The Gift of $200-a-Barrel Oil

Necessity is the mother of conservation.

Let's face it, we, as a society, will not surrender our excesses until we are forced to do so--primarily because we don't see our excesses as excesses. One car per driver, cell phones in every purse, MP3 players in every pocket, strawberries in January, bananas in the northern hemisphere...these all, at various times, would have been seen as extravagant luxuries. In most places in the world, they still are. However, now, in our society, they're commonplace to the point where to go without them seems absurd. These are the everyday items of life.

Yet, the world is changed. Peak oil is approaching, if not past. Cheap energy is over. The consequences of our oil consumption is choking off the ecosystems from which we were born and which we need to survive. Many of us have realized this. Many of us remain unconvinced--though this summer's iceless north pole will pull more heads out of the sand.

Conservation is no longer optional--conservation of land, oil, soil, water, energy, food, and money. Yet, we do not because we do not have to. The planet's tipping point will not be advertised on TV or be available in 10 minute clips on YouTube. We won't know. We can't watch, and therefore the threat of humanity's destruction--as funny as it sounds--is not enough to demand action.

The good news is that there is one potential catalyst which will universally prompt immediate conservation across this culture: money. We will all drive less if we can't afford the fuel. We will all forgo our cell phones if the monthly bill interferes with feeding the kids. We will stop buying power-hungry devices to entertain ourselves if our electric bill is already unmanageable. We will reform our lives as necessary to fit new economic constraints--because we will have no choice.

It's already begun. As the price of a barrel of oil climbs, so too does the level of conservation. Oil at $100 per barrel forced us out of SUVs. Oil at $120 per barrel kept us home on the weekends. Oil at $140 per barrel forced us to plant vegetable gardens, ride a bicycle to work, and research solar hot water heaters.

I have hope for the future of humanity because I have faith in our ability to adapt to the pressures of the world. The pressure, however, must stay on. I welcome $200-a-barrel oil and every incremental increase in between. It will be a difficult transformation. Our society was built on the idea of everlasting fuel and the permanence of car culture. As we now know, this was a devastating miscalculation.

We will need to evolve toward sustainability. Cities will grow as people migrate toward public transportation. Suburban homes will rot in place as they sit on the real estate housing market--too expensively far from work. Gardens will replace yards. Solar-raisings will replace barn-raisings. Communities will rediscover themselves to help members through a difficult and shared transformation.

A sustainable society isn't only possible, it is inevitable. Whether through total collapse of the world's economic market and infrastructure, or through careful steering of society before the end, the next generations will inherit a planet where gluttonous consumption is no longer an option. The oil is gone. And with it, our oil culture.

J.S. McDougall is the lead blogger at Chelsea Green.

Follow J.S. McDougall on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chelseagreen

Comments

[ShawnMichel]

"... we, as a society, will not surrender our excesses until we are forced to do so ..."

Those who refuse, who refuse still, are dead souls, Mr. McDougall. If that means 99% of society (which it does), then that's what it means. But that doesn't make the fact moral, doesn't make it right. It just makes all of you who haven't woken up mere herd animals, wasteful, mindless, greedy, destructive.

Those of us who are awake and aware, and who don't need a herd, have long since downsized and moved on. We didn't downsize because the herd was, or wasn't, doing so, but because downsizing and living sustainably was, and is, and will forevermore be, moral. We did it because we have something so few others seem to have: a conscience. And you know what? Here's the real kicker. We're profiting from our wisdom, and we are not suffering because of Peak Oil. We're celebrating it, in fact. Because we've learned to work within it, having seen it for years and years ahead of the slovenly herd, who we tried to tell and tell and tell, but who called us "enviro-fascists" and "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" and "sky-is-fa­lling-whac­kos."

And now we're watching, amused, as the horse hockey hits the fan. And *that* is the right thing to do as well.

[londubh]

Sadly, I've noticed it to that people won't make lifestyle changes until they are forced to. That's why I favor a 1.00/gallo­n gasoline tax. Why should the oil companies get all the revenue. We need those dollars to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

HuffPost's Pick

If we had put a tax on gasoline 10 years ago and invested the money in mass transit we would be ready to deal with this crisis now.
Of course the answer at the time was 'a gas tax will hurt the poor'.
Now the poor are paying twice as much as they would have with the gas tax.
And they don't have any mass transit.

[tkondaks]

londubh writes: "Why should the oil companies get all the revenue."
Taxes on a gallon of gasoline are much more than any profit the oil companies get.

[research]

Wind and Solar to replace oil, nukes and coal in just 10 years for less then the cost of oil subsidies.

See my profile for details.

We should also copy Holland, and create safe walking and bicycle paths throughout our communities.

[leduck]

sweet
even if it isn't possible to attain sustainability
better to fight then throw in the towel

this is a lot better then that learsy stuff

[orangepetal]

The enviromentalists agenda. Let's all ride bicycles, like it or not. I hope Obama explains this agenda to the American people. Maybe he could at the same time explain how he can sleep at night supporting ethanol production when it has been directly connected to world hunger and food price increases.

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

Hey the environmentalists have been warning us about this for over 30 years. Don't blame the weatherman because you ignored the tornado warning siren and your kids got swept away.

And nobody is going to make you ride a bike. It's just that your car is going to get more and more expensive to drive.

[DavidJames]

You can push your SUV to work if you want.

[tompoe]

Corporate thugs might not like it, but $200 a barrel oil will make virtual worlds begin to look really good. Each house invests $50 for a unit from open-mesh.com to plug into their wall socket, and the house and surrounding yard is lit up in a wireless mesh cloud. Every house in the community participates, and the entire community is one local broadband network. No Internet access needed. Just a one-time fee of $50 per house. The local broadband infrastructure enables a community virtual world to be created with freely available software. From that moment on, business transactions can be done from the home computer. Meetings can be held, town hall meetings become town hall ongoing discussions attended by every resident 24x7. Kids can access their school network from home and get a true 21st century education no longer limited to single school computer lab sessions.

Makes one want to ask our telcos/cablecos why they don't set this local broadband infrastructure up in your community, eh? Of course, they're getting a lot more than a measly one-time payment of $50 per house, now, so I guess they're not the ones to ask after all.

[axt113]

And then the computers take over and boom you're in the matrix, lol

[Cjwirth]

A sustainable society is not possible for the U.S. We have paved over and suburbanized the best agricultural land near our cities. And the population of all U.S. cities is far larger than what the surrounding land could support. ... even if we had not destroyed it with suburbs and highways. Then consider this:

Global oil production is now declining, from 85 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. At the same time demand will increase 14%. This is like a 45% drop in 7 years. No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, it will always be higher than production; thus the depletion rate will continue until all recoverable oil is extracted.

We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.

This is documented in a free 45 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html

[DavidJames]

200 mpg to 300 mpg equivalent vehicles for personal transportation will allow us to keep much of our personal transportation freedom.

Solar photo-voltaic technology is distributed anyway. Sustainable society is possible.