Do We Have Enough?

Another Para­dox of Progress

Osten­si­bly, this post speaks to BP’s homi­cides and eco­cide in the Gulf of Mex­ico, but as is typ­i­cal of my style, one thought leads to a thou­sand others.

Peak Oil enters some­where in an equa­tion when a cor­po­ra­tion so reck­lessly ignored the safety of its work­ers, its own fis­cal health and the life of the Gulf of Mex­ico. Even it does not fac­tor in, our reliance on overly cheap energy cre­ated the foun­da­tion of the ongo­ing dis­as­ter, one that points to another Para­dox of Progress, or as I call it, Paradox2140. The Economist’s Energy in, energy out suc­cinctly defines the challenge.

“The price of energy is the most crit­i­cal price of any com­mod­ity for indus­tri­alised soci­eties. Cur­rently, and for the period of indus­tri­al­ism, oil has pro­vided us with a cheap and abun­dant sup­ply. The price of almost every other com­mod­ity relies upon it. A rise in oil prices will obvi­ously result in higher prices at the pumps for con­sumers, but the con­se­quences of that pale in com­par­i­son to the rise in prices for busi­nesses, and the asso­ci­ated cost rises for all prod­ucts which they pro­duce. Mod­ern agri­cul­ture makes heavy use of oil, as Hein­berg explains:

‘Tra­di­tional forms of agri­cul­ture pro­duced a small solar-energy sur­plus: each pound of food con­tained some­what more stored energy from sun­light than humans, often with the help of ani­mals, had to expend in grow­ing it… Today, from farm to plate… a typ­i­cal food item may embody input energy between four and sev­eral hun­dred times its food energy. This energy deficit can only be main­tained because of the avail­abil­ity of cheap fos­sil fuels.” ‘(Hein­berg, 2003: 175)
The Party’s Over: oil war and the fate of indus­trial societies

Why Cheap Energy is Paradoxical

The above quotes do not require much dis­cus­sion: pop­u­la­tion growth since about 1900, expo­nen­tial and still grow­ing, con­tin­ues to depend on overly cheap energy. Most trou­bling about this  equa­tion revolves around the fact that when our pop­u­la­tion peaks to about 9 bil­lion peo­ple around 2050, we still need to find the land and, most impor­tantly, energy sources in cost equal to the last century.

Hope­fully, know­ing the full extent of the prob­lem will inspire the solu­tions to solve it.

Tags: BP, climate change, ecocide, ecology, Heiberg, morality, oceans, oil, peak oil, progress, sustainability, The Economist