The Global Energy Crisis Deepens: Three Energy Developments That Are Changing Your Life

from TomDispatch:




The Global Energy Crisis Deepens
Three Energy Developments That Are Changing Your Life

By Michael T. Klare


Here’s the good news about energy: thanks to rising oil prices and deteriorating economic conditions worldwide, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global oil demand will not grow this year as much as once assumed, which may provide some temporary price relief at the gas pump. In its May Oil Market Report, the IEA reduced its 2011 estimate for global oil consumption by 190,000 barrels per day, pegging it at 89.2 million barrels daily. As a result, retail prices may not reach the stratospheric levels predicted earlier this year, though they will undoubtedly remain higher than at any time since the peak months of 2008, just before the global economic meltdown. Keep in mind that this is the good news.

As for the bad news: the world faces an array of intractable energy problems that, if anything, have only worsened in recent weeks. These problems are multiplying on either side of energy’s key geological divide: below ground, once-abundant reserves of easy-to-get “conventional” oil, natural gas, and coal are drying up; above ground, human miscalculation and geopolitics are limiting the production and availability of specific energy supplies. With troubles mounting in both arenas, our energy prospects are only growing dimmer.

Here’s one simple fact without which our deepening energy crisis makes no sense: the world economy is structured in such a way that standing still in energy production is not an option. In order to satisfy the staggering needs of older industrial powers like the United States along with the voracious thirst of rising powers like China, global energy must grow substantially every year. According to the projections of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), world energy output, based on 2007 levels, must rise 29% to 640 quadrillion British thermal units by 2025 to meet anticipated demand. Even if usage grows somewhat more slowly than projected, any failure to satisfy the world’s requirements produces a perception of scarcity, which also means rising fuel prices. These are precisely the conditions we see today and should expect for the indefinite future.

It is against this backdrop that three crucial developments of 2011 are changing the way we are likely to live on this planet for the foreseeable future. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175400/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_how_to_wreck_a_planet_101/ (the story follows an intro titled 'How to Wreck a Planet 101')

And I didn't realize the extent of the Chinese drought.

...rather than another "evil speculators" piece.

Like it or not, the energy problem is the story of our time, and becomes a larger and more insoluble issue the farther forward in time we look.

The insanity of the age is something that surviving humans will look back on with equal parts dismay, astonishment and anger.

We KNOW better NOW.
We KNOW that coal, oil and gas are NON-RENEWABLE (this finite and subject to irreversible depletion)
We KNOW how to generate electricity via other methods, yet we do NOTHING to enhance them.

This whole thing is so eerily reminiscent of the debt problems - we know that raising taxes, ending war expenditures and returning our military to a rational % of global defense spending are necessary first steps, yet we are doing NOTHING on any of those fronts.

Michael Moore famously said "we live in fictitious times" while accepting his Academy Award and was pilloried for it, yet almost a decade later we STILL are living in fictitious times, but the difference is it is now becoming visibly dangerous - EXACTLY as we were warned it would years ago. Its too late to stop the problem, but without immediate and sustained adult discussions and plans on how to handle this, we are missing the one and only chance to mitigate the worst impacts.

And for me, the symbolically critical moment was 30 years ago when Reagan dook Jimmy Carter's solar panels off the White House roof as a sign of his loyalty to the fossil fuel industries.