Peak Oil

Every now and then when I use my mother's van I will chip in for fuel. Not very often - I think it's expensive. But I still drive, slightly less often than once a week. And since the tank was nearing empty when I last drove it, I decided to go fill up the tank again.

So I took the Shell card from the other car, and drove down to the petrol kiosk. I parked it there, let the attendant fill it up, and went to pay up. When I got to the cashier, there were 2 pleasant surprises. First, I got a free large slurpee. (For those of you familiar with 7-11, "large" really means small because the only other size is "giant". But I wasn't complaining.) The other pleasant surprise is that they told me that I could redeem $20 worth of diesel from the shell card. Which I did, since that would lessen the pinch a bit. So a full tank for just $27, and a slurpee thrown in.

And I was feeling real good about all that until this morning, when I saw this. Yes, fellars, it's true. Peak oil is not an invention by crazy people. It is really true. Some people think it has already happened. There will be a day, and for most of us, it will take place in our lifetime, when most of it is gone, and there is a permanent shortage. So either people quickly discover a new source of energy, or ... can you imagine what it's like? You think it was terrible, in Iraq, people killing and fighting each other over oil? What's going to happen will make that look very very trivial in comparison.

Yeh, you might say. But aren't the oil prices back to normal? No, not really. What happened was that the credit crunch was a stay of execution. First, the slowdown in the economy means that demand for oil dropped. Secondly, somebody probably persuaded the Arabs that we need world peace, so please pump out as much oil as you possibly could, because we aren't smart enough to deal with two crises at the same time. So oil prices went all the way down. But sooner or later, it will go back up to what it was like in 2006 / 2007. And then we'll see.

Yes, don't try to deny it. Most people are in denial, and the shittier the situation, the more vehement the denial. They denied that World War II was going to happened - that's why it happened, because if enough people believed that it was going to happen, it wouldn't happen. They would have stopped it, stopped all the mistakes that led to it.

Well, whatever. Yeah yeah. Toodle loo...