Petroleum, Growth, Mobility and the End of the World

Anyone doubting that our entire political structure rests on petroleum need only follow the Republican Party's attacks on President Obama on the (very thin) premise that he is responsible for rises in oil prices. As the GOP has said in the past, when it was defending President Bush from such complaints, there is very little the White House can do about retail gas prices. But Romney and Santorum and Gingrich all know that we are all deeply dependent on cheap fuel, and it makes political sense to associate anxiety about that dependence with the incumbent.

But our reliance on gas goes way beyond this kid of superficial political chatter. Almost every assumption we make about our society rests on cheap gas. The "growth paradigm" requires abundant, easily accessible fuel not only for the transportation of people and goods, but the generation of electricity. All of our communication, relies, directly or indirectly, on refined petroleum either in the form of fuel or plastic. In turn, our educational system depends on the physical mobility of parents and children. Feeding ourselves no longer is possible using regionally-produced food, and therefore depends on long-haul transportation. Nothing, from the Super Bowl to our sewer systems, can function without petroleum.

Since petroleum is not infinite, this whole system is doomed to collapse. I say this not as a moral judgment but as a historical reality. It can't work forever. Our conversations, then, need to acknowledge that the paradigm on which all our other behavior rests is on the verge of failure. Continued insistence that all we need is to prop it here or there sounds like the same head-in-the-sand nonsense uttered by critics of Galileo's theory of heliocentrism.

It does not matter whether Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" about climate change is right in all the details; it does not matter whether Bill McKibben's apocalyptic descriptions of the near future will ever come to fruition. The fact is that we must begin to adjust. There is no "or else." The only options lie in how and when we adjust. The longer we wait to accept that the world has already changed beyond the functioning of our paradigm, the fewer choices remain available to us.

The Earth will continue to exist, but our world, as we know it will not. It's a matter of time.