Peak Oil News - The Irrationality Of Not Preparing Contingency Plans For Peak Oil

The public has known about the threat of markedly diminished oil supplies since 1956. Over the last 50 years, the notion of more limited future supplies of oil has been fiercely debated in public forums, and now the data clearly shows which side was right. Now we see that there is no longer any dispute, now we see that we are on a plateau, where we are unable to increase world oil production, regardless of the price that this oil fetches in the marketplace. To verify the correctness of these statements, direct your browser to the web site of the conservative US Government agency called the Energy Information Administration. In spreadsheets of the world oil production numbers, you will see that world oil supply has been about 74 million barrels per day since 2005. Note that this production did not markedly change, even though the price spiked up to $147/barrel in July 2008. A variety of high-credibility scientifically researched reports discuss the seriousness of our current situation, our position at the peak of world oil production. For example, you might reference "Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management" by Robert L. Hirsch et al, and "Global Oil Depletion – An Assessment of the Evidence For Near-Term Peak in Global Oil Production" by the UK's Energy Research Centre.

With all the credible evidence that peak oil is real, not a "theory" as some would have us believe, why is it that organizations such as the Federal government have steadfastly refused to draw up contingency plans to deal with the impacts of peak oil? There is no doubt that, as a society, we have dragged our feet way too long, and because it takes years to change many elements of our energy infrastructure, many of the desirable transitions to alternative energy cannot now be achieved. So now we are forced to do the best we can, now we must deal with the repercussions of our extensive dependence on petroleum (fully 50% of America's energy comes from petroleum). At the same time, that same vital substance will soon get very expensive, will get increasingly scarce, and the delivery systems for providing it will become increasingly unreliable. So at the very least, we should get real, and do a risk assessment and figure out how we will be affected, and then draw up situation-specific contingency plans. To refuse to undertake this important activity is illogical, as the numbers provided below clearly indicate.

Let's compare the peak oil situation to three scenarios for which most large organizations have already prepared contingency plans: (1) a widespread flu pandemic, (2) a serious incident of workplace violence, and (3) a fire in a work related building. The calculations shown below are rough-and-ready, use a back-of-the-envelope style, and are intended only to make the point asserted in the title of this article. These calculations provide a numerical indication that our society's commonly held perception about the risks related to peak oil is dangerously out of kilter with reality. To be more specific, these three planned-for threats are one to two orders of magnitude less likely than peak oil, and they will cause one to one hundred orders of magnitude less damage than peak oil.