CleanBeta

Peak Oil & the ‘Other’ Energy Race — Part 1

The cover story in Vanity Fair’s earth-day issue — The Artic Oil Rush — is a brilliantly crafted narrative replete with gorgeous writing, compelling dialog and rich anecdotes. Otherwise, its trash.

The libraries of the world will soon start to yawn over endless recapitulations of oil scrambles, races and rushes. The oil age has ended and the scrambles we see playing out for the last of the black gold is a different beast entirely from the great imperial conquests of yesteryear. Those were inspired with dreams of grandeur and glory and well-beyond our wildest imagination. Today, the drama unfolding in the Arctic and the coastal waters of western Africa and other remote locales around the world are quixotic spasms driven by fear more than possibility. Who gets the oil in the Arctic? I certainly hope it’s not Russia, but I don’t think it ultimately matters.

Oil’s monopoly on our modern energy economy won’t vanish, but in the coming decade oil and other fossil fuels will gradually recede the way AM radio and the passenger train have slowly receded from the mainstream. Human destiny depends on energy choices made today and oil is among the most irrational choices on the table. Nobody can simply pull the plug without bringing the economy to a crashing halt, but neither can we afford to indulge the false hope that fossil fuels are viable options for our long term energy future.

The twin challenges of rising global demand and climate change have made oil an agent of the apocalypse.

The world physically cannot sustain the ethos and values associated with contemporary humanity if we don’t find better and cheaper source of energy.If oil plumbed out of the Artic seabed is the key to global power in 20 years, the world will have much bigger problems than geopolitics.

**This is the first post in an ongoing series on the race to invent new clean energy sources.