When the oil runs out, people will need horses again

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

When the oil runs out, we will need horses again and also oxen, donkeys and other draft animals and what is often called “beasts of burden”.

“Oh, but we will have electric vehicles instead of the gas powered cars, vans and trucks, etc.” I hear almost everyone say now. Really? I do not think so as the feasibility of this is zero without the power to make them and to charge them and, in addition to that, EVs will never have the power to carry the 35 tons or more of freight on the road, not even 3.5 tons, and as to farm works, electric tractors pulling the plow is not going to happen.

And, even if we could create electric motors capable of doing such jobs there is and remains the problem of the rare earths – and there is good reason why they are called rare earths – that are required for the making of such vehicles, motors and especially the batteries. On top of that comes the problem that those batteries have a lifespan of about 3-5 years at the most, if that long, and then need replacing at costs that are almost have the cost of the vehicles themselves. Does anyone still see this to be the way? I can't. And the same goes for hydrogen fuel cells and all that jazz. Methane, from sewage and such, could work but it all depends on whether manufacturing capacity will still exist to make tractors and other vehicles.

Personally, I cannot see that with lack of fossil fuels (and we all know that nuclear is not an option) the factories will continue to be able to make those cars, trucks and tractors, etc. Either manufacture of those will be done again more or less by hand, thus pushing the prices to such heights that they will become unaffordable, or it just is no longer happening.

If the latter is the case – and even if some will still be made with high prices which will be affordable but too a large minority, if at all – then the horse for transportation and farming will be, once again, the only option. Plus some of the other animals that have, through the ages, been used as draft animals and for carrying goods (and people).

For personal transportation the horse will not be possible for a great many people, especially those that live in towns and cities, but then neither will be the car; at least not in the way that we know them today. The great majority will have to, for their personal transportation, revert back to what we used before the advent of the motor car, namely human power, in the form of walking and cycling.

Even if the electric car and truck will ever make it – though due to lack of power for manufacturing them and their batteries, as well as the rare earths mentioned earlier, I cannot see it happening – the prices will become out of the reach of the majority of those that use a car today.

Farming, as it is being carried out in the main in the so-called developed nations today with the huge machines and the large acreages will also end up being a thing of the past. There is simply no way, with the exception, maybe of using methane, that is to say poo-power, to power tractors, trucks and combines.

So, it will be a return to more people on the land working the land by hand and by use of draft animals, which will, predominately, no doubt, be the horse, who has been our loyal servant in this field (pardon the pun) for centuries and more before the advent of the machines, and this is not all that long ago.

Not so long ago our countryside was a lot more populated than it is today because people worked the land to feed the nation although the more and more mechanization came into agricultural and other rural trades the more people headed for the cities to try their luck there, though many of those were not just agricultural laborers that had lost their jobs due to mechanization but they were smallholders and small farmers who had lost their land, and land to which they had common rights, in the various land grabs of the previous centuries; land grabs by the feudal lords to enlarge their estates.

© 2017

#GreenLiving #oil #horses #endofoil

Has the End of Oil arrived?

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Some while ago there were many who were still poo-pooing the notion of “Peak Oil” and the “End of Oil” and the “End of the Oil Age” but recent developments definitely seem to be indicating this.

It would thus appear that my recently published small tome entitled “The End of Oil” is a very timely arrival then.

In February 2010 the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) published a report entitled “Oil Crunch” (http://peakoiltaskforce.net/download-the-report/2010-peak-oil-report/) where they seems to be running rather scared of the prospects of us all running out of the black and sticky stuff.

Now, in the beginning of July 2010 it was announced, and even though it went across the wires the media the world over stayed stumm, that the King of Saudi Arabia has ordered and end to all oil exploration in the Kingdom (http://community.nasdaq.com/news/2010-07/has-peak-oil-arrived.aspx?storyid=29215).

While he claims that he did this in order to preserve some of the oil and its wealth for their children and grandchildren it would appear that the truth might be somewhat different and they do not want to let the world know that there is, in fact, none of the black stuff left.

However, it is a known fact that Saudi Arabia's oil wells are nigh on empty, totally and thus this exercise is somewhat futile. It also means that the biggest producer has run dry and that means oil will, inevitably, go up in price once again and this time it, more than likely, will stay high and go higher and higher.

The USA has had a Congressional Peak Oil Caucus for many years already but very few people seem to be aware of this and few in Britain, I am sure, have been aware of the fact that British industry has one of those things as well.

While it may not be a governmental one as in the USA the fact that British industry – and the guys involved are not on the fringes – is having a Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security should tell us something.

The great majority of people in Britain have been thinking the people in the Transition Movement slightly bonkers with their talk, like myself, about “Peak Oil” and needing to transition to a post oil age world.

The fact that industry is taking the issue of “Peak Oil” and us running out of it very serious indeed should be a wake-up call to everyone who is still sleeping or slumbering.

We better get used to the fact that soon the car will become part of history in the same way that the dinosaurs did and that we will have to go back to other ways of transportation, including walking, cycling and the use of the horse, as riding animal and propulsion for the carriage. So, it is a return from the horseless carriage to the horse-drawn one.

Peak Oil also is becoming more and more now something that the mainstream media, such as BBC Radio 4 is beginning to talk about and a very interesting research on this was done for iPM by Hugh Sykes, broadcast on Saturday, July 24, 2010, and the podcast can be had via the BBC Radio 4 website under iPM.

There are still some ultimate optimists about though, such as Physicist and Mathematician Michael Soper who, basically, claims that the oil will last for ever. I am afraid though that those are rather misguided and hearing Mr Soper I must say also live in somewhat cloud-cuckoo land.

It is an established fact that all our fossil fuels are finite and the warning against basing out economy was given already in the last years of the 19^th century by scientists then.

More coal and oil has been found since but, the other point is that we are not, in fact, running out of all oil that exist on Earth; just out of the stuff that can be cheaply and cost-effectively be gotten out of the ground.

© 2010

My book “The End of Oil” can be purchased via http://the-end-of-oil.blogspot.com/. I am sure that this will be £3.95 for an E-book well spent.

How will the End of Oil arrive?

Will it be by stealth in increments or will it be over night?

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The answer is not an easy one for it could be either or the two or both.

We have already gone past “Peak Oil”; at least according to most of he experts, and we must, therefore, anticipate the end of cheap oil to be upon us very soon indeed.

The way we may be feeling it initially will be via ever increasing fuel prices at the pumps which the governments will be blaming on the greed of the oil companies and while there is some truth in that – they are running out of the stuff so they want to make as much profit before they have to change what they do – most of the increases will be due to the fact that they are running out of the easily extractable oil.

The BP Deep Water Horizon rig disaster in late May 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico is also due, in part, to this.

They were in a hurry to bring that well, just recently opened, on stream and tried to save – for reasons as much as costs – and left out the second blowout preventer, which would have been the norm.

This action points to the fact that we are already in trouble as far as oil supplies are concerned.

The cost of extracting oil from the Tar Sands, which is a case of expending about half a barrel of oil to gain one, also points to the desperate situation and the oil company geologists and the governments know full well that the “normal” oil wells are running dry and that many of them have basically done so already.

As both the oil companies and our governments are fully aware of the fact that cheap oil, at least, is running out and will soon be history, and all the oils that can still be extracted at a reasonable costs, initially everything will happen incrementally, I should think, in that fuel prices will rise to such an extent that the ordinary punter will no longer be able to afford to drive and the ordinary farmer no longer be able to afford to run his machines.

But the other possibility also remains and that it is going to happen with a quiet bang, overnight, without a warning.

Overnight, literally, without a warning, the gas stations will be shut and that those still left open will be for use by government vehicles only and will be guarded, with the use of deadly force authorized.

The ordinary you and I will find ourselves high and dry and will find that those guards, who will have, as said, authority to shoot to kill, will keep everyone away from the still existing gas supplies.

This means that, either way, the ordinary driver – of which I am not one, as I do not drive – will not be able to get any gas, aside from the fact that most of us would not be able to afford it.

Five dollars a gallon will then appear cheap to the Americans and fifteen Pounds a gallon for the British, who always were used to high prices, really, due to the high fuel taxes in the United Kingdom.

While the incremental will happen I am more convinced that we will get faced with the event of “zero gas” in an overnight action.

We will find that from one day to the next most gas stations will have no longer any gas, and the gas that they had will have been transferred to elsewhere and the ones that will be open still will be left open for use by government vehicles only. The ordinary person will no longer have access to gasoline or diesel and, more than likely, even heating oil.

Without gas most people will be stuck where they are and many cars may, in fact, fail on the road for lack of fuel while their owners are driving around looking for open gas stations that will serve them.

Being unable to drive their cars will mean that getting to and from work will be a little on the difficult side, to say the very least. It is not easy commuting by bicycle from Hayward's Heath to London, and such.

The lack of suddenly not being able to drive, considering the kind of car-oriented culture that we are in most of Europe and North America (and Australia), could mean serious problems indeed, especially in that some people, believing that they are “entitled” to gas for their cars might get rather angry, to put it mildly.

When we suddenly find ourselves in this situation, a Mad Max scenario is easily imaginable. A scenario of riots in the streets with people demanding fuel for cars and homes where there is none – to some degree – and armed police and the military being used to suppress such demonstrations and riots.

Let me once again say that I am surmising here as I neither have a working crystal ball nor a direct line to the heavenly rulers, and neither do the governments or the so-called faith leaders, by the way.

This does sound, I know, all more than a little doom and gloom but what I am trying to do is issue a warning that these are possibilities and probabilities that might soon be upon us. Then again it could all be a smooth and easy transition.

The governments are trying the damnedest to get people out of their cars, and have been trying to do this ever since the 1970s, employing various ploys and reasons, and into walking, onto their bikes and into pubic transport. So far with very little result.

Taking the hint and transitioning to a more-or-less car-free world would help a great deal and some people are already doing it and it will be those that are best equipped for it when it all goes pear shaped. Those that do not will be in for rather a rude awakening.

To try to change from a dependence of the car virtually overnight to walking or using just a bicycle is not going to be easy for those that have really know no other way but the car and who are not prepared for it on a mental and physical level; and that is just on a personal transportation level.

It could all be a slow process and people may have time preparing for it and getting used to it or it could be a case of the powers-that-be turning the tap off overnight, and in a way I believe it will be a mix of the two.

Initially, my guess is that the tap will be gradually turned off, so to speak, by increments in that fuel prices will rise more and more on an almost daily basis until gas becomes too expensive to afford for most ordinary people, this is then, as the final act, I believe, going to be followed by the tap being turned off entirely for all mere mortals.

Without having, obviously, a direct wire to the future and the oracle I suggest we prepare for the worst and that is end of gas or diesel for personal motorcar use overnight and hope for an easier transition to a no-fuel event.

© 2010

This is an extract from the book “The End of Oil” by this author. The book can be purchased on http://the-end-of-oil.blogspot.com/.