Crash Course; Preparing for Peak Oil,
by Zachary Nowak
ISBN-13: 9788896035009
Okay, we have all heard about Hubbert’s Peak? ...the graph regarding peak oil. Traditionally the graph is bell-shaped and there is a big arrow pointing to the top of the curve saying You Are Here! Much discussion has always been had on the topic of when exactly the peak will be, but this book offers a unique peek into life after oil has started to run out. What will global societies look like? How will global economies continue to function? Will there be much social unrest? What about managing the increase in property destruction caused by weather extremes? How should a common person prepare for life in a world that is run by an increasingly more volatile commodity? This book tries to play out scenarios in the post-peak world around the topics of food distribution, energy infrastructure, and other basic services. In a world where commodities become more scarce, human suffering will have to increase simply because the planet's resources can not support the human population. This book tries to get readers to imagine as preparation for some of the possible scenarios in the years to come on the backslide of peak oil.
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For the past two decades, corporate America has been fighting the concept of climate change; first it was that global warming did not exist, and now it is that climate change is not proven to be human induced. Regardless of this fact in relation to corporate behavior, the problems associated with a changing climate have continued to develop.It seems as though public opinion has begun to shift toward more sustainable policies. Corporate America, recently, seems to be banging the drum of renewables and efficiency. What caused the change of mindset in American consumers and corporate executive teams? Was it the increase in frequency of natural disasters, the price of oil, or just another cycle in the market’s or galaxy’s evolution?
The fact of the matter is that it was a combination of events all perfectly sequenced that created the optimal chance for the world to make the shift to more sustainable systems. Obviously, fossil fuel markets have been and will continue reacting strongly to an increase in demand, if not continuously, then at least cyclically. At the same time, globalization is connecting more and more people of similar interests who are otherwise separated by geographical distance. As all of this is going on, advancements in science and technology are coming to the forefront of economic development.
For the past ten years, most businesses have adopted a strategy of fighting most of the regulations suggested in order to improve the health of the earth’s ecosystems. While alternatives to fossil fuels were allowed a window of opportunity initially, recent developments in the world’s political and business communities prove that renewable energy is facing more trouble than just innovation challenges. Central to the sustainable movement is this shift in the public’s consciousness, and this takes time. Without a shift in the public’s mindset, there is no catalyst for business and politics to initiate their metamorphosis.
Renewable energy has been working on becoming cost competitive with fossil fuels over the course of the last two decades. Within the first ten years of the twenty-first century, innovation finally seems to be allowing renewables to catch up. As oil passed $100 per barrel, then $125, then $140, and the price of all resources continued to rise, renewables started to look like a more economically viable option for the long-term. Even if oil comes back down to $100, Americans have become aware of their most volatile of addictions.
While psychics and astronomers generally rely on cosmic explanations, most businesses won’t make decisions regarding long-term costs unless the new technology has a relatively short payback period. Today, with oil approaching $150 per barrel, renewable energy’s payback period is now equal or shorter than that of a new coal or petroleum power plant. With a carbon emission market, both coal and oil will be on their way out.
Today and into the future, business executives realize that one way to gain a competitive advantage is to get out of the fossil fuel energy market with its spikes and huge fluctuations. These ‘heart attack’ markets will become the norm as global demand outpaces supply in the coming decades and people panic and react to short-term trends along the volatile downslide.
The mere fact that the price of oil has risen so high has resulted in corporate executives taking an interest in cutting costs in the long-term. With many executives getting on the renewable bandwagon, energy conservation is beginning to make its way into business plans and marketing strategies. Common dinner discussions around average American households are being held discussing energy development and consumption. This heightened awareness by Americans regarding their own consumption is directly attributable to the price of oil.
To an environmentalist, it seems to make sense that the higher the price of oil is, the better it seems to be for the environment. I am sure the whales in the 1860s breathed a sigh of relief after whale oil became too expensive and petroleum began to replace it as the preferred energy source. In the same way, many plants and animals will breathe a sigh of relief once oil becomes too expensive to try to extract and coal too expensive to burn, though plants will probably miss the rich CO2 atmosphere.
Soaring fuel costs affect virtually every industry. High fuel prices drive up transportation costs and, therefore, tend to reverse globalization trends. With rising oil prices, the age of shipping without consequences is over. High shipping costs will over time lower global trade and, ultimately, allow a more responsible, local view of economics to settle over the planet.
All of these societal advancements like local economics, renewable energy development, cleaner air and water are all becoming possible because the price of oil is making the cost of consumption as usual too high for most Americans to afford; something has to change, and Americans are starting to evolve.
Perhaps there are countless reservoirs of oil trapped under the surface of the earth waiting for us to find them and extract them; perhaps the cosmos is playing a clever trick on us to get us to stop polluting the planet by hiding the oil while at the same time revealing renewable energy technology to us. What we have to gain from living responsibly today far outweighs the costs associated with continuing down a path that has shown signs of beginning to be able to destroy the earth’s ecosystems.
A shift in human consciousness has been under way for some time now. The shift is a term used to describe to coinciding of several exponentially larger forces interacting in alignment to create conditions conducive to conscious evolution. There are a multitude of resources on this topic from every school of religion in the world. The process generally goes slowly working its course like a meandering river over the course of successive generations, but sometimes the river's force can be channeled or an elevation drop can speed the transition of power.
Using nature to innovate product design is nothing new. This particular manufacturing strategy has always been successful. Like it or not, humanity's evolution is tied to our use of petroleum; there is simply not enough petroleum to fuel the population of the future.
As the world reached for renewable energy, the single most contributing factor to alternative fuel enterprises making it on the main stage on Wall Street is the price of oil; as the price of oil goes, so will the investment money into renewable energy. The price of oil will either usher in a century of evolution and innovation or it will mire humanity in its own waste and pollution.
There is a more natural way to meet our energy needs than by burning fossil fuels. By burning fossil fuels, human beings trap themselves into a smaller, more isolated world of scarce resources. These kinds of worlds are usually littered with war and illness, hunger and suffering.
Nature's rules of thumb, in general, are regeneration and abundance. Oil can not be regenerated on a timescale that is useful to human beings. Oil is also no longer abundant. Algae, if grown and extracted on the scale that Big Oil currently is, could meet all of our petroleum demands and clean CO2 from the air. The simple fact of the matter is that there are alternatives to fossil fuels, and humanity is at a critical moment in terms of evolutionary triggers. The next stage in the human evolution chain awaits us as we end our use of petroleum. Will we have the courage to sensitively manage our delicate interrelationships with the natural world?
Regardless of how it turns out for humanity, the natural ecosystems will continue to evolve in the direction of seeing themselves as a functioning part of a healthy planet. Is the human species ready for the challenges of their next evolution or will their addictions to money muck the whole thing up by allowing it all to get too big for its own good? One thing is for certain, the price of oil is a powerful force and holds the key to human evolution.
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K21st-21st Century Must Have Knowledge
www.k21st.wordpress.com
There are millions of brilliant ideas being posted on the internet every day, but the problem is that they are being posted in different locations making reference difficult. K21st enters the picture and tries to bring together the community of webusers around topics such as biology, physics, energy, nanotechnology, the environment, futurism, the singularity…you get the picture. We need be curious, curious not only about that which was, and that which is but more importantly curious of that which we are becoming and that which we may or will become, individually, as a society, and as a species. Oh, did I mention one of their topics is philosophy? At K21st they believe that the future promises to be not only more fantastic than what we have imagined, but probably more interesting than what we could have believed just a few years ago.
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