"We created this modern industrial way of life because we had the cheap oil to do it with, enabling us to manufacture more stuff and transport it further distances. So that's lead to more GDP growth year after year after year. But if oil is a finite resource & if we're getting to the end of the low hanging-fruit, if we are having to search further and digg deeper all the time to get lower-quality resources. That has got to have some impact on the economy. And that's exactly what's going on ... The idea of course [with peak oil] is that as we finish off with the low-hanging fruits, we are getting to a point where oil is getting more & more expensive to produce, harder to produce & production hits a maximum & begins to decline ... And very few people understand what's going on. They think it's all a problem within the financial system, they completely miss the fact that it has to do with natural resources ... We should have started this energy transition back in the 1970ies, but what happened was in the 1980ies, oil got very cheap again, and that took away the incentives that we had had in the 70ies to begin in experimenting with solar and wind power ... And here we are today & we have very little time to make the transition and very little investment capital ... We are in for a very difficult few decades ... It's the end of a certain kind of economy, a growth-based, fast-paced economy that is constantly globalizing all sorts of processes of production and consumption. We are headed instead toward an economy that is shrinking, that is becoming more localized ... Over the curse of the 20th century, we were creating technologies to use an abundance of cheap, concentrated energy. In the 21st century, we'll be inventing tools to enable us to do things more easily using less in the way of fossil fuel energy & that's gonna be just as big a challenge. As oil gets more expensive & scarce, we'll be going to need to use it more intelligently. We're enormously dependent on this stuff. So we are going to have to do a little triage, figure out where we really still need to use oil, let's say for food production, particulary in grain production ... So we wanna preserve some oil for that, for necessary transportation, for hospitals ... But do we still wanna use oil for driving half a mile to get to the movie theater? No! It's too precious & there is too little of it left. And it would be great if we would have left some of this stuff for our children & grand-children. They might think of something really cool to do with it. But the way we are going right now, there is going to be none left. They will not have that opportunity."
Zum Interview [dank freundlichem Hinweis von Dr. Colin Campbell] mit Richard Heinberg, geführt von Kirsten Dirksen (26. Oktober 2011) »
Zum Interview [dank freundlichem Hinweis von Dr. Colin Campbell] mit Richard Heinberg, geführt von Kirsten Dirksen (26. Oktober 2011) »
