Peak Oil Forum
It is becoming increasingly clear that we will soon run out of oil, or more likely oil will become such a scarce resource that none but the super rich will be able to afford the products that are made from it.
There have been no new oil field discovered for the past few decades and the existing major oil fields have passed or are close to passing their peak production, after which they will produce less and less oil. At the same time demand for oil based products by India and China is increasing at a phenomenal rate.
Few people realize how inextricably dependant on oil, and its products, we have allowed our civilisation and our daily lives to become.
The operation of federal and state governments, their law police forces and other law enforcement authorities are only possible because of automobiles and the fuels that come from oil.
Enormous urbanised populations can be sustained only because of the massive increases in food production made possible by the fertilisers that are produced via the products of oil, by mechanised sowing and harvesting that operate on the fuels derived from oil and by automobile based supply lines that continuously move food from remote production areas to urban population centres.
Electricity generation is dependant on trucks continuously transporting coal
from the nearby coal mines to the plants. Mining operation that bring metals and
our defence force are only possible because of oil. The bitumen that is used to seal our roads comes from oil. The plastics in our packaging and, millions of other every day products, are derived from oil.
It goes on and on.
Sooner or later the increasing price of petrol and diesel will cross the
threshold of being an inconvenience to being a threat to our daily lives. Sooner
or later it will cross the further threshold of being a threat to our survival
as food supplies in the urban population centres become scarce. If
we fail to face reality and fail to demand that our political leaders face
reality then western civilisation as we have known
it is threatened. In the distant future, if the human race survives,
archaeologists will be unearthing the ruins of our western civilisation and trying to deduce
why it collapsed and what happened to us. And
this will not be the first time that a civilisation has collapsed, for similar
reasons, and been condemned to history. There is archaeological evidence to
suggest that the Easter Island, Aztec, Inca and Roman civilisations, among
others, collapsed because their populations exceeded the carrying capacity of
their land and the capacity of their technology.
Given this then why are our idiot federal politicians debating such trivialities as whether to cut the fuel excise tax or to implement the fuel watch scheme in order to save motorists a few cents per litre on fuel for perhaps a few months.
Within a few months further price increases will engulf any minor saving they
achieve.
And why are we letting them debate such utter trivialities when there are vastly
more important issues to debate. We
can find solutions, even if those solutions will cause significant pain for a
time. But when our Titanic is sinking the last thing we should be debating is
the arrangement of the damned furniture. We need visionary federal leadership that is
competent enough to tackle the monumental task of untangling oil and its products from our civilisation and massively transforming the
way we do our business and live our lives.
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