By Gene Ogorodov
Opponents of the Peak Oil Theory invariably turn to Thomas Gold's Abiotic Oil Theory which proposes that oil (and all other hydorcarbons) are not by products of bio-matterial. Rather, the theory suggests, oil is a naturally occurring carbon byproduct of the earth's mantle. Other than a chemical experiment at Carnegie Mellon that produced natural gas under conditions that mirrored the earth's mantle, I have no idea what to make of the theory. Gold might be right, but the conventional explanation might also be correct. Eventually scientific experimentation will show the world a likely answer.
However, the ambiguity of the origin of oil should not give one hope that the Hydrocarbon Age will last forever. The crisis of Peak Oil is not that there will be no more oil in the future, but that current rates of consumption are unsustainable. Considering that since the early 1980's the world has consumed more barrels of oil per year than it discovered necessitates that the fears of over consumption are true.
Whether oil is naturally replenishing or a finite natural resource doesn't really matter if the world is consuming it more rapidly than it grows. If it doesn't grow at all then that level was reached in the 1860's, but if it is naturally replenishing at a constant rate M then the quantity of oil will remain stable if and only if the rate of consumption N is less than M. Given that current economic models necessitate growth, N will eventually be greater than M. Thus easy cheap oil will also eventually be exhausted.
Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, describes the advantage the ancient Fertile Crescent had with naturally growing large seed grasses, viz. wheat and barley. That resulted in the first permanent towns and villages in the world, which date to about
10,000 years ago, predating the agricultural revolution.
One doesn't have to go to the Middle East to know that that came to an end. What happened? Human beings consumed a naturally replenishing resource faster than it could regenerate. It is not beyond belief that the threat posed to the societies of those early non-migratory hunter-gatherers by the overconsumption of wild wheat and barley necessitated that agricultural revolution.
Likewise we too will have to change our society to be much more sustainable, possibly, in the very near future. Energy consumption based solely on demand and not upon the finite realities of our planet cannot continue indefinitely. Furthermore, the externalities caused by unbridled consumption of fossil fuels threatens the live not just our species but the lives of every life form on this globe.
We have come to a crossroads with two choices. We can either build a new world with societies based on community, sustainability, and harmony with nature, leaving our children and our grandchildren a world that they can live in, enjoy, and pass on to future generations; or we can despoil it--leaving neither the vast majority of our contemporaries nor our posterity access to basic means of survival. Unfortunately, it seems that our generation has chosen the latter.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors,
we steal it from our children.
-Native American Proverb-
