of Satan - will of course strike back, so be prepared for mass social upheaval in this country.
Seriously, people need to be shocked awake. If it takes a Palin presidency bought and paid for by the corporate oligarchy, then I say, bring it on! 'Cause I aint playin that "lesser of two evils" game 'cause there aint no "lesser": its just two different faces of the same evil, power lust, greed or insanity - however you want to characterize our sociopathic elites.
Maybe Palin will help us with our energy shortage by attacking Iran. They have a lot of luscious oil and natural gas. Also, a bigger military (more boots on the ground in Iran) would help our unemployment situation. Perhaps she'll wimp out though and only go for lots of drill, baby, drill in the arctic. But, truly I'll be damned if she doesn't help us along toward The Rapture (Oh, Glorious Day).
Hey, some of us progressives believe in the 2nd too. But that might be cause my dad is a redneck (his term), and has always believed that the common people might someday need to protect themselves against big government.
Great summary of the pickle we are in. There is a way out -- but WHO will be educating the masses to prepare them for the shift and make them actively contribute? I see how many (I thought responsible) people go lightly on recycling, throwing vast amounts of recyclable materials into the trash without blinking an eye. Where do we start?
"We're in the driver's seat on this one.."
That's a cause for optimism? We've been told for, what is it now?--thirty-five years or so?--to conserve oil, and all we've done from our driver's seat is stomp down hard on the accelerator pedal. We'll change our ways when collapse forces it upon us, and then it's going to get ugly. (Obviously, I'm a pessimist.)
Actually we need to get OUT of the driver's seat!
Once again, the role of our Auto Addiction is ignored - to reiterate:
70% of our oil usage goes to transportation, 80-90% of that to cars and trucks
38% of our greenhouse emissions also go to transportation
NOTE: this is DIRECT oil usage.
What is not counted here is all the wasted energy for building and maintaining
roads, squads of ambulances to deal with the 40,000 auto deaths per year,
traffic courts, etc etc which have been accounted as costing something like
another $3.50 per gallon on top of direct oil usage.
OH and also all the oil usage to ship those cars in huge container ships from
Japan...
The best way to cut oil usage immediately is to run the existing trains we have and
then restore some of the 233,000 miles of rail we already have into real running service and put trains, light rail, freight on all of them.
When 70% of oil usage goes to one thing, then that is what needs to be focused
upon for a viable solution, not dabble with the 30%...
Unfortunately, must USAns live in the, in awful sprawling generic suburban spaces that are designed specifically to defy public transportation or public-anything for that matter.
And worse, it is clear to to me in converstations of family, aquaintances and here on CD, that most USAns cannot concieve that any other way of life is even possible except one that is completely car-dependent. They call it "freedom"
I couldn't imagine a car-free way of life either until I moved to a city neighborhood where a car wasn't needed. In fact, it was inconvienint to own one at all. The occasional out-of-town trip is done far more cheaply by renting a car. This is more what "freedom" looks like.
It's not just suburbia. I live in a rural area. Two-and-a-half miles to the nearest (small) town in one direction and seven miles (with a couple of steep hills) to a reasonably good-sized town.
I used to live in cities so I agree with your comments, but when you raise livestock you don't have the option of moving to a city. Even if we wanted to use a horse-and-buggy, we couldn't. It would be much too dangerous because of all the logging trucks that go past our property.
We don't drive long distance, so we don't use much gas, but we can't get along without a car or a pickup truck. It has nothing to do with "freedom" or even choice. In fact, in a sense we are trapped by the need for vehicles.
I realize that cars will probably be the only viable means of trasnportation in rural areas, but only a small minority of USAns live in rural areas. And of those, a minority are like you who live there becasuse of their livlihoods. The rest live there becasue they like " a house in the country" and drive alone on 60-100 mile (one-way) commutes into town every day, therby laying down huge carbon footprints.
Approximately 60 million people live in rural areas in the US.
The oil age has hatched powerful industries that won't give up wealth and power without a fight. Hence, the idea that our energy future is 'in our hands' isn't entirely correct. For example, the conservative push to put nuclear power plants everywhere has, in my view, a lot to do with the fact that nuclear has a fuel, whereas many other alternatives do not (just access to sun, wind, wave, etc). The fossil fuels industry certainly understands the value of monopolizing a fuel.
Thank you for this article. I've just been reading "Crossing the Rubicon," by Michael Ruppert, so peak oil has been on my mind...
...It really is up to a relatively small, pioneering group of us to find alternatives to driving, consuming stuff from overseas and using petro-products. Especially since the gov't is not too motivated to change its ways... Others (hopefully some with influence) will eventually catch on once they see Someone Else Do It First... So it looks like we have to be the Someone Else Doing It First :-)
There is also a film that features Michael Ruppert titled "Collapse." It's available on DVD through Netflix. It's not at all optimistic or hopeful, but it tells the story of our dependence on oil and its trajectory.
It will be interesting to see how the slide down the back of the peak oil bell shaped curve will play out. The rich and powerful that own the government will desperately fight to preserve the status quo, but in the end obviously reality will win. This will probably result in more government bailouts of failing oil companies etc.
People will look back on our globalization of world commerce as one of the truly asinine ideas to ever visit the human psyche. Think about it, we squandered the one substance that keeps our society going on shipping things as unnecessary to human survival as plastic pumpkins, halfway around the planet so the few people that run the crap can make a bigger profit. That's it plain and simple.
I used to think that Peak Oil was right around the corner, but with the arctic melting all the countries that boarder it, are chomping at the bit to start drilling there as soon as they can. So depending on how much oil and gas are up there maybe P.O. will be pushed back enough that climate change gets us first.
Who knows, these systems are way too complicated to be able to predict. Then you also have the elites that can manipulate things for a while due to behind the scene shenanigans.
NC TOM: Like addicts rushing madly & blindly towards the last known supply source, perhaps the oil barons won't notice the break-up of yet more ice sheets, the faster levels of escaping methane, the greater frequency of violent hurricanes, the uptick in volcanic activity, added to earthquakes, plus the instability fostered by fierce droughts and equally unprecedented torrents of rain.
My point?
Climate upheaval may beat peak oil to the symbolic "end zone."
Then will it be survival of the fittest? Or will those prepared to form communal societies benefit from the range of skills inherent to the variety of persons who act as their members?
"Then will it be survival of the fittest? Or will those prepared to form communal societies benefit from the range of skills inherent to the variety of persons who act as their members?"
I imagine the answer will depend on the cultures involved. I doubt most tea partier's, American conservatives/republican types, or libertarians will work well in communal societies. When you don't want to even be involved with a universal health care system because you don't want any of YOUR money going to help others, is probably a good sign that you don't "play well with others".
Once we pay for the true costs of using fossil fuels we will change our way of living. All you pay for at the pump is the extraction cost. The replacement costs are much higher and we pretend they don't exist. These finite planetary resources are the property of all the people on the planet, not just the favored few.
Before the political contributions from Rockefeller's Standard Oil to the Womens Christian Temperance Union managed to influence the enactment of the 18th Amendment(1919) most engines were powered by alcohol or bio diesel. By the repeal of prohibition in 1933 oil was established as king of fuels. With prohibition, alcohol production was made illegal which created a huge black market and closed the courts to any meaningful despute resolution so gangland violence ruled the underworld.
We live on an abundant planet and nowhere in nature is scarcity displayed. With every ear of corn you can plant hundreds of plants. Every tomato can produce many plants and each plant much fruit. Only in commerce does lack increase value and scarcity raise the price.
By dominating the planetary resources they are dominating you - this planet belongs to you - and me. We each share the responsibility for fouling our nest and we each must clean it up.
I have posted a link to the video below at least 50 times on CD. This video is the most comprehensive presentation regarding the multiple crises facing modern civilization. All result from continued exponential growth: population growth; increases in energy consumption; natural resource depletion- minerals, water, fish stocks, forests, species extinction; growth in the level of debt; demographic trends; among other natural consequences of our unsustainable way of life.
One of the most important fundamental principles addressed in the video is the relationship between economic growth and increasing SUPPLIES of energy. For the entire period of human history in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the case that the availability of energy actually increased as our levels of consumption of that energy continued to grow exponentially such that, for example: the US used more oil in the ten years comprising the 1940's than it had in total in it's entire history, again in the 1950's the US used more oil than in all the years preceding, the same again in the 60's.
This article and many others like it fail to understand the relationship between the availability of cheap oil and the price of everything you eat, use, and buy. But more important, these articles fail to account for how our economy will continue to function when the increasingly limited availability of oil (and accompanying drastic increases in price of everything) choke off economic growth. Our economy is not structured in such a way that it can function without continued exponential, year-on-year growth. Capitalism when distilled to its most basic principles is about moving money around in the form of credit/debt to areas that will generate enough profit (growth) to pay the debt. When growth stops, who knows what's going to happen but the collapse of the housing bubble gives us a bit of a preview.
Capitalism is just an economic system, without significant energy inputs, growth stops and the system fails. Technology is a similar situation, with significant energy and resource inputs, technology can generate amazing things. Without energy and resources technology is just knowledge, useful but not sufficient to address the tangible needs of mankind in a massive energy/economic transition- certainly not capable of sustaining the material standards of living for those of us in the industrialized world.
Watch this video from start to finish. Once you start you won't be able to stop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0WuQ5-t3xM
One more thing. The actual point we hit Peak Oil is academic. The actual day that we produce more oil than we ever have before and ever will again doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is when demand exceeds supply. Let me repeat that: the only thing that matters is when demand exceeds supply. Demand has and will continue to expand exponentially, while supply decreases exponentially. Even as new significant discoveries occur, old fields reach their individual peaks and decline in production. Tar Sands, Shale, Offshore, each one of these is the equivalent of traveling farther and farther each day to fetch water, eventually so much time and energy is expended in the effort that other aspects of life are displaced. In economic terms that means YOU, wealthy (by global standards)citizens of the industrialized world.
We will never run out of oil, but when gas costs $100 per gallon and the average wage is more like $10, you won't be worried about how you are going to fill your tank, you are going to worry about how to fill your belly.
Pessimism? Yes. Because the changes necessary will require us to abandon the life that we know in favor of one almost completely unknown. That alone is a huge hurdle. Add to that the economic and institutional forces dedicated to maintaining that status quo and you've pretty much got a system that isn't going to change until there is no other choice.
I'lll just add the following to your excellent post. Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, says this as to why civilizations collapse:
“The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.”
So the powers that be will fight for the status quo for as long as possible, because it will still be in their best interest to do so long after it is no longer in ours.