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Energy at stake
Nietzsche wanted “overmen”, and now we are there… for how long?
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None of the modern aspects of our contemporary human society would exist on the same scale without this abundant and ridiculously cheap energy (in developed countries energy costs roughly 1 000 times less than the human work it replaces).
From the omnipresent automobile to air travel for all, from paid holidays to higher education, from the rising divorce rate to frozen food, from mass-market computers to space travel, from mobile telephones to strawberries all year round—none of these services would have spread so quickly without an unprecedented supply of energy. The least privileged of residents in a country like France possess at all times the equivalent of several dozen of “mechanical slaves” working for them, providing transport, heating, consumer goods and food. Energy is everywhere! Alas, it is fossil energy!
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Oil is the cornerstone and foundation of our energy cornucopia, supplying more than 40% of the final energy consumed in the world. Unfortunately, oil reserves are running out, and mathematics tells us that oil consumption will one day reach a peak level before inexorably dropping, even if we don’t like this outlook. The much vaunted “40 years of reserves” are only the mistaken result of a media shorthand that confuses oil that producers know they can extract (40 times oil production in 2008) with the time remaining before the maximum level of production is reached. This time is much shorter than 40 years, between 0 and 10 years for most oil producers. After reaching this “Peak Oil” level, production will drop, and so will the amount of petroleum products delivered each day to our gas pumps, our chemical industry (and chemicals are everywhere, in absolutely everything that we make, including food and pharmaceuticals), to our airlines and our heating-oil suppliers.
World oil production, which is today on the order of 85 million barrels per day, will reach its peak between 2015 and 2020 at 95 million barrels per day at the most (some believe that this level will not be attained) before commencing its inevitable decline. After a long period of controversy during which the “Peak Oil” issue was hotly debated, there now appears to be a consensus among geologists and oil companies. Even the International Energy Agency, hostile to this notion up until now, adopts an alarmist tone that can be perceived in reading between the lines of its World Energy Outlook 2008.
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