Over the last 150 years, we have created the society that runs on oil. We have come to use oil for just about everything that we possibly can and it is inevitable that we would have done so because it is just such incredibly inexpensive, convenient energy dense stuff and we human beings are energy junking, always have been, always will be.
It goes all the way back to the harnessing of fire and oil is like winning the energy lottery. I mean think about it, if you had to push your car for 20 miles, and maybe you have had the experience of running out of gas and you have to push your car to the side of the road, maybe push it six feet, ten feet, it is a big job but imagine pushing your car 20 miles and that is what a single galloon of gasoline does for as soon we pay what three bucks for it and complain about that.
The amount of energy in galloon of gasoline is equivalent to something like six weeks of human labor. So, it was inevitable what we would become hooked on the stuff and so we have created planes, trains and automobiles and plastics and petrochemicals and everything else that makes modern life what it is.
The problem of course is that oil is a non renewable resource. So, even when we first started using this stuff, we knew that eventually we would run out.
We thought that would be in a long time buy in actually we are not about to literally run out. But the problem is that the cheap easy stuff is gone. We have picked the low hanging fruit. Discoveries of new oil pits right around 1963, ’64, I remember 1964, that was the year the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan shows, so that was a long time ago.
So we are not talking about a couple of years of bad luck in exploration, this is a long established trend, we have been discovering less oil with every passing year, it is a point now where we are extracting and using about four or five barrels of oil for every one that we discover.
In country after country is reaching its own national all time oil production peak and going into decline. The US was one of the first to do it back in 1970 and now something like 30 or 33 countries are passed their peak and so we just have a very few countries that are still able to increase their rate of production on a yearly basis to make up for those declines for all that depletion in those passed peak countries and it is evitable that within the very next few years, we will see the global peak in oil production.
Nobody is ready for that because we have had a regime over the past 150 years where every year, there has been more oil available to fuel economic growth, and we built an economy based on the idea that it has to grow every year or else collapse.
So assume the economy would not be able to grow and all signs are that we maybe facing a kind of global economic collapse because of peak oil.
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