Tao’s 2 Cents

I recently finished reading a book called “Deep Economy : The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future” by Bill McKibben. It discussed how life will inevitably have to change after oil goes away. That’s of course assuming we don’t find any other form of cheap energy, which is unlikely.

The main change is that we’ll all have to start living more locally. Right now it takes 10 times more energy to deliver a pound of peas than the peas actually contain. The main reason for this is processing and especially delivery. Did you know the average piece of food you eat travel 1,500 miles to get to your plate. These are colossal wastes of energy which can be solved simply by growing things locally.

First I want to talk a little about oil and what it really is. I’d thought about it before, but this book made me rethink it and helped me put it in a simple easier to fully comprehensive package. Let me start with my own analogy.

Think about apple cider. The reason people made apple cider originally was that there was no way to eat all of those apples, even if you wanted to, so to store them they converted them into cider. The fermentation made alcohol which preserved the apples and their energy for a later date. This is exactly like the stored energy in oil that was really just organic material at one point, i.e. plants, algae, and animals but through geological processes is now fermented goodness. Even has the same euphoric affects and terrible hangovers, although we’ve yet to quit drinking so we haven’t experienced it so far.

Essentially oil millions and millions of years of stored crops. This is our inheritance which we’re burning thousands of years worth of every day. Once we were able to tap into that energy to replace some of our physical energy, which was essentially powered by the crops we were growing and eating, civilization jumped into high gear replacing every manual job it could to run off of this stored energy.

It’s no surprise then that we have been using it as if there is no tomorrow. The problem is there may not be a tomorrow if we don’t realize that we are simply throwing it out the window. Transporting a grape 1,500 miles burning countless gallons of gas when grapes can be grown right down the road. That type of exuberance and idiocy is borderline obscene.

McKibben did give me much more hope than I had previously thought possible. He gave examples of megacorporations voluntarily doing environmentally sound things simply because they actually saved them money by avoiding disasters. It made me wonder if the corporations will turn everything around even if its only to save themselves and to insure enough consumers and workers are around to make them run.

He also mentions the enormous upswing in farmer’s markets and community gardens. Before the industrial revolution 65% of Americans were farmers and today that stands at less than 1%. We’ve essentially replaced farmers with oil powered machines, but that won’t last forever.

Basically he believes that we’ll begin to reform the small communities that we had before the industrial revolution. Most people will farm but also have some specialty on the side. Instead of living in this hyper-individualized society where everyone just pops in their i-pod ear buds and pretends like everyone else doesn’t exist, we’ll all be forced to recognize each other for survival if nothing else.

I actually believe this could work well and we would probably already be transitioning at a much faster pace except for one thing, subsidized oil. It’s pretty much a fact that markets work and they work really well. However we have to impose our morals on to the market to make it reflect what we value, or should value. If the government subsidizes something it’s promoting it as the path forward for our society and that it shouldn’t actually cost that much. If the government taxes it, it’s saying the opposite.

Our government is saying that oil is the way forward for our country when it knows perfectly well that this cannot be the case. If gas were properly priced by the market without subsidies and appropriate taxes on the pollutants it creates as by-products then a gallon of gasoline would cost $11. How far away do you think those peas would be coming from if that were the case? Probably not very far.

So, what I’m saying is that the government is artificially propping up gasoline. So instead of slowly working away from oil as the market would clearly promote, we’re continuing of course and when the market rebalances we have a lot farther to fall and much bumpier road ahead.

I just wish we could be using some of that stored energy to prepare ourselves for a time when energy is not cheap. We cannot live without our heads in the sand when we are faced with such a monumental impending change. We need leaders with foresight and the courage to make unpopular but necessary decisions and the charisma to make everyone realize that this is the struggle of our generation if not of our entire species.

Here is an interesting talk a professor in England has been giving. It talks a lot about these topics in more scientific terms, but still very interesting.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Community, Oil, Book Review, Extinction, Awareness, Global Warming, Pollution, Environment. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.