Paul's Comments

In writing the previous blog entry, I forgot or was unaware of another point that I didn't even realize: the use of fertilizer - made from petroleum - to allow us to grow crops. So we are dependent on fossil fuels even to produce enough food to eat.

And that's an even more frightening thought. I've been reading a PDF about how we're not even close to realizing how the situation on fossil fuels really is, and it might be worse than the so-called fears about "peak oil". I may do a summary here once I digest the conclusions, but if they're even close to true, they are devastating.

A couple of short points: Supposedly, the reason we - that is to say, the U.S. under President Reagan - were able to cause the Soviet Union to collapse is we talked Saudi Arabia into dropping the price of oil so drastically that the Soviets, who also export oil, were spending more funds than they could produce by selling oil at the really low price that the Saudis had jacked the price down to. This more-or-less agrees with my own thoughts, basically we bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing it into a contest on several fronts that it could not afford.

The second is that the amount of predicted reserves for some of the OPEC countries might simply be total fiction, accounting hocus-pocus where they count proven reserves as well as the net amount of oil that supposedly could be removed if all possible oil were obtainable. And as anyone who has ever tried to get the last drops of a milkshake by a straw out of a glass would realize, even I know that 100% recovery of all reserves isn't possible. And perhaps the actual amount of proven reserves might not even be realistic.

But there are probable alternatives. The only answer is whether we work on them while we have the current choices, where the adjustments we have to make to our lifestyles, environment and equipment will be perhaps slightly uncomfortable and expensive, or we wait until disaster hits, and we have to make changes which consist of drastic, agonizing adjustments that make the 1973 oil embargo and gas lines seem like an orgasmic experience by comparison.

My guess is, in the absence of someone to "pick up the torch and run with it" or "step up to the microphone" and point out the uncomfortable facts, we'll probably end up going with the agony scenario, and we won't like it one bit. And then, of course, there will be the usual blame thrown around, and scapegoats targeted, and maybe even counter-productive legislation (like "windfall profits" tax) that exacerbates an already bad situation into something worse. Like how the Smoot-Hawley tariff laws made the depression of the 1930s even more depressing. (Unintentional pun there.)