Gas High

As another week passes in 2008, we read daily reports about the rising costs of gasoline in this country. Motorists scream in alarm as gas prices continually reach new highs: greater than $1.20 per litre in Ontario; greater than $1.35 per litre in Québec. Rural commuters complain that they require nearly a quarter tank of gasoline just to reach the nearest gas station; some of them question the futility of remaining employed when faced with the economic reality of paying more to commute to work than they actually earn at their job. Every month of the year 2008 has seen a significant rise in the oil futures market, which as of April 23 has priced the May crude oil inventory at nearly $120 per barrel. That might not sound like much until you consider that only 10 years ago the price reached an all-time low of $11.

Over the course of the 20th century, we got so used to cheaply-produced, easy-to-access oil that we put it into everything. The biggest user of oil is of course transportation. We must not only consider personal vehicle use, which in and of itself is vital to a modern high-tech economy. Nearly half of all transportation in North America is freight. In order to stock local stores with all of the consumer products which we take for granted, oil is a cost input. Many of these products are currently shipped by trucks, which constitute the least-efficient mode of freighting goods to stores. As the price of oil rises, naturally the cost of everything that we buy – from chewing gum to plasma televisions – will increase as well.

On a more fundamental level than transportation, the world is bearing witness to the most dangerous reality of our present era. Food prices are escalating drastically as food producers must index their prices to account for the rising costs of their fuel and oil-based fertilizer inputs. Canadians may currently enjoy consuming tropical fruits in the dead of winter, but that luxury will not be so readily available to working families as the cost of a can of peaches approaches $5. While many understand that food prices invariably rise with inflation, citizens of western countries will not peacefully tolerate an exponential rise in the cost of such a basic provision as food, the cost of which will marginalise them as equally as the west has marginalised so-called developing nations over the past century.

Look around your house and you will locate innumerable products and services which would not exist in a mass-market context without a readily-available supply of cheap oil: plastic products, fertilizers, medicines, cosmetics, clothing, building materials, household chemical agents, home heating, and electricity (in some areas of North America). It is unlikely that modern industrial civilization will be able to continue to produce the cheap plastic items which currently populate our lives and our landfills. The economically marginalised of the future will enjoy short, brutal lives digging through landfills in search of the plastics of the 20th century, from which oil will be reconstituted and utilized by those wealthy enough to isolate themselves in a transplanted 20th century lifestyle of oil dependence. I hate to simplify reality and push a metaphor too far, but oil is and always was a dinosaur whose extinction was prolonged by human genius.

Y2K was an expression of the millennial angst inherent in a transition between centuries; it shared a tradition with medieval anxieties from a thousand years ago. Collectively we breathed a sign of relief as the computers continued to function and the planes did not fall out of the sky. Then we all moved on with our lives to enjoy the new millennium. Peak oil will fulfil these dormant anxieties and prove to be the long tomorrow which will obliterate everything that modern civilization has come to appreciate as “the good life”. In the pages of View and elsewhere, myself and others have repeatedly stressed both the nature and the importance of this concept, and I will not repeat myself here except with the following provision: without accounting for future growth in oil use and potential arctic deposits, there exists slightly less than 30 years of conventional oil reserves on the entire planet. Most people reading this article will be alive thirty years from now.

Don’t worry, you might say; in Canada, we have a few trillion barrels of oil, which will fulfill the oil needs of the planet for at least the next century. While I will presently ignore the fact that one hundred years is not much time when placed along the scale of human history and that such mathematics merely postpones the inevitable for a few generations, a more important fact must be considered. Canada’s tarsand oil deposits represent the dying vanities of modern industry. They are an environmental nightmare second only to China’s legion of coal plants. More importantly, they are the most expensive source of oil currently known. Much of the tarsands cannot be economically developed at even today’s high price of oil. These deposits will become financially feasible as oil approaches $200 per barrel and nuclear reactors, needed to evaporate the water necessary for oil extraction, start to become commonplace in the prairies. Ask yourself if you will truly enjoy a world in which the only way to produce enough oil to meet the “needs” of the world is to price it beyond the reach of the vast majority of the Earth’s inhabitants. This is the paradox which will terminally damn the world’s poor and middle classes.

Industrial civilization will transition from bathing in oil to rationing its use to those projects deemed most vital. Enlightened leadership will currently require the proper investment of oil as we enjoy the peak of world production – building massive-scale renewable energy plants and mass-transportation networks; reserving enough oil for the medical requirements of the next century; and perhaps most importantly, rationing enough oil for the production and distribution of affordable food supplies. Only then will the economic and social hardships of the transition from the era of plentiful oil to that of marginal reserves be minimized.

Citizens of democratic countries must demand action now and not when the pumps run dry. Resource scarcity leads to panic, which in turn leads to massive social unrest and violence, which in turn leads to civil and international warfare and ultimately to fascism. With a degree of willpower, sacrifice, and Obama-esque positivism (“Yes we can! Yes we can!”), then modern civilization will prove stronger as a result of the transition from a society of waste and excess to one of mutual and exponential socio-economic benefit. It is however my greatest fear that the true lessons learned over the 20th century – namely greed, vanity, and avarice – will ultimately lead to indifference toward the plight of those left out of the oil loop. Of course, the Pentagon in the U.S. has its own mathematics concerning the issue, namely the use of nuclear weaponry to dissallow foreign oil use by foreign populations. Darfur, Haiti, and Iraq are the opening wounds in a process which may prove to scar us all. Welcome to the 21st century.