Everything. Everything around us from the our television, our fancy cars, our heaters, cool air, even how our food is processed is all helped produced from one main factor. This factor is fossil fuel/oil. Without fossil fuel everything we see in front of our faces would not even exist. What is fossil fuel or oil? When Andy asked the question of what oil is and where it came from no one seemed to really give a credible answer. I did not even know where it comes from. This is really ironic because fossil fuel, the thing that keeps our lives running the way that it does every single blinking moment, and yet we do not even know what it really is or how it is made. Why is fossil fuel so important? I think all that needs to be cleared into people's heads is that it's important because literally almost everything is made from oil. My amazing laptop in which I do these wonderful blogs off of use energy which is used from oil.
In our present time apparently we have already reached our oil peak. Our oil peak supposedly happened in 2005 or 2006. According to the Energy Bulletin (Oil Peak Primer) "Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource, one that has powered phenomenal economic and population growth over the last century and a half." There is only a certain amount of oil and a oil peak indicates that about 1/2 of that oil has already been wasted. Some effects of the waste of oil is the increase of prices. "Oil and gas are feedstocks for plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electronic components, tyres and much more." The fact that all these resources, food, power run from oil the fact that as oil decreases is will make the value go up which most likely will increase the price of everything/ every resource. I guess showing how important it is you can compare it to the collapse of Easter Island. Easter Island use to be an a rich, beautiful, tropical place which many natural resources. Unfortunately now they almost live in complete nothingness. Their health is horrible and their diets are horrible because of the lack in natural resources. Where did their natural resources go? For the islanders they build they huge massive statues, in order to make these statues they needed to use large amounts of natural resources around them. One for example is the trees. These statues were of great value to these islanders as they represented their wealth status. The bigger and nicer the statue, it showed off your wealth and status. Thus making the islanders a very competitive groups of people. The more natural resources they wasted the bigger their statues. The main thing they wasted were the trees, they chopped down all the trees to roll these statues and such and the extreme loss in trees completely caused a collapse in their society. How does this connect to America? Basically it was stated in class which is really true which is that fossil fuel is like the trees in Easter Island. As we waste all the oil we will eventual cause a collapse in our society since oil makes everything!
I first described the part in which I learned about in class and in discussions/ lectures. There is a second way in which I think of these topic although I am not so sure I am correct but I will still write about it since we did not spend much time on this collapse unit. I think eventually obviously we will run out of oil but I feel like maybe the more richer countries such as America and China will collapse slower then other poorer countries such as Africa if that makes sense? The reason for this is that since America is a more richer country it will be able to afford oil more to keep our lifestyle going longer. Although this may cause conflict because as oil gets more expensive there will be disproportionate wealth of nations, richer companies will be able to afford oil which can create conflict. For example my dad told me that it's like Japan attacked China for natural resources. I am not sure if this would be realistic or true but maybe since we will be able to keep our lifestyle going longer then poorer countries, scientifically maybe we would be able to develop replacements for oil just in time before oil runs out in 20 to 50 years. For example i researched about some things they eventually made to replace wasting resources: one is rubber. Apparently during world war two there was a big need for rubber and most rubber was made from "rubber trees" (what I call them) which are basically trees that produce a rubber base. Before we wasted these trees we eventually made synthetic rubber. So I was wondering if it maybe be possible hat long before we run out of oil and our earth comes to a stand still will America or our Earth be able to develope a replacement or "synthetic" to our oil?
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Chloe -
Smart first grappling with these complicated ideas. Most people agree with your 2nd theory - the rich countries (rich defined by heavy use of fossil fuels for a century - which has produced great abundance of goods and services) will be able to leverage the oil better than less industrialized countries. An increasing issue there though is sometimes called "resource nationalism" - many of the 3rd world countries with oil will keep increasing amounts for themselves!
There are many predictions to how this will play out - for sanity's sake don't use metaphors like "earth stand still". That's a metaphor that WAAAAY overemphasizes the importance of humans. Over the summer consider reading Ishmael (Quinn) and "The World Without Us" and (if you're really brave) "Culture of Make Believe" (Jensen). Let me know if you read any one of them - we'll write back and forth about it.
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