by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Throughout history the richer countries have grown by relying on power sources and technologies that generate massive amounts of emissions, the so-called greenhouse gases, which are the major cause for climate change and the warming of the Planet.
This now is posing a serious dilemma to the poorer nations of the world that also want to attain a higher standard of living and economy. Should they stop improving the lives of their people to avoid generating the additional greenhouse gases that would cause massive damage to the world or should they try to press ahead with growth despite of the consequences?
To all intents and purposes this is a rather serious situation and we can see that time and again at the meetings on climate change when we get to absolutely no agreements because the developing nations state that they want to develop to a standard such as the likes of the USA, the UK, Germany, and similar. This dilemma can be solved only through promoting innovation.
But, is the standard in the rich countries such as the USA, and others, really one to be aspiring to, seeing it came on the backs of the poor and on that of the environment? Personally I do not think so.
On the other hand, however, when the end of “cheap” oil arrives which, according to a number of think tanks on the subject, could be as early as 2013 there will no longer be those questions as the richer countries will no longer be able to stride ahead either in polluting the place. This is rather a positive outcome, I should think.
With “cheap” oil coming to an end the growth no longer can be maintained nor attained and things will change drastically, and thus the greening will happen, though we should make every effort to make it happen already now; the greening that is.
The fact is that once “cheap” oil is beginning to go and going then the developed countries will be reverting very much to the same way of doing things that are currently in use in other, not so developed countries, from Poland and Romania all the way to the poorer regions of South America and elsewhere.
I doubt that we will then, in our respective countries and globally, be worrying any longer as to whether the economy is growing and all that jazz. Our worries will be where to find enough space to grow the food needed to feed the population of our individual countries and as to how to run our towns and cities.
The economy, whether domestic or globally, will not be much of concern to any of us, least of all the ordinary person in the street, and that applies in the same measure to those of us in the developed countries as to people in countries of the developing world.
The end of cheap oil will create a much more level playing field and we all will be, more or less, in deep trouble when it arrives.
© 2010
To learn more about Peak Oil, how it could affect you and what a society post Oil Age might look like get and read the book “The End of Oil”. You can obtain the book via http://the-end-of-oil.blogspot.com/
