[Vision2020] Fwd: Earth Policy News - The World After Oil Peaks

[Tom Trail]

>Visionaries:  A timely article.


Tom Trail

>May 23, 2006
>
>THE WORLD AFTER OIL PEAKS
>
>http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch02_ss6_7.htm
>
>
>Lester R. Brown
>
>
>Peak oil is described as the point where oil production stops rising and
>begins its inevitable long-term decline. In the face of fast-growing
>demand, this means rising oil prices. But even if oil production growth
>simply slows or plateaus, the resulting tightening in supplies will still
>drive the price of oil upward, albeit less rapidly.
>
>Few countries are planning a reduction in their use of oil. Even though
>peak oil may be imminent, most countries are counting on much higher oil
>consumption in the decades ahead, building automobile assembly plants,
>roads, highways, parking lots, and suburban housing developments as though
>cheap oil will last forever. New airliners are being delivered with the
>expectation that air travel and freight will expand indefinitely. Yet in a
>world of declining oil production, no country can use more oil except at
>the expense of others.
>
>Some segments of the global economy will be affected more than others
>simply because some are more oil-intensive. Among these are the
>automobile, food, and airline industries. Cities and suburbs will also
>evolve as oil supplies tighten.
>
>Stresses within the U.S. auto industry were already evident before oil
>prices started climbing in mid-2004. Now General Motors and Ford, both
>trapped with their heavy reliance on sales of gas-hogging sport utility
>vehicles, have seen Standard and Poor’s lower their credit ratings,
>reducing their corporate bonds to junk bond status. Although it is the
>troubled automobile manufacturers that appear in the headlines as oil
>prices rise, their affiliated industries will also be affected, including
>auto parts and tire manufacturers.
>
>The food sector will be affected in two ways. Food will become more costly
>as higher oil prices drive up production costs. As oil costs rise, diets
>will be altered as people move down the food chain and as they consume
>more local, seasonally produced food. Diets will thus become more closely
>attuned to local products and more seasonal in nature.
>
>At the same time, rising oil prices will also be drawing agricultural
>resources into the production of fuel crops, either ethanol or biodiesel.
>Higher oil prices are thus setting up competition between affluent
>motorists and low-income food consumers for food resources, presenting the
>world with a complex new ethical issue.
>
>Airlines, both passenger travel and freight, will continue to suffer as
>jet fuel prices climb, simply because fuel is their biggest operating
>expense. Although industry projections show air passenger travel growing
>by some 5 percent a year for the next decade, this seems highly unlikely.
>Cheap airfares may soon become history.
>
>Air freight may be hit even harder, perhaps leading to an absolute
>decline. One of the early casualties of rising oil prices could be the use
>of jumbo jets to transport fresh produce from the southern hemisphere to
>industrial countries during the northern winter. The price of fresh
>produce out of season may simply become prohibitive.
>
>During the century of cheap oil, an enormous automobile infrastructure was
>built in industrial countries that requires large amounts of energy to
>maintain. The United States, for example, has 2.6 million miles of paved
>roads, covered mostly with asphalt, and 1.4 million miles of unpaved roads
>to maintain even if world oil production is falling.
>
>Modern cities are also a product of the oil age. From the first cities,
>which took shape in Mesopotamia some 6,000 years ago, until 1900,
>urbanization was a slow, barely perceptible process. When the last century
>began, there were only a few cities with a million people. Today there are
>more than 400 such cities, 20 of them with 10 million or more residents.
>
>The metabolism of cities depends on concentrating vast amounts of food and
>materials and then disposing of garbage and human waste. With the limited
>range and capacity of horse-drawn wagons, it was difficult to create large
>cities. Trucks running on cheap oil changed all that.
>
>As cities grow ever larger and as nearby landfills reach capacity, garbage
>must be hauled longer distances to disposal sites. With oil prices rising
>and available landfills receding ever further from the city, the cost of
>garbage disposal also rises. At some point, many throwaway products may be
>priced out of existence.
>
>Cities will be hard hit by the coming decline in oil production, but
>suburbs will be hit even harder. People living in poorly designed suburbs
>not only depend on importing everything, they are also often isolated
>geographically from their jobs and shops. They must drive for virtually
>everything they need, even to get a loaf of bread or a quart of milk.
>
>Suburbs have created a commuter culture, with the daily roundtrip commute
>taking, on average, close to an hour a day in the United States. While
>Europe’s cities were largely mature before the onslaught of the
>automobile, those in the United States, a much younger country, were
>shaped by the car. While city limits are usually rather clearly defined in
>Europe, and while Europeans only reluctantly convert productive farmland
>into housing developments, Americans have few qualms about this because
>cropland was long seen as a surplus commodity.
>
>This unsightly, aesthetically incongruous sprawl of suburbs and strip
>malls is not limited to the United States. It is found in Latin America,
>in Southeast Asia, and increasingly in China. Flying from Shanghai to
>Beijing provides a good view of the sprawl of buildings, including homes
>and factories, that is following the new roads and highways. This is in
>sharp contrast to the tightly built villages that shaped residential land
>use for millennia in China.
>
>Shopping malls and huge discount stores, symbolized in the public mind by
>Wal-Mart, were all subsidized by artificially cheap oil. Isolated by high
>oil prices, suburbs may prove to be ecologically and economically
>unsustainable.
>
>In the coming energy transition, there will be winners and losers.
>Countries that fail to plan ahead, that lag in investing in more
>oil-efficient technologies and new energy sources, may experience a
>decline in living standards. The inability of national governments to
>manage the energy transition could lead to a failure of confidence in
>leaders and to failed states.
>
>National political leaders seem reluctant to face the coming downturn in
>oil and to plan for it even though it will almost certainly become one of
>the great fault lines in the history of civilization. Trends now taken for
>granted, such as urbanization and globalization, could be reversed almost
>overnight as oil becomes scarce and costly.
>
>Developing countries will be hit doubly hard as still-expanding
>populations combine with a shrinking oil supply to steadily reduce oil use
>per person. Such a decline could quickly translate into a fall in living
>standards. If the United States, the world’s largest oil consumer and
>importer, can sharply reduce its use of oil, it can buy the world time for
>a smoother transition to the post-petroleum era.
>
>#     #     #
>
>Adapted from Chapter 2, “Beyond the Oil Peak,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B
>2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New
>York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), available for free downloading or for
>purchase on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm
>
>
>Additional data and information sources at www.earthpolicy.org or contact
>jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org
>For reprint permissions contact rjkauffman (at) earthpolicy.org
>
>
>---
>---
>You are currently subscribed to public as: ttrail at moscow.com
>To unsubscribe send a blank email to 
>leave-public-1365614D at lists.earth-policy.org


-- 
Dr. Tom Trail
International Trails
1375 Mt. View Rd.
Moscow, Id. 83843
Tel:  (208) 882-6077
Fax:  (208) 882-0896
e mail ttrail at moscow.com