Oil scarcity may be the solution to global warming, but just the beginning of our difficulties

Oil scarcity may ease the dynamic that is producing global warming.

Final exhaustion of this dwindling finite resource, the elephant in the room, will see the collapse of the world’s industrial complex and as it crashes over the abyss, with it will largely go the human contribution to carbon dioxide.

Above: The image used
to portray a town in
transition.

The damage we have done to the atmosphere will, according to leading climatologists, will be with us for thousands of years, and so that moment will not end the difficulty, just not worsen it.
The end of oil, depending what advice you take, is 30 years away or double that if you listen to the optimists.
Others argue that such a moment will not really matter too much as technology, and human ingenuity, is simply waiting in the wings for its call to centre stage.
A few things – our ingenuity will ease the coming difficulties; technology won’t, or can’t, help; the end of oil will not be the end of our difficulties, in fact, it will be just the beginning.As industry, as we know and understand it, crashes into oblivion, so goes the financial superstructure on which the world’s welfare hinges, along with our ability to feed the world’s billions.
Listening recently to Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, Mike Hulme, it was interesting to hear that the one hiccough in the past 200 years to man’s contribution to carbon dioxide came with the Global Financial Crisis about four years ago.
As the world’s economic system spiraled out of control, industrial systems slowed noticeably, equally slowing our consumption and in turn denting humanity’s global carbon dioxide output.
The end of oil will damage, even more dramatically, the world’s economy and so reduce even further our carbon dioxide output.
So that is the good news – the end of oil eases significantly our damage to the atmosphere, but with it comes the bad news, difficulties we can’t imagine.
Everything that makes life as we know it complete, from food to football and trains to tampons, exist because of oil.
This elephant in the room, the exhaustion of the world’s oil, is rarely acknowledged and being something hugely exhausting to think about, it is sort of mentally discarded with the rationalized cover-up being “technology will solve the problem”.
It is mainly those actively involved with the Transition Towns movement who willingly talk about what will be a pivotal moment in humanity’s history and who are actively preparing both themselves and hopefully their respective communities.
The Goulburn Valley is fortunate to have a transition group working, almost beneath the public radar, in Tatura hoping it can prepare individuals and the wider community for this challenging moment.