I firmly believe that our love affair with oil and all the so-called progress that it brought in the wake of the industrial revolution, is coming to an end in the next 40 years. This does not make me sad, suicidal, anti-American or anything else, except, maybe: aware. And that is what I want for America today. That is what I want for my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren. Starting now, I want people to be aware of where society is heading and to start think-tanks that will help put solutions in front of the citizens of this country.
What am I talking about? If you read my last article you know that I believe the publicly-available oil will be gone in approximately 40 years or less. As the worlds population continues to increase exponentially and the demand on oil rises with it, cheap oil (if there is any of it left) will evaporate from the pumps. The price of gasoline and diesel will necessarily escalate to the point that only the extremely wealthy and governments will have access to it. That means automobiles for the masses will dwindle to a few. Public transportation will be the major mode of moving about and everything that depended upon oil will skyrocket in price, or no longer be available. This paradigm change requires a completely new way of viewing our future.
No longer can we think in terms of oil always being available; it is a physical impossibility. The media would have you believe that is not the case, but as usual they are lying. We need to to rethink how we will live in the post-industrial world. I don't think it's a Mad Max scenario we're moving towards, but I do believe the new world will favor the agrarian world of the 16th and 17th century. For some of you, this scenario will be impossible to embrace. Unfortunately, you will be in the group that was least prepared for the inevitable.
Let me stop here for a moment and let my faith speak. I absolutely believe in the coming return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the renewing of everything in him. This is not my eschatology working itself in a peak-oil vision. I do not advocate violence, nor believe that it will serve any purpose. Trying to overthrow the governments as Greece is doing is of no value.
For starters, this will happen in steps. We won't wake up one morning to the announcement that gas is 20.00 a gallon. The change will be incremental. What will be deceiving is that the media and our government will not be warning us of the forthcoming crash - they will be telling us that it is just another price blip in oil. They'll say don't worry, it's going to get better. The rhetoric will continue as it has since the debacle started in 2008.
People will advocate alternative sources of energy, reducing energy usage, saving the whales and hugging some more trees. While all of these things are good, they are only temporary. The loss of abundant cheap petroleum, and eventually coal, will radically alter the way we are able to live. To put off preparations for a drastically changed future society because we believe that drilling for oil in Alaska or the discovery of some alternative power source will save us is just burying our heads in the sand. Glenn Beck, who I enjoy listening to, is talking about diminishing oil supplies and how that will affect us, but he is still not pushing as hard as I think we need to for a new paradigm.
Almost everything that makes our lives what we are used to, is made, produced or delivered, through oil. Whatever alternative energy resource we come up with won't replace petroleum in the manufacturing of the stuff that our lives are filled with today.
I'm going to continue writing in this series as I get new ideas, but my goal for now is to get you thinking about what society might look like sans (without) oil. God bless.
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