Are you ready for prices (of everything) to rise?

If you were looking for a quick, 4-paragraph introduction on the subject of Peak Oil, Bloomberg News has you covered:

Exxon Mobil Corp., BP Plc and Total SA are investing in assets that previously weren’t worth their time or money after oil-rich nations reduced access to reserves and exploration drilling faltered. Efforts to find new sources of crude and natural gas are failing more often, with San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp.’s exploration failure rate jumping to 35 percent last year from 10 percent in 2008. Countries such as Venezuela are making it more expensive for companies to develop their resources, if they’re allowed in at all. And previously developed fields are drying up, reducing oil companies’ future supplies, or reserves. “Their No. 1 problem is reserves replacement,” said Nansen Saleri, chief executive officer at Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston and former reservoir-management chief at Saudi Arabia’s state oil company. “That’s the elephant in the room, so that’s what they have to address.” To compensate, major producers are investing in projects they once eschewed, including geologically complex oil and gas fields, called “unconventional” by the industry to distinguish them from the easy-to-get oil and gas of earlier years.
And that is Peak Oil in a nutshell. It is real, it is here. All the cheap, easily accessible oil has been used up; the low-hanging fruit is gone. The remainder of the planet's oil, of which we still have plenty, is going to cost a great deal more to extract and refine, leading to higher prices at the pump, at the grocery store, or anywhere else that requires oil to function.

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Building lifeboats

I know that my past few posts have been bleak (see here and here), but now I must temper that sense of despair with some hope. Things are bad, and will probably get worse, but that's not to say that they will not get better. But here's the trick: we all have to stop relying upon someone else for solutions. Forgive me if I sound like a politician for just a moment: we must "be the change" we want to see in the world. I cannot tell you how to solve the peak oil problem, or the unfolding economic collapse, or climate change, or the corruption which has become endemic in our political system-- you have to figure it out for yourself. I'm not selling a prepackaged kit which contains all of the answers, and I would probably distrust anyone who was. But that's precisely why I still have hope. If we are going to make it through the challenges facing us, we must learn to pull together again as a community and actually attempt to create our own solutions. There can be no more delegation to those in Washington. We cannot afford to wait for decades as they attempt to muster the political will to combat the flood of money which has so damaged our electoral and political processes. We simply don't have time to fix the system that's been damaged beyond repair.

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“Collapse” goes mainstream

Last week I wrote about a new film, Collapse, and the arrival of Peak Oil as one of the primary factors driving that collapse. Two years ago, daring to speculate about the end of America, or of capitalism itself would have been greeted with a hearty guffaw, or at least some very skeptical glances. Today, these concerns are no longer solely the province of the "doomers"-- there is a blossoming awareness of the gravity of the challenges facing us. Consider these warnings from mainstream, highly credible sources:

  • Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argues that our debt and unprecedented deficits have become a national security issue, not merely a matter of economics. Reuters reported:
    Having to rely on foreign creditors hit "our ability to protect our security, to manage difficult problems and to show the leadership that we deserve," she said. "The moment of reckoning cannot be put off forever," she said. "I really honestly wish I could turn the clock back."

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“The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth”

"The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth" That's the judgment on what awaits us from Michael Ruppert, in a new documentary entitled "Collapse". The age of fossil fuels has been a blip in the scale of human history. We've only been using them a few centuries, and yet we are unable to remember a time when fossil fuels were not abundant and cheap. That age is now over. Recent experience has taught us that the end of this age was heralded by massive price spikes and has already caused the greatest economic dislocation since the Great Depression, or possibly even including it. Given that the growth of human population has so neatly coincided with the growth in the production of fossil fuels, human population now faces a analogous decline on the far side of the bell curve.

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The transition to post oil

Post Carbon Institute Fellow Rob Hopkins gives us the hard facts that we are running out of oil and it is taking immensely more energy to extract the oil that remains. Can technology solve the impending crisis? How shall the transition proceed? This talk parallels many of the observations of Hopkins' earlier paper, entitled "Searching for a Miracle," both of which should serve as a wake up call for massive conservation efforts. We need to be "loving and leaving all that oil has done for us," and getting ready for the transition:

The fundamental disturbing conclusion of the report is that there is little likelihood that either conventional fossil fuels or alternative energy sources can reliably be counted on to provide the amount and quality of energy that will be needed to sustain economic growth—or even current levels of economic activity—during the remainder of the current century. This preliminary conclusion in turn suggests that a sensible transition energy plan will have to emphasize energy conservation above all. It also raises questions about the sustainability of growth per se, both in terms of human population numbers and economic activity.

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