I don't think anyone thinks we can do this indefinately, and no one has suggested we should. This current "crisis" is a wakeup call. Many Americans are changing their habits. Their dumping their gas-guzzlers and buying Prius's. Congress is passing higher CAFE standards. Corporations are investing into R&D (and have been for some time) into new sources of renewable energy.
Unless oil dries up tomorrow, we're going in the right direction and we'll reduce our dependency on fossil fuels to a more manageable level long before the supplies are gone.
I'm not talking about the supplies being
gone.
If you keep on believing that I'm talking about "
gone" then I can't continue to talk to you, because if you believe that's where I'm coming from, then the rest of what I say has no meaning.
I'm REALLY talking about the world demanding 87 million barrels of oil every single day. But the day will come (soon!) when our ability to lift 87 million barrels per day out of the ground slips down to just 82 million barrels a day. Even if that slippage were to plateau (stabilize, but I doubt it) at just 82 million barrels per day indefinitely, that shortfall of 5 million barrels a day is what will be our undoing.
On Monday we'll be 5 million barrels short.
On Tuesday we'll be 10 million barrels short.
On Wednesday we'll be 15 million barrels short.
On Thursday we'll be 20 million barrels short --and 20 million barrels is what the USA currently consumes on a daily basis.
Multiply this out over the course of several weeks, or months, or even over JUST ONE YEAR and the picture it paints is not pretty. And out of all the nations that this will harm, the USA will suffer the GREATEST harm because we are the most prolific consumers of oil, as well as the most utterly dependent on oil.
--Airlines will shut down.
--Cross-country truckers will severely cut back their operations.
--Plastics manufacturers will lay off entire shifts and possibly shut down completely. (Plastics are made almost entirely from petroleum.)
--Medical manufacturing will severely cut back in their productions because petroleum is an important component in almost all medical supplies from the laytex gloves to the IV bags. Can you imagine the shortages that hospitals will start suffering from coast to coast? And even if a medical manufacturer in Pennsylvania were to promise a shipment of their absolute last inventory to a hospital in California, what long-haul trucking outfit is going to make the delivery????
If supply and demand were to TRULY kick in, then some enterprising trucker somewhere would probably agree to make that deliver IF the price was right. So that one shipment of medical supplies will cost an astronomical amount to be delivered. And guess who that cost gets passed along to? The answer is it gets passed to the competant and economically strong safety net of the American health care system that can weather any storm and always pay the bills on time with the least amount of red tape and administrative hassle without ever once burdening the patient with unweildy co-pays.
More bad news:
--Roads are a petroleum product, so they will start to fall into disrepair as municipalities from coast to coast suffer from serious budget squeezing and need to cut back. (Didn't all of our fifth grade history teachers tell us that one of the first signs of a society on the verge of collapse is found in the neglect, breakdown, and eventual failure of its internal road systems?)
--Fire and ambulances need petroleum, so municialities will cut back on fire and ambulance personel as they try to keep the diesel tanks of the fire trucks and abulances full. So we'll have skeleton fire crew and skeleton ambulanc crews, and only half-full tanks in their vehicles.
--Heating bills will become so burdensome to people AND to municipalities that it will become normal for the thermostat of any civic building to be set at 50 degrees all winter. And private citizens will resort to using fireplaces --perhaps illegal and makeshift ones. Those illegal fireplaces will often result in house fires and the need of fire fighters to come running--lets hope the fire fighters can actually get there (I am right now thinking of the firefighter played by Mark Wahlberg peddling on that kiddie bicycle in the movie
I Love Huckabees).
--Yellow school bus fleets will become such a burden that more students will be required to walk to school. The push and shove of trying to balance out the school budget with those yellow school buses will be enough to break school budgets for many of the towns whose populations are very far flung. The so-called "regional schools" in particular will suffer the most because their student bodies are spread out over several hundred square miles.
All these details I've itemized will be the natural result of a petroleum shortage in this nation. And again, I'm NOT talking about petroleum being "gone" but instead about it being "in short supply."
Supply and demand.
Supply and demand.
Supply goes down, and then the price goes up. And up. And up.
The oil and the gas and the diesel and the home heating oil won't be gone, it'll just cost waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much. And the above-mentioned scenarios I've listed involve thousands of municipalities all across this nation who have NOT made ANY contingency plans to try and shift away from their usage of petroleum. So many thousands of municiaplities are clueless as to what's coming. Now IF every last one of those municipalities were to try and shift away from petroleum starting at midnight tonight, it would take no less than five years (fifteen years is more like it) and many millions of dollars per municipality to reach a functional and practical point of a petroleum-free infrastructure. Building loads and loads of smaller school houses in every last neighborhood where kids can walk is a good starting point. Either that or those towns all need to build their own nuclear power plants nearby AND convert all their yellow school buses to electric-based engines that can be recharged by that local nuclear plant. No matter how you slice it, it will take time AND money for thousands of municipalities to respond to this situation. But now .... sadly ..... because the oil prices have already quardupled on all those little towns, the money is running out on them at this very moment ... and soon the TIME will have run out on them as well.
We needed to have started 20 years ago.
.
I should have put a smiley face in that reply I made to Maestro (I mean it WAS Maestro afterall.) It was a joke reply.