Peak Oil gets all the press — that is, when there is any press at all on realistic concerns about the future — but oil doesn’t grab hearts and minds. Even though everyone knows the gasoline that powers our car comes from oil, filling up at the service station isn’t something we look forward to. Like washing the dishes and doing the laundry it’s not much fun in itself. It’s merely a means to some other end.
Shoes are a quite different matter. Scan the fashion pages or watch an episode of Sex in the City and you’ll discover how many people find shoes endlessly fascinating: shoe fashion, shoes as status symbols, shoes as a topic of conversation, shoe prices, shoe designers, …. Italian shoes have a special category all their own. And even if, like me, you aren’t particularly concerned with high fashion shoes, you wear shoes every day and likely have several pairs among which there’s one which because of an especially good fit is a favorite.
So if the availability of shoes were to peak and decline — if Peak Shoes were imminent — there’d be a hue and cry. Governments would be forced to step forward and address the grass roots uproar.
Similarly with Peak Food. If there was a general awareness that food production would soon decline and never again achieve its current heights, it wouldn’t be long before people took to the streets in mass protest. Even urban dwellers who have never cooked a meal know their restaurants need reliable deliveries of meat, grain, and vegetables to put a plate of hot Kung Pao chicken on the table or slap a slice of NYC pizza on a paper plate.
Peak Shoes and Peak Food are just as realistic as Peak Oil and everyone — including governments and oil companies — believes Peak Oil is realistic. The only disagreement is about the timing. Will it be later this year or 2035? One reason Peak Oil doesn’t get more attention is most people haven’t made the connection between Peak Oil and Peak Everything Else.
Everything in our modern societies, from soup to nuts and food to shoes, depends on the daily availability of enormous amounts of relatively cheap oil. Health care, the educational system, publishing, clothing, television, movies, rock concerts, football — you name it. Without cheap, abundant oil it changes radically and not likely in a way you will appreciate.
Peak Oil essentially means Peak Everything Else because cheap, abundant oil is the foundation of our modern economy. Say Peak Oil and people immediately think of the price of gas and understand that transportation cost will go up, but how many extrapolate from there? Everything — from food to shoes — gets transported from where it is produced to where it’s consumed. WalMart is filled with Chinese products, your coffee comes from South America or Africa, and while your computer and many other products may have an American brand name their components come other continents. That’s certainly true of your car even if it’s a Chevy. Globalization means every nation is dependent on reliable, low-cost, world-wide transportation, and that depends in every respect on cheap, abundant oil.
Yet the impact on transportation is just one part of the Peak Oil means Peak Everything Else story.
Without cheap, abundant oil
- high-production, fertilizer-based modern agriculture — an invention of the last 50 years which feeds all developed countries and much of the rest of the world — disappears.
- energy intensive manufacturing becomes rare, costly, and localized around energy sources like hydro-electric, clean-coal-fired, and nuclear power plants. Thus, everything made of steel and aluminum and any other metal or plastic becomes precious.
- mining, another energy intensive activity, becomes vastly more costly since by its nature it can’t be relocated to be near a convenient power source.
- the cost of air travel goes through the roof and consequently global tourism and business travel become restricted to a select few, transforming the way we interact globally. There is no power source for aircraft that can substitute for oil.
- the modern megalopolis — New York, Chicago, LA, London, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City — becomes unsustainable.
In short, everything we’ve become accustomed to which depends on large amounts of low-cost energy changes. There is no low-cost substitute for oil. Peak Oil is Peak Everything Else and modern human societies will change radically. We need to be focused on making that as positive a change as possible. (Local action is one part of the solution.)
The next time the subject of Peak Oil comes up and doesn’t get attention mention Peak Food, and if that doesn’t do the trick try tossing out the notion of Peak Shoes. That’s sure to turn some heads.
Great post. It’s a take on peak oil we don’t usually hear. Once people wake up to the message of what peak oil will really mean for them, day to day, there should be some serious stirrings.
Well, the same is true, I suppose, of population and our ecological predicament in general.
I’m early in a phase now of trying to touch a little more on peak oil as it’s a huge factor, linked closely to population and the economic issues I discuss, that can’t be ignored. There seems to be a sizable list of issues looming, any one of which could have very serious consequences if we don’t manage to take decisive action fairly soon.
I’ve been thinking about the “list of looming issues.” They of course revolve around humans and their activities, number of people and resource use. The labels commonly applied to the issues are overpopulation (crowding), climate change (global warming), biodiversity decline (both in number of species and in population of particular species), and peak oil (which is also peak methane). Can you think of other general categories?
I’d love to have a fairly definitive list.
Peak Oil, climate change, overpopulation, desertification, urban and industrial sprawl, fish stock decline and higher meat consumption in Asia are all reasons to believe that food availability per capita will soon decline.
This is fully discused at http://www.peakfood.co.uk.
Nice work at PeakFood, John G. I hadn’t seen your blog before.
Declining fish stocks, to me, are part of the general biodiversity decline, which makes me think that category ought to be split into decline due to direct, intentional activities like commercial fishing and another for colateral damage due to things like urban sprawl and climate change.
John — Interesting info on your site. I’ll go back to read in more detail.
Trinifar — Here’s a list I put together for a recent post:
climate change, species extinction, overfishing of both the oceans and fresh water environments, deforestation, “dead zones” in the oceans, loses of coral reefs, the global spread of chemical toxins, desertification, peak oil, aquifer depletion.
I’m sure that’s incomplete, and some categories strongly influence others (e.g., climate change and coral loss), but I think those are all distinct enough to warrant mention. I didn’t put population in there as I see it more as a cause than an effect, but it depends, I guess, how you want to categorize these things.
How to categorize these things seems important to me. I’d like to discover a set of categories and labels of the sort that is “immediately obvious” to the average person, something that will stick in their mind.
In the abstract, we have “resource use” and “waste generation” and sustainability means using resources and generating waste in a way that can go on forever without degrading the environment. Overpopulation is then a condition that makes sustainability impossible given current technology, knowledge, and methods.
Biodiversity is a resource that is used unsustainably by overfishing, overgrazing, overfarming, and urban sprawl and also degraded by unsustainable waste generation (that is, all forms of pollution).
Seems like a flow chart of some kind is in order to link the relationships visually.
[...] A recent post on Trinifar makes a good companion piece to Jim’s essay. Check it out. _______ Image source: Roadsidepictures, posted on flickr under a Creative Commons [...]
I disagree with idea of oil production peaking anytime soon. Whilst petroleum production is certain to peak, oil won’t. The reason – at about $60-$70 per barrel it becomes economic to produce oil from coal. There’s a lot of coal in the world. The enviromental consequences will not be favourable to say the least, but I suspect It’ll be the market choice.
Zorba, the idea of peak oil has to do with oil production from wells, getting oil out of the ground as oil, peaks. Producing it from coal is another matter.
Where do you get the idea that producing oil from coal becomes economical at $70/barrel? And how much energy goes into that process?
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