Life After Oil
I just read the cover article from this month's Harper's which deals with the PeakOil Movement and what exactly is going to happen when we run out of black gold. At least part of the answer seems to be, "go back to yellow gold." By this I mean that in a post-economic collapse kind of world, good ol' greenbacks won't be worth the paper they're printed on and so we'll have to switch back to intrinsically valuable money and spend all our time digging around in the dirt trying to find shiny things.As far as the lack of oil itself goes, we won't be able to make plastics or most synthetic fibers, which means we'll be naked. We won't be able to fly planes, power ships, cars, trucks, etc. and even if we could, we couldn't pave roads, at least not with asphalt, so there goes travel, and more importantly, trade. We won't be able to heat or cool our buildings, so bye bye living in Minnesota or Nevada. Basically, it's going to be pretty shitty if it pans out the way the folks at PeakOil think it will. I'd recommend checking the article out, it's food for thought if (hoffentlich) a bit alarmist.
posted by Der Staubsauger @ 16:20
3 Comments:
I was wondering when someone was going to buck up and write another blog. And who better to do it than Staubie. Funny you wrote about that because I read it last night before going to bed, and I had sweet dreams of small communes and Hobbesian every-man-for-himself clashes. Darwin would be excited to see natural selection return to the realm of humanity. I've been saying it for a while now, that some kind of shit is going to hit the fan in the coming decades. It's just a question of what kind, and how smelly its really going to be.
I think the study of apocolypse/upheaval believers throughout history is some pretty interesting shit, because its been going on since Moses and Mohammed, but has never really happened. Are they finally right this time?
I think they're finally right this time in the same way that they were right when Ancient Egypt slipped into the annals of history, when Rome fell, when the Aztecs and the Incas were wipped out, etc. At this point in history, the western "developed" industrial world is running the show. The western world is, in turn, being run by oil. No more oil, no more oil-based civilization, and no more western world as we know it. Humanity will survive, but I don't think that much of our current way of life will. Our time is coming to a close, probably within our lifetimes. It seems that civilizations are becoming more efficient, in that they can peak and be gone in a matter of hundreds of years now when it used to take thousands. Go us.
Another crazy thing about thinking of how civilization will continue in such a situation as the Peak Oilers predict is that 99% of the population is completely inept as far as practical skills are concerned: producing food (and I don't mean microwaving), building shelter, plant knowledge, etc. If you've ever read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" you would know that the cultures that are now considered savages or primitive at best will then be considered the experts. Again...go us.
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