WillPatching.com

With a massively successful economy based on US corporations infiltrating* every society across the globe, combined with a media machine pumping out images of affluence beyond most people’s reasonable expectations, America provides the role model other nations are eagerly pursuing.

Rampant capitalism, measured by GDP growth, is the holy grail, especially in the developing world. With the decline of the socialist Soviet Union and China’s capitalist economic reforms, there is seemingly no viable alternative.

Everyone wants to live like an American.  From Bangalore to Bangkok the pursuit of materialism through the development of an urban/automotive economy is well underway.

And so, like lemmings, we are heading unwittingly and inexorably towards our own doom.

No, this is not an article about global warming - serious as that matter is - but a more immediate, pressing and potentially disastrous problem: oil is a finite commodity and it is running out. This valuable resource is undoubtedly the true reason for the current war in the Middle East, and the future is not bright. The likelihood of global strategic conflict will increase as China and India consume ever increasing quantities, whilst trying to achieve the impossible: to emulate the US industrial economy.

Americans currently guzzle around a quarter of the world’s petroleum output. The capitalist model says that’s ok: if the US can continue to afford to pay as prices rise, then why not?

Well, if we all want to live like Americans perhaps we should determine how long current known reserves of oil would last if we did.

The math is easy:

The US, with one twentieth of the world’s population, currently uses about 7.5 billion barrels of oil a year. If everyone consumed oil at the same rate, then planetary consumption would be twenty times 7.5 billion. That means we would be using over 150 billion barrels per annum. Known petroleum reserves are estimated at 1.2 trillion – which sounds like a lot…

So, how long would those oil reservoirs last if we all lived the lifestyle of the average American and burnt over 150 billion barrels a year?

Just eight years.

Now, many skeptics would argue that known reserves are increasing all the time as new discoveries are made. The reality is that the few major oil finds over the last twenty years have failed to keep up with increasing demand over the same period. New discoveries cost ever more to locate and are increasingly expensive to exploit as the most accessible large deposits have been in production for many years. The law of diminishing returns has started to bite, and even the oil corporations are acknowledging the problem.

According to Chevron, “Oil production is in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil producing countries, yet energy demand is increasing around the globe.” (1) Furthermore, the oil producing states belonging to OPEC are known to have inflated their reserves to justify pumping larger quotas to generate greater revenue. There may well be much less than we think.

Processing oil from tar sands and other alternative sources will become more economic and provide some relief as the price of crude oil soars beyond $100 per barrel, but the reality remains: the world is pursuing an industrial revolution based on a model destined to fail.

Western industrial societies rely on cheap oil – and not just for the freedom the automobile provides. Even the computer you are using to read this article had a high energy input during manufacture; the plastics, metals, silicon chips and other components enabling you to read these words consumed approximately twenty times the fossil fuel requirement needed to make an equivalent weight of automobile. All modern technology relies on cheap oil consumption.

And so does the food we eat.

US style agribusiness consumes enormous quantities of oil for the manufacture and distribution of fertilizer and pesticides, for the manufacture and operation of farm machinery, for draining and supplying water for irrigation, and for processing raw foodstuffs into packaged consumables.

Transportation of agricultural produce also sucks hard at the gasoline pumps to ensure an ever more dizzying variety of foods decorates the supermarket aisles of the wealthiest nations. Washington’s WorldWatch Institute estimates that the average item of food travels some 1500 miles before arriving on an American consumer’s plate. (2) Hence food is often produced with transportation and storage in mind rather than taste and nutritional content – a reality the agricultural conglomerates prefer to conceal from their customers.

This industrialized agricultural model is unsustainable and will start to disintegrate as the price of oil escalates: “It is damaging the land, draining water supplies and polluting the environment. And all of this requires more and more fossil fuel input to pump irrigation water, to replace nutrients, to provide pest protection… simply to hold crop production at a constant. Yet this necessary fossil fuel input is going to crash headlong into declining fossil fuel production.” (3)

Our dependency on oil is complete: the western world’s modern industrial manufacturing base and the food it consumes rely on readily available cheap oil. And so, the future of industrialized society is hostage to the, largely unsympathetic, oil producing nations of the Middle East.

Already crude oil is approaching $100 a barrel yet was less than a fifth of that price just a few years ago. Oil is becoming scarce, the price is escalating, and demand continues to spiral as we all try to become Americans.

The resulting political and economic tensions have already led to an aggressive strategic response by the world’s only superpower. When the US president says he must respond to “threats to national security,” can anyone doubt he actually means “threats to ongoing supplies of cheap oil”?

A report from Cornell University in 1994 accurately predicted: “The denser the human population becomes, the more countries are forced to closely interact and compete for the shrinking endowment of natural resources. Intensification of such interaction may result in an emphasis of differences in cultural, religious, and political identities… and may precipitate international conflicts… U.S. dependence on oil becomes an ever-worsening strategy with regard to national security.” (4)

Is it any wonder that Bush and his oil buddies initiated an illegal pre-emptive war with Iraq whilst lying to the world about the rationale? Recently ex- Federal Reserve chief, Alan Greenspan, euphemistically admitted in his memoirs that “it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

This is a war to protect the American way of life.

Is it any surprise that the US oligarchy is now rattling their nuclear arms in Iran’s direction – a country containing the world’s third largest oil resource with a vociferously unfriendly regime in control? And is it really in America’s best interests for the rest of the world to follow in its footsteps? For hordes of Chinese to pursue the American dream? For India’s masses to emulate the US model? For struggling nations to compete for the crude lifeblood that feeds America’s immensely powerful, bloated and wasteful economy? In pursuit of life, liberty and an SUV?

No. We can’t all live like Americans.  Isn’t it time the world stopped trying?

Sources:

1. http://www.willyoujoinus.com/energy-issues/supply/default.aspx
2. http://www.sectionz.info/ISSUE_3/content_1.html
3. From Eating Fossil Fuels by Dale Allen Pfeiffer, 2004 http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html
4. Food , land, population and the SU economy, Cornell University 1994. http://www.dieoff.com/page55.htm
5. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption

* Infiltrating = “penetrating with hostile intent” www.thefreedictionary.com/infiltrating