Lower gas prices bad news for the Earth

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Posted on September 20, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

With all the cheer-leading going on regarding plunging oil prices, and therefore the price at the pump, it is difficult to ring the alarm bell and get any serious attention.  Who wants to be told this is not a good thing?  It’s such good economic news, freeing up more of our money to buy things, things made with fossil fuels, things shipped with oil and diesel-based transport.  The engine of the world’s economy keeps running, and incumbents increase their chances of reelection.

But I did find one honest voice, buried on the bottom of page 3 of the NY Times Business Section on Sunday. (I wonder what the readership is for the Sunday Business Section?)  Journalist Daniel Akst lays out most of the grimmer aspects of cheap gas, not least of which is that it allows the oil party to go on, more oil being burned, more of it burning off into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, more encouragement for wholly unsustainable suburban and exurban, car-dependent development.

This is bad news for our global warming/climate change problem.  As we have noted here many times, we are careening rapidly towards runaway global warming, or the rapid heating of our atmosphere leading towards ecological collapse.  Recent studies of Arctic warming conducted by NASA adds evidence to support this fear.

It is important to educate ourselves on the true costs of oil.  The price at the pump hardly represents it, once you add in the environmental costs of getting it and then the harm it does when we use it for energy, the costs to come to our global societies and Earthlife as a result of imminent runaway warming.  We should probably be paying triple the prices right now — that might get us to actually reduce our consumption, which is the necessary thing to do if we are to save ourselves.

In case you don’t have time to read the short linked article, here’s his major point:

“Anything that reinforces the role of fossil fuels — particularly oil — as the industrial world’s primary energy source is bad, not good.  Anything that prolongs the life of the internal combustion engine is a negative, not a positive.  Anything that makes it cheaper to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is cause for mourrning rather than celebration.  What we need is not lower oil prices but higher ones — significantly higher, enough to deter consumption and make us look seriously at alternatives.”

But maybe the worst thing about all of this, not mentioned in this article, is how the lower prices reinforce our state of denial.  We heard recently of the ‘discovery’ of a vast oil reserve lying deep under the Gulf of Mexico.  You see?  The supply really is endless.  Except that there is probably a lot less to this discovery than meets the eye, especially when the story is being related to us by Chevron and its corporate friends in the federal government.  Read more here.  The ‘discovery’ is not so much the news as that recent high gas prices have provided the necessary investment funds to develop this very expensive new deep-water technology to get the increasingly hard-to-get remaining oil.

Actually, this story is more about how we are reaching, or have passed, peak oil, more representative of diminishing supply rather than endless abundance.  It is what many of the  ‘peak oil’ crowd have predicted — that we would come to the point of peaking not at a time of scarcity, but rather when we seem to be awash in oil and at the peak of our complacency.  For a terrific discussion about the discovery among bloggers, visit The Oil Drum here.

One of the biggest problems of cheaper prices is that it will encourage us not to conserve but to use up remaining fossil fuels even more quickly, hastening the day of reckoning.  Given the fact that we do not have available to us the means to replace oil any time soon in a way that allows us to merely go on as we are, and probably never will, hastening the day of reckoning only shortens the time we have to prepare.

We should not be trying to fool ourselves.  We should be trying to sober up and face the unsustainability of a whole way of life that began with the industrial revolution.  Another revolution is required to a wholly new way of life.

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