Independent UK: The world must end its addiction to oil

[marmar]

Johann Hari: The world must end its addiction to oil
Thursday, 29 May 2008



This week, a battalion of angry addicts brought London to a standstill. They snarled up the traffic, then marched on 10 Downing Street to demand their fix at prices they can afford. Across the world, in countries as different as the US and Iran, fellow junkies are rising up in rage. Their addiction is to a gloopy black drug called petrol – and we are all about to go cold turkey.

In the past seven years, the price of oil has soared from $30 (£15) a barrel to $140. By the end of next year it could be at $200. No matter how much we plead or howl at our governments, it will never go back: the final act of the Age of Oil has begun.

The era that is ending began at 10.30am on 10 January 1901, on a high hill called Spindletop in south-eastern Texas. A pair of pioneer brothers managed to drill down into the biggest oilfield ever found. Until then, the dribbles of oil that had been discovered were used only for kerosene lamps – but within a decade, this vast gushing supply was driving the entire global economy. It made the 20th century – its glories, and its gutters – possible. Humans were suddenly able to use in one frenetic burst an energy supply that had taken 150 million years to build up. A species that died before the age of 40 after a life of boring, back-breaking labour spurted forward so far and so fast that today billions live into their eighties after a life of leisure and plenty.

Oil now drives everything we do. It shuttles us across the globe, we fight wars for it, and we even eat it: to farm a single cow and deliver it to slaughter burns up six barrels of oil – enough to drive from New York to LA. That's why food becomes expensive when oil becomes expensive.

It is totally understandable that most of us want to live forever in that sweet niche in history when we had seemingly infinite reservoirs of oil, and no awareness that burning it would, in time, burn us too. But, alas, we need to wake up and smell the fumes. There are three reasons why the placebos demanded by the petrol protesters and the politicians cowering from them across the world – lower taxes! find more oil! dig! burn! – are a delusion. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-world-must-end-its-addiction-to-oil-835814.html

[ladjf]

1. About 2 billion years ago, blue-green algae showed us the way.

And that was photosynthesis, a.k.a. solar power. We will follow their lead. I hope we start soon enough.

[bhikkhu]

2. More easily said than done...

we tend to think of cars and airplanes when we think of oil, but how about fertilizer? In the 60's and 70's there were bouts of panic that world population was exceeding the planet's capacity to grow food. The "Green Revolution" was a strategy developed to save the world from hunger, and since then human populations have doubled. The strategy is complex, combining four things in combination to double the yield - high-producing strains, irrigation, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizer. There are problems with the second and third things, but the real problem is the fourth: synthetic fertilizer is a petroleum product.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution


As food production is already strained to the limits of water availability, arable land availability, what happens if we ask farmers to end their oil addiction? The world needs a smaller population, and we have only a small window of opportunity to make this voluntary and relatively painless...