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By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted May 26, 2008 at 23:13:06
Demand for oil has been exploding in the past few years, while oil production has plateaued at best. The world is coming to realize that treating a fossil fuel as a renewable resource does not make it one.
If you were Iran, Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, would you really want to scramble to bring all possible production online, so as to drive down the prices for the oil-sucking western world? Or would you cautiously cut back on production to ensure that it lasts as long as possible at a relatively high price to ensure the maximum number of remaining years of prosperity? Our politicians in Alberta could learn much from questions like these...why are we fighting to keep royalties down and subsidies up?
Ladies and gentlemen, while our parliamentarians debate the virtues of a carbon tax or "emissions trading system", the realities of oil production are imposing both. At current rates of growth, and there's no reason to believe those will slow significantly until major changes are made to the way we heat, move and feed our society, especially when billions of people in Asia are striving to catch up. The price of oil has been far too low for generations, and it's led to a world where energy is used far too frivolously for good sense, and that has meant that alternatives have never had a true opportunity to develop.
We can deal with oil depletion in one of two ways - we can lower taxes on fuel and subsidize production, we can increase automobile efficiency through smaller cars and hybrid whatnots (studies have shown that greater fuel efficiency simply lowers the price of driving, thus causing people to drive more), and we can work vigorously to bottle every last drop of oil we can get our hands on regardless of financial, environmental or human restraints - all to prolong the status quo. Or we can read the writing on the wall and go about getting a head start on the kind of changes which are coming, one way or the other. Effective transit systems, bicycles, organic farms and denser urban development.
Frankly, I have very little faith that our leaders will go with the latter, at least, until things get a lot worse. It's up to individuals like us to cry foul, to make changes in our own lives and do whatever we can to help others along that path as well.
"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford
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