The price of oil - “…we are headed toward really bad days”
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Posted on November 8, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Well, that’s the word from the chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, reflecting on the price of crude oil, which keeps floating just shy of the century mark for the past few days. Everyone agrees that $100 per barrel is a psychological threshold of great significance to the world economy.
I am sorry to say this, but we are headed toward really bad days. Lots of targets have been set but very little has been done. There is a lot of talk but no action.
Well, we’ve been saying this for some time. We have been talking about this inevitable energy crunch since the 1970s and, indeed, very little has been done. Now we have the added factor of the economic growth in China and India and elsewhere, and, according to the IEA, demands for oil will rise by 50 percent — from 85 million barrels a day to 115 barrels by 2030. You can read that here in this article, Oil Prices: It Gets Worse, from this week’s issue of Time Magazine. This is the IEA’s concerns in a nutshell.
But the IEA is concerned not only with the price of oil and the impact it will have on the global economy. The agency is also very worried about what this steep rise in the use of fossil fuels will mean for the planet, for climate change, as more and more CO2 is spewed into our already-warming atmosphere. From their Nov. 7 press release:
Worldwide, fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal – continue to dominate the fuel mix. Among them, coal is set to grow most rapidly, driven largely by power-sector demand in China and India. These trends lead to continued growth in global energy-related emissions of carbon-dioxide (CO2), from 27 Gt in 2005 to 42 Gt in 2030 – a rise of 57%. China is expected to overtake the United States to become the world’s biggest emitter in 2007, while India becomes the third-biggest emitter by around 2015. China’s per-capita emissions almost reach those of OECD Europe by 2030.
This isn’t good, folks.
These two factors combined — the oil supply crunch that is coming very soon and the cooking of the planet — are facing us with imminent crises across the world. The difficult future that many thought was still a generation away is arriving now and promises an even more difficult future for the generation right behind us.
Unless — unless —
Now, which presidential candidates do you hear addressing these twin crises of our times — along with ecological overshoot, the reality that we are already living beyond the means of the Earth to sustain us and the living systems that make us possible? Which ones? Which ones are showing courageous leadership, helping to tip the weight of the debates and political discourse towards preparing our society for the stark changes these trends require of us, here in this very rich, very spoiled nation?
There is hardly a thing I can think of in our daily lives that will not be impacted by the ecological crises descending upon us. Only our awakening to the crisis and our determination to get to work altering this culture of consumption and endless economic growth (it isn’t endless, actually, and the wall into which it will crash is rising larger and larger on our horizons) provides the firm foundation for an authentic ecological hope, the focus of this project.
We should have been oil-independent by now. The changes required will take decades to bring about, and we haven’t even started yet.
We could start by extracting ourselves from military hostilies in the Persian Gulf region, ending the Iraq war, rebuilding trust within the international community, starting a nationwide campaign at all levels — from consumers to manufacturers to agriculture policy to transportation to development and more — to conserve energy, to reduce oil consumption, to become profoundly energy efficient, to take all tax breaks away from oil companies, to institute a steep carbon tax, etc., etc., and most of all, to transform our economy away from this unsustainable growth mentality to an economy that mimics the living systems of the planet and puts us back into balance with them.
You see, just this starting list shows how enormous and complex this task will be.
And there is not one single candidate for national office that is really taking any leadership on this at all. Of course, no one wants to tell a voter that they can’t simply go on as they please any more. No one wants to tell that guy in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, that we mentioned the other day, who complained about the rising cost of the 30-mile trip to visit his kids, that the problem is not with the price of gas but where and how he is living, with the car-dependent development in which he has chosen to retire.
Ecological hope rests in ecological honesty, truth, bold leadership, and a willingness to change how we live, drastically, and right now.
[The word from the IEA comes in conjunction with the release of their World Energy OutLook 2007 Report. Here’s the link.]
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One Response to “The price of oil - “…we are headed toward really bad days””
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Dear Margaret Swedish,
Yes we heading for very bad days. Specially the third world is after the comforts like having a bike or car or van. it has become a prestige for people to have some sort of vehicle, ther is a lot of boom in this market. Automtically the prises of oil goes up as the consumption increases. Nor there is a scientific understanding of the political personalities for taking alternate steps for public transport. What I understand that from the political figures who running the affairs lack commitment, they are short sighted to gain public image by different methods which unlawfull. Of course we have live that. Let them roost their own eggs, and spoil the earth.