The Light and Dark Roads - an Essay on Peak Oil

THE LIGHT AND DARK ROADS - AN ESSAY ON PEAK OIL


THE LIGHT AND DARK ROADS

by Anai Bendai
(C) 2007

Two Possible Futures Considering Peak Oil
& It's Impact On Global Civilization in the 21st Century

PART ONE

"The Darker Road"

To begin - I wanted to write this essay primarily to illustrate just how bad things can get if we fail to heed the warnings of a growing group of well informed geophysicists, eco-scientists, academic intellectuals and concerned voices from various pro-Earth movements who are environmentally aware yet existentially stumped as how to tackle the problems that will consequently arise after the much heralded production marker known as "peak oil" has passed and has been confidently identified by a consensus of legitimate, scientific minds.

As a stark wake up call and perhaps also as yet another alarming siren blast of warning - the first half of this paper describes and explores what might at first seem like the fictional milieu out of a futuristic science-fiction post-apocalyptic horror movie - yet with even a modicum of speculative imagination augmenting our material data extrapolation - the ultimate social consequences of M. King Hubbert's peak oil becomes terrifyingly evident and not at all too improbable. If nothing else, my "Darker Road" scenario intimates just how vulnerable our nation is in the event of other natural catastrophes while we remain dependent upon foreign oil.

If such a grim future as the one I will depict awaits us all - that is - if we fail to heed the alerts and warnings from all the knowledgeable experts in the geology, oil extraction and business sciences and fail to right now initiate the stultifying process of addressing and mitigating against so many entangled social human problems; economic, political, religious and environmental crises all reaching catastrophic climax proportions concurrently - then our species is blindly careening headlong at full speed towards a brick wall comprised of many unknown, chaotic variables - with the so-called "impact" of just such a collision with the future occurring somewhere near the middle of the 21st Century.

But there is still time to save ourselves. Thus, in the second half of this paper I want to show what we can do right now - what steps we can take to mollify the mosty urgent problems that we all collectively face as a global civilization and alleviate some of the darkness and suffering that does not have to be if we only recognize them as problems we need to deal with right now. We need to be honest with ourselves and work together towards coming up with innovative solutions to any one of a myriad of problems and resultant sub-problems as they arise.

The first prospective path to the Future that I want to consider in this brief paper is the 'Dark Road'. It describes the likely outcome if we fail to awaken enough conscious effort and prepare ourselves in advance for this unavoidable catastrophe. Along this bleak course, Humanity remains apathetic and ignores the informed warnings of all the scientists and researchers. We choose to be myopic and only think only about the problems and consequences of today and repeatedly put the problems of tomorrow off till then, leaving the future for our grandchildren to deal with.

So as we march blindly into such a Future of unsustainable natural resource exploitation - mindlessly driven by some kind of lethargic and despondent ignorance, we see a future where even more gasoline powered automobiles are being manufactured and miles and miles of new ebony asphalt superhighways and city streets are being laid down and more and more blind reliance is being placed on the non-renewable black tar blood being pumped from the Earth's arterial network of oil reservoirs and reserves like there's no tomorrow.

Perhaps due to stalled diplomatic endeavors that were never properly or seriously initiated and appropriately effected in the first place, comingled with continued economic stagnation and diminishment of the dollar and the senseless, juvenile playing out of military showdowns and saber-rattling duels between superpowers and smaller trump card holding oil-rich third world countries through the remainder of this first decade of the 21st Century, nothing is done to address the fact that global peak oil production has indeed already passed and the entire planet is now on the steep, slippery downswing slope of what was once a booming, economy and civilization building rocket ride up to unforeseeably spectacular but ultimately unsustainable lofty heights. The great boon of oil given to us by our own modern Prometheus, Colonel Edwin Drake has finally revealed its ultimate cost through a myriad of intertwining and delayed consequences.

From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might over soar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane...
- from "Prometheus Unbound" by P.B. Shelley

The United States, our proud Nation, finally reaches its zenith and perihelion, and just like Icarus, intoxicated with the rush of a heady, rapid ascent and triumphant culmination - in horror begins to feel the gummy black wax holding the feathers to his arms begin to soften and give way, releasing their hold upon his all too transient and mortally frail flesh...

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
- from "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats

America, the great victor of WWII, the self-appointed steward of Western Civilization and the superpower who led the charge of unchecked growth and expansion, the Nation that set the standard, made the mold and invited all other nations to put away their age old religious strife and internal political feuds and join them as business partners in a corporate pantheon of world-wide, free-market delusional insensibility where Democracy and Capitalism were the two new bright and sparkling gods that promised and promoted prosperity and abundance and unparalleled luxury to all of humanity for the first time ever by proxy through their infallible industrial aegis, operating like an unreachable, untouchable hierarchy of administrative angels from the towering heights of sky scraping steeples manifested by their destined religion of Greed; corporate warfare, covert business alliances, hostile mergers, take-over trades, war profiteering and slick stock market manipulations.

This is how it was built - this brilliant towering Empire of Oil buttressed by a burgeoning technological engine unseen or unimaginable in any of the previous ages of mankind's eternally repeating cycle of rise by hubris and fall by humility, and this was finally it - the endlessly spinning corporate prophets announced - this was the true path to global prosperity, world peace, the end of famine, disease and poverty and it had all been borne from the black blood of Mother Earth herself and now nothing can stop us, they hailed, nothing can take us down or hold us back, they promised. Just join us and you too will prosper the advertising mantras went. Join us or be excluded from the club of technology, luxury and security.

And then came what would be known as the Great Grid Collapse and Oil Crash of 2012.

At first there was scattered news reports in the early morning hours about widespread power outages all along the eastern seaboard. Some experts were already blaming the cascading effect on the expected peaking solar maxium officially called Solar Cycle 24. Power transmission stations and cellphone towers already underfunded and long past due for much needed repairs and upgrading began to collapse first, then GPS and satellite communcations of all kinds began to fail. Air traffic controllers had to ground all further flights and pray the planes already in the sky could find somewhere to set down safely.

How could they even begin to imagine that they would never be giving the following order to re-open up the skies for commercial airline flight ever again? Many passenger airliners circled the airports until their fuel ran out and simply plummeted from the sky like great dead birds falling onto the cities or countryside below.

The markets responded to the chaos by massive sell-offs and sky-rocketing stock prices, and it all happened so quickly that it seemed as if someone had prior knowledge that the disturbances and outages were coming and was using them to their advantage. Then word came into the New York Stock Exchange that it had been confirmed and re-confirmed. Due to recent findings concerning the rising scarcity of natural oil resources, OPEC had just raised the price of oil from $300 to $1000 a barrel.

What a futile gesture, the takers of the call thought to themselves as they changed the board to reflect this black and foreboding news. What an insane act of damnation and humiliation in the last moments of civilized humanity's ultimate stagger and collapse. Had this been planned all along? Or was it merely a horrific and fatally untimely coincidence?

Everyone in positions of power and informed academics knew that global oil stability could not be divorced from social, political and military stability. A fatal dagger from the OPEC backers had just been struck in the heart of the United States not shortly after she had been knocked down to her knees for other reasons. Perhaps, the stock traders argued amongst themselves, that had been America's glaring vulnerability all along and finally someone had seized the opportunity and used the first stagger to strike the fatal blow.

Because of this shocking news, the Stock Market began to collapse into an exponential freefall remarkably like the World Trade Centers had nine months and eleven years before. The media outlets were already calling it the worst disaster to hit America since 1929 and 9/11. Some watched huddled around their soon to be blank television sets as the iconic images of the falling World Trade Centers were re-played and now re-interpeted as a symbolic warning or vision foretelling the crumbling of America's economic prosperity, solvency and her integral, seemingly indestructible ediface all together. Some recalled the hubris and lessons from the sinking of the 'Titanic' exactly one hundred years before. "This ship is unsinkable,' it was declared then too... shortly before she sank.

There was "no comment" from the White House that morning of the Great Grid Collapse followed by the Oil Crash of 2012 - just stunned silence. They had seen it coming, knew it was inevitible, but had always assumed there was always going to be at least one more day to deal with it. All across the globe - the markets began to implode - one after the other - until nothing remained standing but the shocked and bewildered into silence stock-traders and brokers who vacantly stared up at a totally blank trading board for the first time in history. The "Big Board" at the New York Stock Exchange was still big - but now - it was also black; no more stock quotes, no more numbers, no more activity whatsoever. Those holding their breaths finally exhaled. It was over. The Age of Oil had ended. And now all that was left was the Aftermath - and that was not a good time for anyone.

At first there was just some wanton looting in the streets. Unimaginable acts of violence. Human brutality unleased. Rape and torture for fun. The grim fiction of Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange" now became an even grimmer reality as 'ultraviolence' became the new status quo. The police were simply out-numbered, there was nothing that could be done to maintain order. Most organizational systems fractured due to communication breakdowns. Desperate people began to realize that they were all in these dire straits together.

It's each human for itself now. Survive or die. Take what you need. Kill anything that's not on your side.

Civilization is dead. Hail the fruits of human arrogance and ignorance.

The urban areas in large cities were the worst hit by the oil crash. Large gangs of anxious, terrified, directionless people gathered together to argue and fight amongst themselves trying to appoint leaders and decide what to do - who to blame - who to go after. Some of the more intelligent, compassionate people tried to gather up friends and familes and escape this urban nightmare landscape - but to where would they flee? To the suburbs? Would it really be any better there? To the countryside? To live off the land? To hunt and forage? Did any of them even know how to do that? How many would have to suffer and die through trial and error before a new, sustainable way of living was found? Was anyone going to help them? Didn't anyone care any more?

Martial Law was declared in America by the White House just before all the political officials absconded to their underground military fortresses and disappeared from sight. There was no more oversight or organization. No one showed up to their workplaces anymore. Prisoners were left locked in their cells to starve to death and howl in agony at guards who dropped their badges and fled the penal facilities to find their families and run or hunker down. No one obeyed traffic signs anymore. What was the point? Social order made no more difference without oil. There was no more money. No more dollars. No more fines. No more consequences of your actions. How could anyone be paid? How could anything be bought? Who could be held accountable for anything they did from here out? Now it was all going to have to be survival of the strongest. Take what you need and guard what you have with your life.

Every remaining power plant on the grid in the United States eventually went down. Water and sewage treatment sites were left unchecked and unmonitored. With no electricity, no one had acccess to television, radio or Internet. Not that it made much difference as no one was broadcasting anyway. Remarkably, the telephone systems remained up and operating all by themselves for several weeks after the great Oil Crash as people called each other deperately trying to arrange for someplace to go to, something to do. There was no news of what was happening. Few even knew martial law had been declared let alone what the new rules and laws were. Where was the military? Why weren't there any National Guard units maintaining order and restoring services? What had engaged all their resources and taken them away from their national defense duties?

Rumors of some kind of black-op United Nations extermination units cleansing cities one by one spread like wildfire. True or not, the rumors made everyone even more terrified, desperate and withdrawn. There were also rumors that a massive nuclear exchange might have taken place between Europe and Russia. It was hinted that North Korea might have obliterated Japan but nobody knew for sure. Even those with ham radios running on batteries got conflicting stories from multiple sources all over the planet. Were these stories true or disinformation propaganda?

Eventually cities became kill or be killed zones of death. Common people had become so unstable, so uncivilized and so starved that they had reverted to the ways of barbarians. Anyone who dared cross a street was taken out by a skilled sniper's shot and their hapless carcass was divied up by a gang of feral hunters who knew nothing but the reality that flesh was sustinance and food was scarce. As long as it gave them another day or two to live, they would kill it and eat it. Humankind, afterall, once reduced to its most basic, fundamental needs, is nothing more than a animal that needs constant nourishment and subsequent propriation to survive.

Apartments and houses became private fortress where people defended their property zones upon threat of death. Those residents that did not already have guns were taken out by roaming bands of urbanite nomads with guns and so property was traded and collected by disconnected, cell-like cabals of small warlords; he who held the most weapons and ruled their neighborhoods with fear and the threat of annihilation survived and dominated. Criminally minded kingpins began to send out their dependent, subservient soldiers to loot, rape and pillage neighboring suburbs. Quasi-relgious cults of personality around certain warlords began to emerge. Gang signs became the new religious smybols. Inflated myths of these neighborhood warlord's super powers became the new common knowledge throughout the city's communal traffic of legends and folklore. None of it was true of course, but the warlords perpetuated these mythologies to make themselves seem untouchable and all powerful. And tragically, people were so frightened and desperate that they began to believe it and thus made it so. There was no TV or radio to tell them differently. Within a few years of the Great Oil Crash - humankind had reverted back to fiercely territorial, armed, hunter-gatherer packs with no oversight, no checks and balances and no accountability whatsoever.

Anarchy had indeed been unloosed in America by the Great Grid Collapse and Oil Crash of 2012 - and human civilization would never be the same thereafter.

PART TWO

"The Lighter Road"

And yet it doesn't have to all end with such a hard, spectacular and gruesome collective crash landing like this. We can prepare for the future and mitigate most of these disasters and sublimate them into softer, survivable crash landings. We can avoid these perilous consequences of our ignorant, wasteful practices and ultimately unsustainable modern way of life if we just inform ourselves and share our information and together become collectively aware of the incredible peril and huge stakes at risk with the state our current situation. We as a Nation are indeed like what Kunstler aptly calls a 'sleepwalker' who has awakened to find himself standing on the wobbling pinnacle of giant, towering steel stucture and now has to decide how in the hell he is going steady himself and safely climb back down to a safer, less deleterious height.

Then we have to be brutally honest with ourselves and re-examine just how it was that we got there to that heady pinnacle with no thought for safety wires or otherwise catastrophic possibilites. How are we now going to safely climb back down and re-vist the fundamental base upon which our towering structure of commerce and industry has been built - recognize the cracks and faultlines on the ground that lie beneath our teetering tower now before they become gaping sinkholes and unspannable chasms that swallow us all up whole and at once by the putting aside our political and religious and social differences - and put away our arrogant, stubborn grasp on maintaining a ridiculously luxurious status quo all the while constantly pushing for more unchecked expansion and growth. Then, we will have to find new ways of working together to intelligently and expeditiously solve our problems together - replace our dependence on oil and find viable alternatives which can allow us to resume a comfortable, but perhaps more reasonable and sustainable way of American life.

Thus, the second prospective road we as humanity could walk down is the Lighter Road. Along this road, we see wise, effective, bold and bi-partisan American leadership voted into power and passing broad and sweeping legislation which immediately calls for radically fewer (down to zero) petrol-based automobiles being manfuctured and imported to the United States and many more hybrids and alternative-energy vehicles being manufactured which in turn can initiate a new, competative alternative energy fueling revolution.

Perhaps at first, only the wealthiest corporations and individuals will be able to afford such a drastric and all-ecompassing switch-over transition, but the wealthy will need to be informed by this new leadership and helped to understand the absolute urgency to use up and actually spend some of their financial capital on new, domestic sources of alternative energies and immediately and unequivocally stop the buying of foreign petroleum products all together, thus forcing the demand for the oil market to drop dramatically and enable the much less wealthy citizens of America to 'use-down' the much cheaper remaining petroleum fuel supplies during this critical 'trasition time' in order to help with the total conversion over to all alternative energy sources.

Almost overnight groundbreaking new developments in alternative fuel production are announced, such as the discovery of a cheap and efficient process for turning algae into viable bio-fuels from the University of Minnesota.

Innovation becomes the wildly popular 'fad' of the day - and then the year and eventually the decade as everyone is jumping on the bandwagon with their own creative ideas and contributions. No one is laughed at - no one is judged - there's just a lot of encouragement from all corners of the country and a lot of back-patting and hugging when imaginative new ideas actually work and are permanently implemented. No one is in it for the money this time around. It's not about profits and image.

This time it's all about individual contribution and sacrifice. This is about saving our great Nation - and for once - we don't have to do it by sending our youth overseas to kill and be killed in a bloodbath of slaughter and suffering. This time - we can all each play our own part in the salvation of our beloved country and become known as The Green Generation - the generation that once again made great sacrifices - but this time peacefully - to save America and ultimately the entire planet.

And so the Age of Oil will begin to end with a whimper and not the death-blow whallop as we that we visited along the "Dark Road". At this stage, America will now need to immediately pump vast amounts of economic and material resources into the research and development of bold, new innovative technologies - no matter how expensive or initially dangerous. Risks will have to be taken. Losses expected. The goal will have to be to reset the mold and get the nation's infrastructure refounded on her own feet again. Our wise, bi-partisan American leadership continues to explains to the public through daily briefings and town hall gatherings all across the nation how absolutely important and essential it is to rebuild our society slowly but surely as a truly independent and sovereign nation - totally self-solvent and rebuilt from the ground up with permanent and meaningful incentives to stay that way.

New and drastically cheaper technology like solar panel shingles that are much more efficient and can store electricity for days like individual re-chargeable batteries become the new roof building material of choice upon every standing structure in the land. Older buildings and houses are re-fitted for free with the new solar-panel shingles and even the south facing sides of all new buildings and structures are covered with an all new kind of solar energy collection and storage material that is affordable and efficient.

On cloudy days, the load is generally switched over to alternative energy wind farms which begin to pop-up all over the countryside and even dowtown in cities and in large tracts going for miles on both sides of the highways. No one particularly cares how this looks. For now - it's simply needed.

Hydro-electric power generating systems are re-visited, re-evaluated and brought up to 21st Century specifications and many such plants are built and brought on line. With Federal and State assistance, cities and towns begin the switch over to multiple-energy manufacturing platforms so if one system suffers a breakdown or fails - the others will still be able to provide limited but necessary electrical output until the damaged systems are either fixed or replaced with yet another environmentally safe technology.

The manufacture of petroleum based plastic products are finally banned in 2014. Everything that was once made from oil-based plastics are now readily replaced with a new environmentally friendly substance invented at Cornell University called limonene plastic which is made organically from citrus peels and eventually becomes bio-degradable and breaks down over time into nutrients that the Earth can use to grow new life. Everything from saran wrap to beer bottles to electronic components, computer keyboards and children toys can be made from this new, cheap non-petroleum oil based plastic.

As we travel along the "Lighter Road", we discover a future in which America finally 'gets it'. The alerted and informed Citizenry of the United States have awakened from their erstwhile precarious sleepwalk into the 21st Century and wisely decided to climb back down from the pinnacle of the perilous tower of wanton consumerism to a safer and saner strategy of environmentally self-sustainstable moderation.

Getting easy credit becomes a distant memory of a certain path to economic failure. It becomes chic to grow food locally and eat organically. Suburban sprawl becomes as cliche and outdated as bell-bottom pants and mullet hair styles. New living areas are designed intelligently and efficiently according to the availability of natural resources readily at hand and not on the dependence of long distance trucking transportation or coast- to-coast cargo flights.

Mass transit finally comes of age in America as it already has so long ago in Europe. Clean and quiet electro-magnetic shuttles and passenger trains whisk travellers to their destinations through a network of interconnected cross-national railways which link every city and town. As time goes by there is much less reliance on Federal Government to fund and maintain these public transportation lines and stations. Instead they are regularly cleaned, serviced and repaired by a corp of local civil servent engineers who work more out of a sense of social duty and gratitude for the opportunities and education provided than the desire for a large paycheck and personal recognition. This conscientious corp of young, volunteer engineer civil servants realize that their own children, families and friends depend and rely on these new mass transit lines, so they keep them safe and secure and always operating effeciently - not because they have to - but because they genuinely want to. They feel an authentic ownership of these national resources and take personal pride in their maintenance and reliability. It is considered an honor to work on these mass transit systems for young men and women and they become a stepping stone towards employment with the Civilian Space Program which regularly flies citizens to the Joint-International Space Agency research moon bases and beyond.

America unites and rises to the occasion and tackles these problems together and successfully - emerging stronger and more prepared to meet the needs of the 21st Centruy than ever before and in so many ways. No one can stop or dissaude her because it's all done by an alert, aware, informed citizenry on the homefront - in her homes and offices and schools - on the level of environmentally beneficial corporations, small business, publically funded organizations and public and private services from the Federal to State to Local agencies down to individual homes and citizens. No American would ever think of putting their own interests, their businesses interests or their Government agencies interests before the interests of the environment, future generations, the planet Earth itself.

And so America has sacrificed and prevailed once again - passing this test and playing its part to help guide the world through what could have been a civilization ending crisis for the entire human species - and now she is stronger, wiser, nobler and more prepared for future challenges that necessity many rudely and suddenly thrust upon her.

WORKS SOURCED OR CITED

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Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005.

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Meador, Roy. Future Energy Alternatives - Long Range Energy Prospects For America And The World. Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Science Publishers, Inc. 1978.

Yetiv, Steve. Crude Awakenings - Global Oil Security And American Foreign Policy. Cornell University NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

This speculative essay was written by Douglas L. Bryenldson. You may reproduce this essay in whole or part without express permission as long as you cite authorship and proper legal copyright information (Douglas Bryenldson (C) 2007).