Peak oil is good

[mattbell]

People have been blogging about "peak oil"  -- how oil reserves are declining, and we may all be running out of oil soon.  I've decided that peak oil, if it happens, would actually be a good thing.

Basically, people use oil because it's slightly cheaper than the alternatives.  It's true there's a lot of infrastructure that's dependent on oil, but as the prices rise, the capitalist system will find ways of routing around the infrastructure issue.  Many of those other ways would involve renewable resources.  If biodiesel becomes less expensive than fossil-derived diesel, people will switch to it. 

Thus, peak oil will likely dramatically slow global warming.  By raising the price of oil as it dwindles, the capitalist system will encourage people to become more efficient and switch to renewable energy. 

There are plenty of unnecessary actions that use a lot of oil because it is cheap.  For example, we mine iron in the US, ship it to China where the labor is cheap and have them turn it into washing machines, and then ship them back to the US for sale.  Companies grow crops in South America and then fly them to the US so we can eat strawberries in January.  People buy needlessly big cars so they can feel good about themselves.  None of this represents true need.  If the price of oil goes up, the whole capitalist system will reconfigure itself.  They'll make the refrigerators in the Midwest for slightly more money, stop selling strawberries off-season, and market small cars as sexy.  Thus I don't think peak oil is the disaster people think it will be.

So how do we encourage peak oil?  Perhaps we should make more things out of plastic, as plastic is oil-derived.  I wonder if we put less CO2 into the atmosphere when we turn oil into plastic as opposed to burning it in an engine. 

Comments

[iron-sky.livejournal.com]

I agree that rising oil prices are the best way to reduce our dependency on oil. I'm not convinced that the result would be a move towards better energy efficiency or renewable energy, though. For example, one straightforward way to reduce oil dependency would be to shift towards running cars on hydrogen (ICE or fuel cell) and then produce hydrogen by burning coal. Coal is cheap, and we have enough of it to last for a long time.

Also, if the goal is "shift the economy towards reduced oil usage", I'm not sure that "shift the economy towards increased oil usage" would be an effective way to get there...

Long-term, we have (at least) two nearly-unlimited energy sources available, once we get the technology for either working well enough: solar and fusion. My thinking is that we're not going to really get out of this mess until we achieve something revolutionary like that (not that it would be overnight -- there would still be a long maturation process). Being more efficient and renewable with our current technology will slow down the problem but can't stabilize or stop it. The way out is through.

Which is all grand generalizations, but it captures my basic outlook on the subject. Also, slowing down the problem in the meantime is still a valuable thing.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Making plastic must release less carbon into the atmosphere. When you burn the oil in an engine, most of the carbon becomes CO2, some amount becomes CO, and there's probably a tiny remnant of soot leftover. When you turn it into plastic, there's at least some significant amount of carbon forming the long polymer chains. Of course, since you burn other oil when turning some oil into plastic, maybe that creates an offset that makes it worse. But my boyfriend keeps pointing out that some day when we're running low on oil we're going to be so mad that we were burning so much of it, instead of turning it into plastic.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

I'd assume so. I'm just worried it might release some other much stronger greenhouse gas, but I have no evidence either way.

In any case, Brazil is already using like 50% ethanol in their cars. Most of the cars sold there are flex-fuel and can use both oil and ethanol. When the cost of oil goes up, they just buy more ethanol. That's energy independence.