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<H1 class="cN-headingPage prepend-5 span-11 last">A world without oil - it's
closer than you think </H1>
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<H5>Steve Hallett and John Wright </H5><CITE>April 27, 2011</CITE>
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<P><STRONG>So far, we've done very little to plan for the perilous moment.
</STRONG></P>
<P>Dismantle the oil rigs and stack them in a pile. Radio the tankers and order
them back to port. Pull out the drills and seal the wells with cement. (A year
after the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, let's hope we've learnt how to do
that, at least.) Tow the platforms back to shore. Plug up the pipelines.</P>
<P>What would happen next? How would we live in a world without oil?</P>
<P>First, there's transportation. With the overwhelming majority of the oil we
produce devoted to powering our cars, motorcycles, trucks, trains and planes,
the impact on getting around would be most dramatic.</P>
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<P>Price-gouging would begin right away, and long lines would form at petrol
stations. The lines wouldn't last, though, because the supply would soon be
gone. Within a month, every fuel tank would be dry, all our gauge needles would
point to ''E'' and the roads, rails and skies would be virtually empty.</P>
<P>How far is it to the nearest supermarket? How long does it take to walk - or
cycle, or skate - to work? Finally confronting our dependence on motor vehicles,
we'd reach for whatever solutions we could find. Soon, we'd all be looking for
an electric car (but there are precious few of those for sale) or converting our
vehicles to run on natural gas. But we'd be waiting for some time to secure
adequate natural gas supplies.</P>
<P>Our enslavement to black gold goes much further than the problem of getting
from point A to point B. We also need to keep the lights on. This would be
possible for a while, but brownouts and blackouts would soon begin - sure, our
electricity is generated mostly from coal, but how would the coal be extracted
without those diesel-guzzling yellow trucks? How would it be hauled to the power
plants? (Remember, freight trains all run on diesel, too.)</P>
<P>Heating and cooling our homes would suddenly get a lot more complicated, and
our televisions and laptops would be just a few weeks away from shutting off
forever.</P>
<P>Forget even trying to get to work any more; we now have another set of
problems to solve, especially if it's winter and our houses are getting cold.
Can we quickly put together some solar panels and batteries? A wind turbine?
What do we have growing in the backyard that can burn?</P>
<P>Environmentalists have been nudging us to insulate our homes and generate
electricity from renewable resources for a while; this might be the time to
start paying attention.</P>
<P>It gets much worse, of course, because a world without oil would quickly
become a world without all the products made from petroleum that we have come to
know, love and depend upon.</P>
<P>The list of essentials that we'd soon be doing without is prodigious: nearly
all plastics, paints, medicines, hospital machines that go ''beep'', Barbie
dolls, ballpoint pens, breast implants, golf balls.</P>
<P>Eating would get tougher, too. If no one can truck in fresh vegies from
across the country, we might be inclined to go back to basics and grow our own
food.</P>
<P>Local farmers would become a necessity, not just people who sell us honey at
the school fete. That said, make sure to keep the food coming, fresh and fast,
because it's going to be awfully difficult to refrigerate. Fishing might work,
so you'd need to get a new rod while supplies last. Alas, most of them are made
of plastic. Then again, so is fishing line.</P>
<P>It's an interesting thought experiment to picture a world suddenly without
oil. Taken to its logical conclusion, it encompasses so much more: a complete
and rapid breakdown of society, leading to desperation, lawlessness, wars and
untold suffering. The scenario is unreal, of course, because we could never shut
off our oil supply in a day, and, in any case, there are trillions of barrels of
the stuff still in the ground, right?</P>
<P>Yet, in a simpler sense, it's not so unrealistic, because even if it will
happen more gradually than laid out here, we will indeed run out of oil. Output
has already peaked in the majority of countries. A handful of countries are
still increasing production, but not enough to offset even bigger declines
elsewhere.</P>
<P>There is lots of oil still in the ground (we've used about half of the
planet's generous endowment), but while the end of oil may be many decades away,
the beginning of the end is now.</P>
<P>It's not just at the drip of the final drop that the oil crisis begins. It is
when production stagnates and begins its inexorable fall. That perilous moment,
alas, is now. Our oil supplies are about to begin to fail us. As oil becomes
more scarce, we have to get serious about finding new solutions to power our
world.</P>
<P>We have time to plan - but not that much time. So far, we've done little to
prepare for a world without oil.</P>
<P><STRONG>WASHINGTON POST</STRONG></P>
<P><STRONG>Steve Hallett is an associate professor of botany at Purdue
University. John Wright is the Latin America news editor for </STRONG><EM>Energy
News Today</EM><STRONG>. They are the co-authors of </STRONG><EM>Life Without
Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future. </EM></P></DIV></DIV><BR><BR>Read
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