from Forbes magazine:
Sky-High Oil Will Make U.S. Go Broke
Charles Biderman, TrimTabs 06.23.08, 7:00 PM ET
….What is happening now is not demand destruction, it is a financial disaster. The U.S. consumes 21 million barrels of per day. At $135 per barrel, the U.S. spends $1.0 trillion per year on oil, which is equal to 15% of the $6.8 trillion in take-home pay of everyone who pays taxes. If oil prices rose to $200 per barrel, the U.S. would spend $1.5 trillion per year on oil, which would be equal to 22% of take-home pay. Moreover, those percentages of 15% and 22% do not even include the cost of coal or natural gas. In other words, the U.S. will be broke long before oil prices hit $200 per barrel, and the rest of the world would be sure to follow.
from the UK Guardian
A world less flat
If the price of oil remains high, we may see drastic changes to America’s cities, economy and way of life
Wednesday June 25, 2008
….Economist Paul Krugman recently estimated that Americans use about 1,000 gallons worth of petroleum products a year – each. We pay for oil at the gas station, of course, but also at the grocer, through food shipping costs and – less obviously – in the petroleum-derived fertilisers that fuel crop yields. We pay for petroleum in the plastic products that surround us. Designers are now investigating ways to fit products into ever smaller containers as a response, and those of us who fondly remember the days when toys were made of sturdy metal (and when the average child had less than a closet full of them) may recognise the shape of Christmases future.
Petrochemicals find their way into most of the products we use as consumers, from lip balm to house paint. If dear oil becomes the norm, we can expect less waste across the board and a thriving research business in chemical alternatives.
and from the ever-astute Sharon Astyk:
Is electricity really the lifeblood of civilization?
….Let us not bullshit ourselves – if we had to suddenly, rapidly transition to no fossil energies at all (very, very unlikely for most of us), it would suck and be destructive. But it would not send us back to Olduvai Gorge. Many people would probably die in an overnight transition (also wildly unlikely) but most people probably wouldn’t. Some people would curl up, unable to bear this world they lived in, but the rest would get to work reorganizing into something else, bringing back and recreating older technologies, using human and animal power, changing their work, building new economies and markets. And not only could we survive, but we might not think that our lives were suddenly without meaning – electricity is not the defining characteristic of our beings, merely of our economy. And economies are remade all the time.
The part of this that I find most troubling is the offensive notion that living without all the above-listed goodies makes life completely untenable. Because that implies that the lives of our great-grandparents, and the billions of lives that don’t have electricity are an unmitigated hell, a place we wouldn’t even be willing to visit, that all that is “civilized” about our lives began in 19-freakin’-30. If our past, and the lives of the world’s ordinary poor are utter doom, we are doomed. But what if they aren’t? Let us acknowledge a vast and difficult transition, and a great deal of potential and probably real trouble and misery a’coming. But let us not start with the assumption that “modern industrial civilization” is equivalent to “civilization” itself. And let us not separate ourselves from everything that came before us and everyone now who lacks what we have as though some barrier keeps us from reaching out to them.
Can we kill ourselves off in the coming decades? Sure, I never wish to underestimate the stupidity of our collective humanity. Is that a likely and inevitable consequence of even sudden, extreme depletion and shortage – no. Only if we choose the worst possible forms of mismanagement (and grant you, there’s some good bit of evidence for this), only if we race headlong towards doom in a concerted effort can we create the consequences that Duncan and Leigh imagine are the simple results of the loss of electricty and other energies. Electricity is a goodie, a sugar coating. It makes a few lives possible – lives that would be lost in a world without it, and that is at tragedy. But mostly, it makes lives easy and convenient, and grows the economy – and that’s pretty much it. It is not our life or our blood.
