EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Wisconsin Bill Would Treat Organic Milk, Sharp Cheddar, Brown Eggs as "Junk Food"
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Climate Change's 'Evil Twin': Ocean Acidification
- Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Wisconsin Bill Would Treat Organic Milk, Sharp Cheddar, Brown Eggs as "Junk Food"
- Climate Change's 'Evil Twin': Ocean Acidification
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
Popular content
Today's Top News
Demanding Cheaper Oil is Disastrous
The most popular cry in politics today is a pledge to deny reality and cut petrol prices. Give us our fix! Make it cheap! Make it now!
My name is Johann Hari, and I am an addict. If you restrict the supply of my drug, as has happened over the past month, I become panicky and angry. If you cut it off entirely, my life will fall apart. I want my fix, I want it cheap, and I want it now. My drug is called oil. I eat it: my food is driven to me. I wear it: my clothing is shipped and flown to me. I travel with it: on every bus, train and plane. But if I don't go to rehab soon, this addiction is going to ruin me. This is the inaugural meeting of Petroleum Anonymous. We're all going to need it now. There are four major symptoms to my addiction and yours, and in 2011 they are all getting worse.
(Global Exchange)
Symptom one: unpredictable convulsions. There is a revolution happening all around the world's biggest oil-fields, and it is getting closer to the deepest pools every day. For 60 years our governments have armed, funded and fuelled tyrants in return for them pointing the petrol pump in our direction. Just as junkies will rob their mothers and mug their grannies, we have abandoned the most basic values of our societies in pursuit of cheap oil. Initially, this created the virus of jihadism. Now some of the local populations are finally rising up in a democratic spirit against their tyrants. They are being shot at by soldiers trained at Sandhurst and with weapons stamped Made in America.
Nobody knows where this revolution will stop, but today is a declared "day of rage" in Saudi Arabia. The angriest part of the population, the marginalised and abused Shia, happen to live on top of the biggest oil-fields on Earth, and can stare across a thin patch of water to see their fellow Shia rising up in Bahrain. Sixty per cent of the Saudi population is under the age of 25, yet they are governed by an 86-year-old and half-dead "King" who bans women from driving and has rape victims whipped. It seems unlikely they can be bribed, beaten and shot into submission forever.
Even a small and brief disruption in the oil supply can cause this symptom in us. Since 1973, there have been five oil price shocks – and every single one has been followed rapidly by a global recession. A Saudi uprising would be the biggest disruption yet, triggering $200-a-barrel oil and beyond. It would be like having the 1973 oil price shock just after the 1929 Great Crash – and change all our lives.
Symptom two: fever. In the century-long party since a pair of brothers first struck oil big-time in Texas, human beings have burned up 900 billion barrels of the black gloop. Each one of them has released gases into the atmosphere that have trapped more and more of the sun's heat here on Earth. The result is that, according to Nasa, 2010 was globally the hottest year ever recorded, tied with 2005. Don't be fooled by local snow: the last time it was this hot was three million years ago, when the sea level was 25 metres higher. Yes, we have a planetary fever. If we burn up all the oil that remains, we will push it way beyond current levels – or any ever seen by human beings.
Symptom three: hunger. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says food is soaring in price across the world as a result of this man-made fever. Last year Russia's wheat crop dried out and burned down in wildfires nobody had ever seen before. It caused the global price of wheat to double, and President Dmitri Medvedev to renounce his global warming denialism.
Similarly strange things are happening across the world's most important agricultural areas. All this, in turn, helped cause the Arab revolutions. These crop failures rendered many of the Arab people unable to meet their food bills – and made them rise up in desperation.
Symptom four: denial. Petrol is finite. It takes millions of years to form under the ground: it can't be grown, or made in factories. We all know that, sooner or later, it is going to run out. But when? The last year in which humans found more oil than we burned was the year I was born: 1979. Since then, it's been a downward graph. But it may be plunging much faster than we think. The WikiLeaks cables revealed that the US suspects the Saudis have 40 per cent less oil than they claim, and that the country's supply could peak as soon as next year.
There is a shrinking pool of oil in the world – and more and more people chasing it. In China, three quarters of city-dwellers understandably say they plan to buy a car in the next five years. There is not enough for everyone.
We are going to have to make the transition to fuelling our societies by the mighty power of the sun, the wind and the waves sooner or later. The technology exists today. It can be done without us regressing to caves, or any of the other ludicrous myths pumped out by the oil lobby. George Monbiot's book Heat is a detailed roadmap of how to do it, step by step. Far from killing our economies, the work needed to build a new energy infrastructure would be a vast source of new jobs – at precisely the moment when we need a huge economic stimulus.
Every time the oil price spikes, our politicians mouth platitudes about the need to kick oil, but the change never comes. It's worth going back to the last serious proposal because it offers a tantalising "what if?".
On 18 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter delivered a televised address from the Oval Office. He said: "Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly." He said the West must wean itself off oil or "the alternative may be a national catastrophe... This difficult effort will be the moral equivalent of war – except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy."
What would the world be like today if Jimmy Carter had been listened to by the Western world, instead of being booted out of office as a "whiner"? With the US no longer backing Arab petro-tyrannies and occupying Arab territories, there would probably have been no 9/11. There would have been no Iraq war. There would have been no BP oil spill. We would not be facing an oil price shock today that could cripple our economies and leave us backing some of the worst dictators in the world.
The Copenhagen climate summit could well have established a path to dealing with global warming, rather than burying it. If we pursue Drilling As Usual, what unnecessary disasters will they curse us for 30 years from now?
Yet the most popular cry in politics today is a pledge to deny all this reality and cut petrol prices. Give us our fix! Make it cheap! Make it now! In truth we don't have a choice about whether we join Petroleum Anonymous. Our only choice is: do we do it today, or do we do it 20 or 30 years from now, on a much hotter planet, after squabbling and fighting and killing for the last pathetic dregs of petroleum.
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
17 Comments so far
Show AllEconomists (the ones who are not in the employ of the establishment) have been saying for years that our gasoline is underpriced, that charging what Europeans are said to charge (I wouldn't know; I can't afford to go there) would force the gasoline economy to reconfigure itself.
But the "energy" companies, as they have now taken to calling themselves, have such a huge propaganda budget that they are able to constantly reinforce the George Bush (pick which one) notion that "the American economy is nonnegotiable."
It is human nature to believe that the way of life you are used to should continue as long as it can without your being asked to change it.
People can't be blamed for demanding lower gas prices, especially when the high prices being charged are contributing to their slide into poverty.
To understand why so many people are so needlessly dependent on automobiles, I strongly recommmend the documentary "Taken For a Ride". It is available via bit-torrent using the site onebigtorrent.org. There are plenty of people seeding the file right now.
For those no familiar with peer-to-peer collective file sharing via bit-torrent, this is probably a good time to learn. A .torrent file client (program) is needed, but they are free. I recommend u-turrent (greek letter mu-torrent). Download and install the client from the u-torrent site, and read the help files, and join the .torrent file sharing community.
Hindsight being 20/20, this article does present a quiet, yet urgent, warning. Deriving more energy from the wind and sun, possibly even tides and geothermal sources, is the only real alternative. Unfortunately, until someone finds a way to pry money from sunbeams and breezes, nothing will change. The corporate stranglehold in the US and elsewhere will only grow tighter as things get worse. How do you suppose the transnationals in the US will react to food riots, general strikes, and their serfs not being able to afford to get to work?
AND, it behooves us all to understand that wind and sun and the rest will, at BEST, replace only a small part of the energy we now get from oil. First response should be - learn how to use a lot less.
Hi, Johann. Welcome to OAA (oil addicts anonymous).
http://iamanoiladdict.org/
We've been around a while. Mostly tongue-in-cheek but with an awareness of the painful fact that we all REALLY are oil addicts. Carter said, "Gee, maybe we should stop using". Reagan said, "Nonsense! Here, have another fix! Enjoy! Pay later!" No surprise which of those two a country of addicts would like better.
Demanding cheaper oil is also pointless. The consumers of the world have pretty much reached the point where demand has outstripped supply. It is going to get worse as we proceed into the next decades. The days of a preponderance of US travelers driving about solo in large, gas guzzling cars are over.
It won't be the insatiable greed of those 400 obscenely rich people who Michael Moore has cited and who rule the US that will bring the US economy to its knees, it will be the price of oil.
I'm glad Hari has again mentioned Carter, the last honest and decent US president, and his warning regarding the looming end of oil.
The fact that something is unavailable is not enough to convince Americans (and other Western Civilization denizens) that they can't have it if they demand it. We live in a "content on demand" world and telling people that what they're demanding just isn't there to be had will only upset them.
Eventually circumstances will require that they "get it." By then it may be too late, but then again, maybe not.
Although I agree with the overall intent of ths piece, I really object to the notion that "we" are "addicted" to oil. We have been deliberately deprived of real alternatves for what? 30, 40 years?? "We" like the ability to travel, heat our homes, power the appliances that make our lives easier, but this does not translate into an addiction to oil, only that corporate power has deprived us of real choice as to how to accomplish these things. The fact that we are now facing increased costs because alernative energy sources have been undermined by the power of the petrochemical industry simply demonstrates how enslaved we are not to "our addiction" but to corporate powers that, among other things, deprives us of real choice.
Thank you for saying this-I think this is a very important point that often gets lost (much to our detriment). The initial failing is our lack of political power against corporate power.
We can't always play the victim. "we like to travel, heat our homes, power the appliances that make our life easier" I would argue our life hasn't got any easier, but more frantic and like heroin addicts, more detached from reality. We once illuminated our homes with whale oil. Maybe we could set up clinics where the millions of obese american addicts could donate their fat;l we could render it down and light our lamps; or use it as an ingredient in fast foods.
Bon apatite.
And after Reagan came into office,he had the solar panels taken off the roof of the Whitehouse, that Carter had had installed,no doubt at the behest of big oil.
Reagan said and did some pretty stupid things but this stupid act gave Americans the the idea that there are no problems re a warming climate.
With leaders like that you don't need enemies!
Above all, don't worry, be happy!
The best way to get off our oil addiction is to kick the auto addiction by
promoting Green public transit with rail, lightrail, buses, vans, bikeways and
walkable mixed used communities. In the US, which still uses almost 25%
of the world's oil, Transportation, primarily cars and trucks, accounts for
70% of oil usage, 38% of greenhouse emissions and over 50% of the US trade
deficit. The vast highways, parking lots, interchanges take up huge amounts of green space and are primarily made of aspalt, another product of oil.
In the auto addicted USA 20% of the population who cannot drive unless
they live in a very few places like New York City or Portland, Oregon, are basically immobile, stuck. For the rest of the auto-addicted population they have to pay an everage of $8,800 per year for each auto, and the average family has more than 2 of those!
What is the payoff for this auto addiction?
Well, it is certainly convenient to just walk a few steps to your driveway at
any time and drive a car wherever you want.
BUT the price for this convenience is enormous - on top of the $8,800 per year for each car, there are over 30,000 auto deaths per year versus a handful for trains, hundreds of thousands of auto injuries, record levels of obesity, and billions of dollars spent supporting the vast auto infrastrucure of roads themselves, ambulances, traffic cops, traffic courts etc etc etc.
On top of that acres and acres of asphalt which cannot grow crops, woods,
or even provide tax revenues!
The US still has 233,000 miles of rails waiting to be called to action before
new construction of high speed rail, as well as commuter rails already actively used but wasted on off peak hours, weekends and without efficient local/express services or connections.
Instead of simpy running the public transit the US already has over 150 public
transit systems have been cut since 2008.
Meanwhile billions were wasted on "cash for clunkers" subsidies to prop up
the dying auto industry and now $7500 tax giveways for electric cars which
take as much energy as a house....
This was a well stated accounting. If you tried presenting this list of statistics to your average SUV driver, you'd have him/her nodding off less than halfway through the list or begging you not to burden them numbers. Most inhabitants of the US never experience social growth beyond an adolescent stage. They have no sense of social responsibility. The want what they what now, they have learned that they're entitled to it.
And the longer we wait, the more painful the transistion will be. But go through we must, assuming of course, humanity manages to be around that long. I give it until the year 2500.
I agree with some of this article but it misses an important point. There are already many who have developed serious health problems because of the lack of oil for heat. Every year there are deaths caused by this. Solar, wind, mass transit, and other alternatives are not available to many on low incomes.
Too often this debate places the burden on the economically disenfranchised. First let's eliminate NASCAR, recreational boating, unnecessary air travel, etc.
Also, always remember that the price of oil is determined by commodity dealers and hedge funds on Wall Street.
The USA just spent 36 BILLION on a new Offense Dept contract with Boeing. Think about the oil that is wasted on the military.