Boing Boing On Peak Oil  

James Kunstler's "Long Emergency" article made it on to Boing Boing (unnoticed by me) a few days ago.

It provoked a lot more comment than normal on BB, with some people focussing on Viridian solutions, some talking about the nuclear option and some nut saying we need to consider abiotic oil (there's one in every crowd).

I've been reading a lot about Peak Oil, which refers to the year at which oil production hits the peak of a bell curve, and after which oil production goes down, tapering to zero.

There's some argument about the year of the peak, but pretty much everyone agrees -- including the US government -- that the peak is fewer than a couple of decades away. A lot of experts says we've already hit the peak. James Howard Kunstler's piece in Rolling Stone, called "The Long Emergency," argues that the US hit its peak decades ago.

I'm not ruling out a global supercatastrophe. A runaway greenhouse effect might turn Earth into another Venus and cook us all. Acidification of the oceans might kill the plankton, and with them everything that needs a lot of oxygen. An instant ice age could happen several ways, and this scenario needs more attention because some humans would survive. But what I'm focusing on here is the scenario that includes only events we're reasonably sure about: the end of cheap energy, the decline of industrial agriculture, currency collapse, economic "depression," wars, famines, disease epidemics, infrastructure failures, and extreme unpredictable weather.

If that's all we get, the crash will be slower and more complex than the kind of people who predict crashes like to predict. It won't be like falling off a cliff, more like rolling down a rocky hill. There won't be any clear before, during, or after. Most people living during the decline and fall of Rome didn't even know it. We're told to draw a line at the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, but to Romans at the time it was just one event -- the Visigoths came, they milled around, they left, and life went on. After the 1929 stock market crash, respectable voices said it was a temporary adjustment, that the economy was still strong. Only years later, when we knew they were wrong, could we draw a line at 1929.