This is a slight modification of a post that got away from me.
Short Fix: The answers to salvaging our civilization have been staring us in the eye for decades. There is no millennial technology, or one more vast undiscovered great oil reserve, and if there was, it would only delay the crisis -- not in standard of living, but in being alive.
We have become too dependent on oil; its emergence as the standard of civilization is strongly correlated with the rise of the United States as a world power, the rise of de facto American suzerainty in the Middle East linked to American superpower status. Just as the Aztec emperors and supporting cast of priest depended on the Sun Cult and ever-expanding demands for fresh sacrifices as the basis of the empire, endlessly-expanding consumption of a slightly less ghastly sort is the basis of the extant imperium.
There are other examples; I give one below. Or, more accurately, Jared Diamond provides it, and I run with it.
So long as oil, somewhere, is the most efficient source of energy in cost terms (Saudi light sweet crude costs five times less to refine into gasoline than it costs to distill pure water!), local maxima in efficiency for alternate sources of energy excepted.
When Saudi LSC is no longer cheaper to refine to gasoline than the cost of distilling water, we will move to the next cheaper source of energy -- most likely, that's Iraqi oil, after that I'm guessing -- Libyan, and maybe Brent after that. I'm not a petrogeologist.
And when the procession through ever-tougher oilfields as the base standard for energy begins to stumble across significant alternates (the vast natural gas reserve beneath Al-Udeid Air Force Base, for example), that's when we will stop being whores for oil, and whore for other forms of energy, too. Not before, not after, but right then.
The ultimate limit is the point past which is costs more energy, regardless of its sourcing, to extract the oil from the ground, transport it to a refinery, refine it, and retail it than the energy being sold, regardless of price.
The second it costs 1.000000000000000000001 barrels of oil to send 1 barrel of oil through the 10,000 mile-long pipeline and into my gas tank, the Age of Oil begins to die, and the oil-based machine civilization along with it.
And the more the world persists in hanging on to the Age of Oil, the faster and more comprehensive the collapse to follow.
The movie "The Edge" has a lesson"
You know why most people die in the wilderness? Shame. They can't make themselves do what it takes to survive.
From Jared Diamond's Collapse
I am reminded of the example of the Norse settlers of Greenland, who persisted for over four hundred years. They were even there before the Inuit (Eskimos for the less up-to-date).
The Greenlanders of the 14th century, though, were facing a combination of problems
- It was getting colder, yeah the world does that, too. (It's warmed back up since, that's why people live in permanent settlements on Greenland again.)
- Trade in ivory and polar bears (dead and alive) with Europe was out of fashion
- The ships stopped coming from Iceland and Norway, on account the icy seas were too dangerous.
- The iron and timber that the Greenlanders depended on for tools, weapons, armor, fuel and construction material did not exist on Greenland
- There was plenty of both in Canada, which the Greenlanders knew about, but they didn't like going there on account there were too many natives, that they called skraelings (wretches) and had long since alienated by killing whenever they came across them.
- They had a proscription against eating fish, in my theory because they liked eating the seals that fed on them and had put two and two together.
- They began to cut up meadow turf and use it to build sod houses...and burn it as fuel.
- They systematically destroyed the meadows, which as the weather grew even colder, accelerated the demise of their goat, sheep and cow herds.
- After that, there wasn't much to eat.
- Not long after that, there wasn't a piece of iron larger than a nail, nor a piece of wood larger than a knife handle on the entire island...that is, at least not wood in possession of the Norse settlers.
- The Inuit newcomers (they've been there for a thousand years now) had iron, wood, abundant food, large numbers that were increasing, fast seaworthy boats to get more of same if they needed it and thanks to the kneejerk violent culture of the Greenlander Norse, they had an ax to grind against their necks, and proceeded to do so.
- Regarding the Inuit cold-smelting technology: They did not mine for iron, but the Arctic ice is dotted with occasional iron-bearing meteor fragments, and the Inuit recognized it for a useful substance; they alone among all Native Americans mastered the craft of iron tools before the Europeans showed up.
- Regarding Inuit wood supplies: they used wood frames for dogsleds, kayaks, umiaks (whale-hunting boats, useful for longer voyages and hauling heavy loads [think: whale] including iron and timber, food and fresh warriors, wood obtained from Labrador (which the Norse called Markland) or trade with other Native American nations, who coveted Inuit iron and finished products.
- Regarding Inuit boats: They are fast as effing hell; the Norse resided deep in wind-shelted fiords on the Southwestern coast of Greenland; it was child's play for the Inuit to block off access (or escape) to the sea with faster, more maneuverable kayaks, from which Inuit warriors could make short work of the meager makeshift craft that the latter-day Greenlander Norse had available.
- Regarding Inuit weapons: the Inuit had the bow, the lance, the harpoon, and lighter casting-spears, and a variant of the Aztec atlatl, a lever for throwing both harpoon and spear greater distances, with much greater force and accuracy. To firearm-toting moderns, that's no biggie; perhaps even to Spaniards with arquebusses and galleons, the Inuit would have been more annoyance than anything else...that is, in a warm climate.
- Regarding Inuit mastery of the arctic: the Inuit had dogsleds, too, trumping any advantage that the Norses' paltry few horses gave them in terms of cavalry out on solid ice; Inuit war parties could move between fiords over the glaciated highland, and descend on Norse settlements from both the sea (which they were masters of) and the high ground (which they could handle, albeit at great risk).
- And with that mastery, food and lots of it. While the Norse were commiting ecocide and collective suicide by tearing up their own meadows for building materials and fuel for their hearths, the Inuit were living large off the bounty of the sea, which was now out of the range of the Norse, who lacked boats of any sort, and even if they had sufficient wood to build a skin-covered frame boat, they lacked the millenia of inherited expertise in their use that came with being an Inuit. And finally, the Norse lacked the skills or even the inclination to learn how to hunt for ring seals, which live year-round in Greenland waters, even in the winter, and often make the difference between needing a diet and enduring a famine for the Inuit.
A disinclination to change.
The Greenlander Norse saw themselves as (a) the original and (b) the superior civilization on Greenland. Their inclination was to treat the Inuit as beastly interlopers, and their stand to maintain European civilization, albeit in a limited form, on the ultimate (to them) frontier as a vocation, to the end, if need be. They intended to die before changing. Perhaps they could have changed, attempted to trade for supplies from the Inuit, had they begun soon enough to avoid a genocidal vendetta and soon enough to have something to trade. Shy of that, the Norse could have spent less time tearing up their meadows and more time making runs for iron and timber from the Labrador coast, where both were plentiful. And, had they responded to the message that the ships were no longer coming regularly, and perhaps it might be a good idea to bail, that would have been an option, too. Or, in extremis, acknowledging by the example of a superior competitor that perhaps the pastoral life was over for Greenland, and suing for incorporation into Inuit society was as good as it was going to get.
By the time any such notions were possible to the staunchly conservative Greenlander Norse, the only thing the Inuit required of them, and the only thing they had to give the Inuit, was their lives.
Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that the Inuit killed Norse and left them to rot where they fell; they were simply too dangerous -- and, in Inuit eyes, too stupid to be allowed to live.
What's that got to do with oil?
Well, I suppose I should get on with it.
1. There is no need for a next great innovation to save our civilization; the answers are abundant, and available off the shelf, and have been for decades, some for eons: Change, in ways great and small, to accommodate the limited resources of a planet, to conserve a surplus and dedicate it for the purpose of developing new forms of energy and material wealth from the many, many sources of both that are available on this one planet and, just as a side bet for now, continue with the exploration of the other worlds in the Solar System, to learn their unique geochemical processes and develop new approaches, new catalysts, new fuels, new modes of chemistry and physics from those lessons using Earth-borne materials.
As for energy: it is not as concentrated as oil, but solar energy is the way to rock, and the most efficient vehicle for that energy was and remains wind power, and the power of running water.
As for materials: potable water is the ultimate critical resource; there is no negotiating around the cost to Humanity of despoiling this resource, upon which not only civilization but almost all land life on this planet depends. And much of our civilization now depends on organics -- the substances of life -- and destroying habit is a death sentence to the most advanced technologies currently at our disposal -- skills we will need, when the time comes to not just conserve, but heal, the single, unified habitat that is Earth.
As for conserving habitat: There are simply too many of us. Any ethics that insists on perpetual population growth and denies bottom-up management of decisions to contraceive, and access to methods of same is an affront to common sense and assurance that innocents who should never come to be are doomed to die, most horribly, in conditions of abject material and spiritual destitution.
We must reduce our numbers. We must continue to innovate. We must take advantage of the superlatively abundant and reliable energy that falls on our heads every day, or breezes past us even at night. We must change.
The Norse did not; all they wound up doing was painting themselves into a deadly corner, with neighbors that had every advantage and, after repeated affronts, no inclination to be magnanimous, and no escape possible.
Perhaps we should consider their example: We, too, are living beyond our means with an island that, under current circumstances, none of us can escape, and where flight possible, there is as yet no asylum in sight.