The above link takes you to a story about how oil production has peaked, specifically, “The oil is almost gone. The hourglass is about to run out. It’s time to create a utopia.”
Realizing that no one on this blog is likely to take the Huffington crowd too seriously, but I guess there are those who do.
That said, can we encourage these people to move to a post-oil utopia, say, Somalia?
I would encourage the moderators of this blog to actually answer this question more directly. Rather than point at a pre-oil development level nation like Somalia, is there any nation that seems to point the way to a post-oil nation? Let the utopia part pass for a moment and ponder what preciscely a “post-oil” economy and society would look like.
I ask this knowing that people who put forward the kind of thinking present in the quoted Huffington Post piece fail to answer any of these questions for themselves. They have not thought through their own proposals.
But the reality is that competitive markets and price mechanisms associated with them are the only way to assure ourselves that the future will be less and less dependant on dwindling resources, even if not energy in general.
Keep up the good work here, and I look forward to reading much more on these pages!
– Ivin
I’m not aware of any real ‘post-oil’ utopia. Thomas Friedman talks about Denmark’s reliance on wind, but it only provides part of their energy; they still get about half their energy from oil, and are quite willing to ‘drill, baby, drill’ in the offshore.
As near as I can tell, references to post-oil communities are essentially talking about Amish-style communes, although in theory, you could use organics to provide everything plastics does (although mostly at higher costs), biofuels, and renewables for electricity. A much larger amount of your income would go for energy in that case.
Mike Lynch