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Petroleum’s end game part one
Evidence that we’ve reached Peak Oil, the limits of how much petroleum can be produced is everywhere if you know where to look. Any peak is followed by a fall and there’s evidence the decline has started. That’s why we need a new energy paradigm, a way to replace the fossil energy we use today with sources that won’t pollute or run out.
There’s a fundamental question in business and economics about when you cut over from an old paradigm to a new one and it involves more than energy. For instance, at some point we converted from mainframe computers to PC networks and today we use handheld devices and Wi-Fi quite a bit. Older paradigms are still with us but in greatly diminished form. It’s easy to note those changes in retrospect but how many of us can say we called the moment or recall when we changed over personally?
Today we’re watching the first deployments of electric cars, charging stations and renewable energy. They’re still curiosities for many of us but at some future point when we’re all driving electrics, we’ll probably look back trying to figure out when the conversion happened. We’ll also want to ask what the driving factors were. With technology and electric devices now available and becoming better and less expensive we’ve arrived at a tipping point. What might that point be? Perhaps the decline of petroleum and rising costs will provide a hint.
