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By: Alex Stanczyk
Whenever I think about oil, and the fact that we are likely already past peak oil production, I am reminded of what oil has done for us as human beings.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Peak Oil concept, it is not so much a belief that we are running out of oil so much as a historically proven description of the behavior of producing oil fields. For a great video primer on the subject, see Chris Martenson's fine work in Crash Course Video 17a.
Oil is, obviously, stored energy. But what I think many fail to consider, is that it is cheap energy, and it accomplishes a great deal of work that otherwise may have had to been performed by human energy.
Cheap energy has affected everything about our lives as human beings ever since the combustion engine.
I am reminded of how America went from an agricultural society with most of its citizens living and working on farms, to today the work that would take perhaps a few hundred men or more can be accomplished by two guys, and an oil powered tractor.
By ancient standards, every single person in the western world lives a lifestyle of a King. From the wide variety of foods we so conveniently have available to us in our grocery stores, to simple conveniences we have for generations taken for granted. Is this solely because humans are so much more advanced technologically, or does it perhaps have something to do with how cheap energy has been for the last 50 years?
We run lights all day and all night, each light bulb if powered by humans would require a man riding an exercise bike 24 hours a day in your basement. The food in your refrigerator for example is more energy intensive than you may realize. It has been estimated that 1 lb of beef can take up to 8 lbs of grain to produce, and each pound of grain that goes into raising that livestock again goes back to those oil powered tractors. It also took oil powered trucks to bring that beef from the farm to your grocery store shelf, and even more oil to fuel your car or truck taking it from the store to your home. Even something so simple as water takes power to bring to your faucet, and more power if its filtered first either by your favorite bottled water company, the local muni water system, or your private filtration system.
In terms of gold, it also comes back to that labor/energy component. You see, in our view, gold is simply a method of storing energy, as it has been for thousands of years.
