Past Peak (Cheap) Oil

Commentary By Ron Beasley

As I said below our civilization is not just dependent on oil but dependent on cheap oil.  There may be some debate about whether we have reached peak oil but there is little doubt we have reached peak cheap oil.

MM News has an interview with Richard Heinberg:

American journalist and writer Richard Heinberg is one of the world's foremost Peak Oil educators. He has taught at New College of California�s Campus for Sustainable living a program on "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community" until March 2008 and is a Senior Fellow in Residence of the Post Carbon Institute in Santa Rosa, California. He is the award-winning author of nine books including:

•  The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003),


•  Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (2004),


•  The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse (2006),


•  Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines in Earth�s Resources (2007).

Heinberg explains we have not just reached peak cheap oil but cheap coal and natural gas as well which makes any talk of an economic recovery nonsense.

Mr. Heinberg, your most successful book-title to this date is �The Party�s Over.� For those of our readers who have never heard of you and that book: What kind of party is it that you were writing about and why do you assume that this festivity and its special features are about to come to an end?

The �party� was humanity�s one-time-only opportunity to fuel economic growth and technological innovation with a bounty of cheap, abundant energy from fossil fuels. The harvesting of oil, coal, and natural gas has inevitably proceeded on a best-first or low-hanging fruit basis. While the Earth still possesses a wealth of unexploited energy resources, the cheapest and easiest-accessed of those resources have by now already been used. All of these fuels are in the process of becoming more expensive, and the various energy alternatives are limited in one way or another in their ability to replace hydrocarbons. That means we are currently seeing the end of economic growth as we have known it. The impacts for transportation, globalization, and world food supplies will be serious indeed.

As a rather critical observer of that party: Do you see significant hints that a growing number of participants realize that �The Last Waltz� is near? Or are you afraid that large parts will continue to dance no matter what?

After over a decade spent in trying to alert policy makers and the general public about this issue, I have concluded that only a small minority have any idea what is in store. The �dance� you speak of is indeed coming to an end, but it appears to most that the problem is purely a financial one, and that once the global economic crisis is sorted out, we will all be able to get back to business as usual. I do not believe that is an option. We have reached a fundamental turning point, foreseen in the �Limits to Growth� study of 1972. For a while, world leaders may be able to redistribute wealth in various ways�most likely from the poor to the rich�in order to make it appear that the global economy is continuing to grow. But I suspect that this will work only for a very few years at most. At some point soon, it will become clear that economies are contracting. And then most people will look for someone to blame. No doubt politicians will oblige by trotting out various scapegoats.

Joseph Tainter's collapse is here - we just don't know it yet.

H/T The Oil Drum