Letters to the Editor
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Another Example Of How People Just Don't Get It
Oil had nothing to do with the First Industrial Revolution (1800-1870), so without oil we'd at least be living at a mid-nineteenth century standard.
Don't know if I can agree with this statement. We've built an extensive, oil-dependent infrastructure since the 1800's - far flung suburbs, exurbs, Wal*Mart rolling a million semis around the country, oil and gas-based fertilizers, etc. Without cheap oil, that infrastructure's gonna fall down and go boom.
While oil and petroderivatives do provide the best quantum package of energy by volume, as you say, the secret is in finding another package.
There is no other package anywhere near as cheap as oil, and certainly nothing that can be utilized in our existing infrastructure. There's no technological solution to this problem. Technology <> energy. Technology - especially deploying new technology to replace our existing infrastructure - consumes energy. And that's gonna be the problem, because there won't be any energy to use for massive deployments of alternative technologies.
hydro, wind and solar power can generate the power required to keep transport and communications going.
Those sources provide only a fraction of the energy that's consumed for transportation alone, and deploying them is going to become increasingly expensive as oil prices climb. We've yet to develop any means of storing electrical power that's anywhere near as efficient for off-grid use as gasoline. The most promising technologies are still vastly more expensive to implement and vastly less efficient to operate, and would require the replacement of our entire inventory of transportation equipment even if they did work. It's not happening anytime in the next 20 years, and we're gonna hit peak oil long before that (we've probably hit it already).
Our best realistic hope in the nearterm may be the conversion of coal into gasoline, which actually works, but is hideously expensive. It'll help put an upper cap on the price of a gallon of gas somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 - $7 a gallon, pre-tax. But we'll burn through our remaining coal reserves in just a decade or two as a result, and at those fuel prices the economy is likely to be plunged into a permanent depression. Still, it may give us enough time for alternative technologies to be developed and deployed, or for the infrastructure to be retooled away from the automobile.
If you want to look at an example of what happens to a country when it can't get - or can't afford - the transportation energy it needs look at the former Soviet Union. They hit peak oil a few years before their collapse, going from an exporter to an importer, something they didn't have the economy to support. We're actually in worse shape than them, since we're even more oil dependent and this time it's not a matter of us not having the cash to buy oil on the world market - there's not gonna be enough oil on the world market to come close to satisfying the natural demand of our infrastructure.