Introducing the Wonder of the Oil Age
Here is a litre of oil. It is an extraordinary thing. The oil in this bottle contains more energy than you would create doing hard physical work for five weeks. Just in this small bottle. It has made us powerful beyond the imaginings of previous generations, able to change landscapes, eat foods from the other side of the world in defiance of the seasons, travel the world as though we had 7 League Boots, and break, for the first time, our connection to the land beneath our feet.
It can also be transformed into the dazzling array of plastics, glues, materials and products that fill our homes, workplaces and shops. We make our medicines from it, and our food system has become a system for turning it into food. Were we to pick our lives up and wring them out, they would drip with oil. Yet this level of oil dependency, which once determined our degree of prosperity and success, now determines how vulnerable we are. While in many ways the oil in this bottle has brought us wonderful things and extraordinary opportunities, we need, as Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency is now telling the world’s governments, to “leave oil before oil leaves us.”
As part of the oral history interviews that start in part two, we asked the late Douglas Matthews of Staverton, shortly before his 100th birthday, whether he considered the Oil Age he lived through to have been a blessing or a curse:
“A blessing. But it was also a blessing for the type of wars we were able to fight. Is it a blessing if you put the two together? I don’t know. I am very glad though to have lived through the period that I have lived through.”
4 comments on “Introducing the Wonder of the Oil Age”
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One liter of oil takes a 4×4 car 6 miles = 5 people towing it up & down small slopes for one mile would probably take a days work. Big gradients would be impossible. Electric cars powered from renewable sources will probably / hopefully become the only new cars for sale within 10 years.
“Electric cars powered by renewable sources of energy” sounds nice, but…have you taken into account the special resources needed to build such cars, the amount of infrastructure needed to supply them with the tremendous amount of energy needed to power them and who will be the privileged to enjoy this cars and to what end, with what benefit to society? With what consequences?
We are having a tantrum, like little kids or drug addicts, DON’T TAKE MY CAR AWAY!!!
Well children, it is time to grow up and face the fact that this is the planet you are lucky to inhabit and it has its limits, learn to live in it or perish.
Francisco
Behavioral change based on our attitudes is going to underpin many of the real changes we make. Well said.
Electric cars are part of the solution, along with electric cycles, buses and trains, but it will take a lot of effort to get people to switch when they are so much more expensive. So why not advertise them as something that has free fuel (just get a solar panel and get paid for generating electricity through feed in tariffs)