Peak Oil is not About Running Out of Oil!!!!

I'm getting tired of hearing it. Some economist or financial analyst or some talking head in the employ of one of the oil majors gets in front of a camera and declares something to the effect that, "The peak oil theory is dead wrong. We are not running out of oil!" The only people who ever connect peak oil and running out of oil are those who do not understand the peak oil theory, those who have a vested interest in creating confusion about peak oil because there's far too much profit to be made in people not knowing, and those attempting to discredit the peak oil theory. No one in the peak oil movement, unless they too are new to the movement and do not yet understand, ever says, or ever would say, that peak oil means the end of oil, means we are running out of oil. Most in the peak oil camp, in fact, believe we will never consume all of the oil there is, for a wide variety of reasons. In general only about thirty percent of the oil in a reserve is recoverable so there is always going to be oil left over in a field after the last well has been shut down.

Peak oil is about a global society and global economy that have become hopelessly dependent on an ever-increasing supply of cheap, high-grade oil, increasingly dependent also on natural gas and coal, the other main fossil fuels. It is about the impact on that global society and global economy when the supply of oil can no longer be increased, when the demand for oil exceeds what the world's oil fields can produce, when the primary sources of oil remaining contain only low-grade, high sulfur crudes, when we have to increasingly rely on expensive, low-output sources like tar sands and deep water wells, when the majority of the oil reserves left are in areas of high political volatility or under the control of governments increasingly intent on preserving their resources for their own future use, when there is no longer a supply buffer available to absorb market disruptions, when we have to increasingly rely on synthetic crudes produced from coal, natural gas, bio-mass, tar sands and oil shales, when all sources can no longer produce enough energy to support a growth economy and the perpetual-growth global economy begins to go into irreversible contraction.

Peak oil is not about the oil! It is about what we do with it. It is not about motor fuel. There are over 300,000 other products in everyday use around the globe made from oil or oil derivatives. Peak oil is about the gradual disappearance of one after another of those 300,000 products because their producers can no longer afford or obtain the raw materials. Most importantly, peak oil is about the ubiquitous agrochemicals that our modern agriculture has become critically dependent on, about our ability to feed ourselves. We have so denuded our commercial agricultural soils of their natural fertility that, without petrochemical inputs, many experts suggest those soils will, at least temporarily, only be able to produce one tenth to one fifth the crop yields that are being produced through the artificial fertility achieved with petrochemical inputs.

Quite literally, the lives of billions of people will be affected by peak oil and the ensuing decline in oil and the other fossil fuels. We can't produce enough food now to feed our 6.6 billion population. Every day 20-40,000 people around the world are dying of starvation and other nutrition-related diseases and illness. If the agrochemicals modern agriculture needs have to compete for raw materials with other, high-profit uses of oil, under the normal functioning of the market the high-profit uses will get the oil because they can afford to absorb higher costs than pesticides and fertilizers. If we leave it to the markets to transition us through peak oil into the long slope of oil decline we can expect those ever-dwindling reserves of oil to follow the money and go where the profits are.

With these stakes I would strongly suggest that we cannot tolerate any person, corporation, organization or government intentionally creating confusion about the state of the world's oil supply, about when we will hit peak (if, indeed, we have not already hit it which we very much appear we might have), about how the use of the remaining oil reserves will be prioritized for social need rather than corporate profits. Sooner, rather than later, those nations sitting on significant remaining oil reserves are going to decide that those reserves are far more important as a future resource for their own nation and people than they are as a means of enriching a few of the world's most profitable corporations. Sooner or later energy sovereignty is going to trump corporate globalization. Sooner or later producers are going to be unwilling to part with their precious remaining oil reserves at any price. When we reach that point, those nations which are net oil importers are going to be the first and hardest hit on the downslope. The only question then remaining is whether the people of those importing nations are going to insist or even accept their nation fighting resource wars around the planet in order to maintain their lifestyle.