The "Other" Sustainable

I am a “peak oiler”. I believe that oil is a billion years of sunlight stored conveniently in dead organisms and compressed into a convenient, consumable, liquid that we discovered 100 years ago (.1% of human history). We are ripping through it like a rabid dog rips through its dinner, without thought for what to do tomorrow or how wasteful the process is. Oil is of course finite and its consumption by definition unsustainable. But it’s not my point.

Oil has fueled the growth of the human race more that anything else could ever hope to and has taken us from 1 billion people to 7 billion people in 100 years. This word “growth” is what I want to say a couple things about.

We ASSUME growth has to exist, will always exist, and anything else is unfathomable. This is mainly evident in economic and population statistics but believe that measures of those things are indicative of just about everything else.

We look at our debt problems and assume we can grow out of them. We look at Social Security and other safety net programs and assume it’s easy for “more new people” to take care of “fewer old people”. All of this is nothing short of Ponzi thinking.

And when growth does not happen for a brief period of time, we have dramatic words for it. We’re in a recession! The horror! The population of Detroit SHRUNK! And to some extent, these things are horrible. Our societies have been built to be wholly unprepared for anything other than growth.

Yet when something cannot continue forever, it of course will stop. Yes, our growth will stop. But forecasts for just about anything are simply an answer to “what degree of growth” will we experience? Never, WILL it get bigger? And to some extent, they are simply trying to be accurate. We are generally not shrinking.

But what happens when we get to that point and more importantly, do we have any idea that that day is coming someday? I would say we do not. And do we have any idea the speed at which that end will hit us? When people are asked a quick thought experiment that sounds something like:

If a bacteria is expanding within a closed test tube, is doubling every minute, and takes exactly one hour to fill the allowed space, at what point was it half full?

People will usually say something like “with 20 minutes or so left” in the hour. The answer of course is at the beginning of the 60th minute. Even at that moment, where the bacteria is speeding towards it’s death and has about 2% of it’s life left, things probably seemed relatively peaceful. Lots of air left; look how prosperous we’ve become, right?

But that couldn’t happen to people, right? Something like oil consumption is only increasing at 7% a year. We can handle that, right? Well that means it’s doubling every decade. To make a stronger statement (but the same one mathematically), it’s like saying each decade, we use the same oil as ALL DECADES BEFORE THAT. Here’s a picture of that:

Are we really prepared to deal with this? Are we sure that things like this won’t cause societies to come to a screeching halt?

I don’t know if we should be worried or not, but it’s pretty interesting.