Nicholas von Hoffman, The Nation
...The big fact is that the major oilfields around the globe are getting tired and are in decline. In due course, unless somebody finds a lot of undiscovered oil, Browne [of BP] and his corporate confreres will have an ever-diminishing amount of oil to sell at an ever-increasing price. Additional assistance in driving up the price of oil may come from politicians in the United States and Great Britain and Israel. Since 9/11, prices at the pump have doubled. If these three countries go ahead with their hearts' desire, an attack on Iran, gasoline at $7 a gallon sounds about right.

Because more people (China and India) with more money want more of a lessening supply of oil, prices will go into zoom mode before long. But how long is before long? It could be three years, it could be ten or it could be fifteen years--or just when your grandchildren will be going to college or hitting the job market.

For all kinds of reasons, the age of cheap, plentiful oil is coming to a rapid close. And that is a greater, surer and more profound threat to Western civilization as we know it than Al Qaeda multiplied by a hundred.

...The economic and therefore the political consequences, even if we are somewhat prepared, will be shocking in ways only a few presently understand. Most of us have been nurtured to believe that after a few adjustments are made by way of "energy conservation" and the "miracle of technology," we shall be on our merry way as before. We buy it when George Bush remarks, almost absent-mindedly, that America is addicted to oil but that he and his allies have the biofuel methadone needed to kick the habit. Well, methadone doesn't work on heroin junkies, and it won't work on oil junkies either.

If we are to survive, much less prosper, in a time when oil will vie in price with Cristal, we must not only think outside the box; we must get rid of the box. We must do something Americans have never imagined: Give up on economic growth. We must abandon the long-held idea that we can grow our way out of every problem, that growth is the path to achieve every national goal.

...We can begin to move from being the Can Do Society to the Make Do Society. It means, at the minimum, that our apples will no longer be grown in Chile and our underwear will no longer be manufactured in Indonesia. Beyond that it means that businesses that are dependent on the use of staggering amounts of energy, like Wal-Mart, will either have to redesign themselves or enter the history books.

It means that while America can still be the home of the free and the brave, the free and the brave are not going to be living a life of waste and excess. The old model is out of date. Either we start working on a new one right now or in too short a time the free and the brave will be fighting one another for a whiff of air-conditioning in the summer or a place by the fire on the cold nights to come.
(15 Aug 2006)

Life in a Post-Carbon World

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