There’s an interesting “experiment” going on over at World Without Oil. Essentially, the idea is that peak oil has arrived, we’ve passed the inflection point, global oil production is declining, and prices are going through the roof.
The idea behind peak oil, if you are not familiar with the idea, is that eventually global oil production will peak, supplies will decline, and in the US, as the world’s largest oil consumer, there will be…problems. Please like The Oil Drum and Peak Oil (clever name) have links to stories and commentary. The theory was first described in 1956, when a Shell engineer named Dr. Marion King Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak in the late 1960’s to early 1970’s, so people kind of took notice when this event did in fact happen in 1970. Applied to global oil production, current estimates of peak oil production range from, oh…now (or that we’ve already passed the peak point of oil production) to several decades out into the future. New discoveries of oil has pushed the peak out to sometime in the future, but the problem is that all estimates, even the most optimistic, predict that there will be a peak, and oil production will eventually decline, so that’s kind of a problem…
The thought of how declining oil production would affect the world is what the experiment at World Without Oil is about. Other bloggers took the idea, and posted descriptions of the effects of the oil shock; how they were affected, realistic “news” stories of local, national, and international economic and political effects, as well as videos and audios. Here’s a good description of the problem caused by declining oil production:
The issue is not one of “running out” so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running. In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a 200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn’t need to lose all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him.
In a similar sense, an oil-based economy such as ours doesn’t need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10-15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.
I got this from Life After the Oil Crash, which, as you can guess, takes an “end of the world” approach to peak oil, although it is a good place to kind of get the idea about the concept (just be sure to take it with a few grains of salt).
Anyway, it’s interesting to see how people think the situation would play out…
