The energy crunch to come

Share your Thoughts
Posted on May 16, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality

Today from Margaret Swedish:

It seems to me to be very important to make as clear as possible to “my people” that we are facing within a generation the depletion of fossil fuels upon which our economy, indeed, the global economy, depends.  This is not a matter of more drilling, more mountain-topping, more pipelines, to save the day.  This is not a matter of ravaging the earth (“we’re sorry, but we simply must do it so that you can turn on your lights and drive your cars for the foreseeable future”), overcoming the sentiments of tree-huggers and others of us who embrace a holistic, or deep ecology.

Whether or not we destroy Appalachia and the Alaska wilderness, or drill for gas all across Dick Cheney’s state of Wyoming, and no matter how many wars our “leaders” intend to grab access to oil fields and pipelines (to see where US foreign policy will be focused, for good or ill, check out this link) we will still face the imminent depletion of fossil fuels – because there is only so much stuff in the earth and we are coming to the limits within the lifetime of our children.

So I am always looking for resources, and ways to talk about this, to make it real for people.  I found this article, Timescale for Depletion of Fossil Energy Resources, and thought it laid out the scenario beautifully and simply, with words and graphs.

It is not just a matter of depletion of oil reserves (something the earth spent hundreds of millions of years creating for us and which we will use up in no time – with no idea what the impact might be for our planet; but, for now, it is a humungous transfer of carbon from deep in the ground into our atmosphere), but of natural gas and coal as well.

This article projects that within 75 years, “the world will have used up all the world’s extractable coal, all the world’s extractable oil, all the world’s natural gas, and all the world’s extractable uranium-235.”

Got that?  That’s the whole enchilada, as they say, of non-renewable fossil fuels.  That’s why we are insane not to be shifting our national (and international) attention away from this hopeless quest for oil and gas to the development of renewable energy sources (solar, wind, etc.) and to the reorganization of society to deal with the coming energy crunch (mass transit, battery-fueled cars, relocating or reorganizing suburbs and exurbs dependent on cars and not building any more of them, local farming and farmers’ markets, reorganization of production back to local small businesses and away from mega-corporations relying on ships, air freight and trucks to move products to the store shelves, etc.).

Just imagine what it will mean to have waited to do these things until the crisis is already upon us.

It may be hard to be the generation that finally has to come to terms with this, but denying that it is so ain’t going to help us either.

Just think of the children.

Comments

Leave a Reply