Oil And Environment: A Contradiction:
Among the factors in systemic collapse that should be placed far down on the list are many that might be described as environmental: pollution, global warming, and so on. The fact is that the issue of peak oil and that of the environment are mutually exclusive problems. As oil and other fossil fuels disappear, the environmental problems will also go away, even if very slowly.
By trying to raise the alarm about both issues at once, we are placing ourselves in a self-contradictory position, and our credibility is rapidly undermined. We cannot, on the one hand, wish that oil would go away so that the air will have a crystalline purity, and on the other hand complain because we have spent hours poring over the charts of global oil production and found that the cost of driving to the cottage is becoming prohibitive.
As oil is depleted, there will be fewer automobiles and factories, so the air and water will be less polluted. As the air becomes cleaner, the man-made aspects of global warming will be reduced. As fossil fuels disappear, in fact, all that goes with it will disappear or be reduced. Above all, there will be no chance for 7 billion people to be living on the Earth. As the human population goes down, so a great many other problems of this planet will recede, from the disappearance of fresh water to the extinction of species.
That is not to say that the reversal of the destruction will be a sudden process. On the contrary, even if our use of fossil fuels ended tomorrow, it would take decades for the planet to cleanse itself.
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The greatest danger of fossil-fuel depletion, on the other hand, is that human life itself will come to an end. This is not a topic to stir the patriotism of the sheltered souls of Middle America. It is a nightmare. The simplest arithmetic shows that 7 billion humans cannot be fed with the products of pre-industrial agriculture. We can try to hide from that reality by planting a few rows of tomatoes and lettuce up at the cottage on a summer weekend, but deep in our hearts we know that human life requires far more than tomatoes and lettuce.
Even more frightening is the thought that those doomed human beings will not float up into the sky and enter some other dimension. Their deaths will not be anesthetized. Death by famine is slow and painful. It is not just hunger, and it is not just fasting. After a few weeks without food, the entire body starts to fall apart. Not a very nice topic for a high-school essay. It is far better that we allow our teenagers to continue their air-conditioned lives, to dwell in what Ibsen called a doll’s house.
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(Don’t just read these excerpts; please go read it all, if only to wallow in more of the moral superiority as seen in the last graf I quoted.)
Before I explain why I think the viewpoint expressed above is ridiculously wrong, let me ask you, dear reader, to ponder it for just a few moments. Hint: What assumptions is the author making that one could reasonably say are either wrong or on very shaky ground?
While you’re thinking and mentally jotting down some notes, I’ll go make a cup of tea.
OK, I’m back, steaming mug in hand. Did you say that they key points of contention (in no particular order) are:
- Timing. The author is assuming that peak oil will bite us hard before climate chaos does.
- The impact of climate chaos, as a function of the amount of CO2 we dump into the air. The assumption is that not only is climate chaos quickly reversible, but that it can be reversed at all.
Right now, I think the most likely scenario is that climate chaos will start to bite soon enough and visibly enough, and we’ll finally begin to restrain our fossil fuel consumption, so that far from “peak oil saving us from climate chaos”, as many of my fellow enviros like to claim will happen, it will be just the opposite–we’ll reduce our carbon emissions just slightly quicker than peaking production alone would have forced us. (It could well be true, as I’ve argued here before, albeit not recently, that policy makers will hear the peak oil message very clearly behind the scenes and it will give them the needed urgency to restrain our consumption while selling these changes to the public as a move to mitigate climate chaos impacts.)
As for the second point, I think the author of the above opinion is wildly off base in how long it will take “for the planet to cleanse itself” (and no, I’m not entirely sure what that means). Instead of “decades” it would be centuries, minimally, before the atmospheric level of CO2 dropped enough to curtail further warming; remember all that warming that’s “in the pipeline” we’re always talking about because the planet is in a state of radiative disequilibrium, in part because of feedbacks? And that’s assuming we’re lucky and we haven’t already jolted the Earth’s environment so much with our emissions that we’ve awakened the monster under our bed, the 1.6 trillion tons of carbon locked up in permafrost in and near the Arctic, plus the vast worldwide methane hydrate deposits. With all we’ve learned lately (and continue to learn) about how twitchy the environment is, we simply don’t know if we’ve disturbed enough of the small stones on the mountainside to set a gigantic boulder rolling downhill, a boulder we have almost no chance of stopping, slowing, or even deflecting once we see it beginning to move.
In no way should this be taken as an indication that I think peak oil “isn’t a problem”. I believe now, as I have since I started writing here nearly six years ago, that peak oil is a real, imminent, and gigantic problem.
In short, this ongoing war of words between the peak oil and climate chaos camps is ridiculous and counterproductive. They’re both enormous threats, and either one would be a hideous problem by itself, only made worse with the addition of the other problem to the toxic mix.