The Pessimist

Mother Nature endowed us with a huge quantity of oil long before our species descended from the trees and started walking upright. We ignored it for a few million years, basically unaware that it was down there until quite recently. We heated ourselves with wood fires, clothed ourselves with animal skins and travelled everywhere, and I mean everywhere, by foot. We discovered travel by boat a few thousand years ago, which was great because it allowed us to carry lots of heavy stuff over relatively large distances, but we were still dependent on the wind or oars.

Then we found this oil stuff and boy did it change our lives. First, the stuff is flamable, which makes it really useful. It gives us heat and light. But heat is actually way more useful than just keeping your butt warm. In the mid 1700's we started replacing the kinetic energy of falling water, which we had been using to run our mills and factories, with the compressive power of steam. By the middle of the 1800's, we'd gotten really really good at extracting every last unit of work out of the steam engine, and the resulting industrial revolution was transforming our societies. It made some people very rich indeed, and it made a great number of people less poor (it created a middle class). But heating all of those steam engines was dirty work, what with all the burning wood and coal. And by 1870 the steam engine was reaching the limits of its efficiency. Improvements were at the point of diminishing returns.

But then oil arrived, just in the nick of time. Oil could heat the water for the steam engine, which was much cleaner and more portable then coal. But after dinking around with it for a few decades, a couple of new types of engines emerged that worked on the compressive power of the controlled explosion of the fuel directly. By eliminating the "middle man" (heating water into steam), the whole process became hugely more efficient. No more need to haul water and fuel, just fuel. And as a bonus, the minimum threshold of engine size and power was lower, allowing engines to be used in more places. The automobile for getting around; the tractor for getting the fields tilled; massive diesels for boats allowing for massive boats to get goods from A to B. The path from 1905 to 2005 is an exponential insinuation of oil propelled engines into everything. From a few hobbyist cars for the rich, to two cars in every garage.

Agriculture is now so efficient that huge farms can be operated by very few people. And crops can be produced in such huge quantities that we are awash in surplus food. And goods of all kinds can be moved from wherever they are in the world to wherever they are needed so cheaply that transportation is an inconsequential portion of the cost. Goods are therefore produced wherever they can be produced most cheaply.

And on a individual level, there is no longer an incentive to live close to where you work or shop or play. We have redesigned our cities such that most people live in a monoculture of residential. We travel to a monoculture industrial zone to work, sometimes not even in the same city. And we don't need to be close to a store because we can just hop in the jalopie and head for the big-box power centre for cheap goods made in China. We have been conditioned to believe that this is the way it should be: places of work/shop/play are undesirable in the neighbourhoods where we live. We can live in the country, where the air is clean and the children are safe.

So far, so good. Oil has made a lot of people extremely wealthy, and it has made most people extremely comfortable. But what happens when we reach peak-oil, some time in the next 10 or 50 years? When the $10 commute to work now costs $100? When the goods from China can't get to the Walmart, and we can't get to the Walmart because of the cost of gas? Are we going to rip-up the suburbs and reintegrate the residential and industrial zones? Are we going to repatriate the factories and jobs from abroad? How are we going to afford to do that? And how long will it take?

(This threat is cleverly explored in documentary "The End of Suburbia".)

Are we going to wake up to this threat before it is too late? Will technology save us from ourselves once again?
ThePessimist doubts it.