After Oil

I was bored beyond belief this arvo, so thought to watch a freebie online doco to pass the time. Which category to select.....decisions! decisions! I selected Geo-Politics and a doco about peak oil. After 15 minutes it wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know & frankly, was boring me even more than I'd been before it. I changed categories, selecting an ancient egyptian doco about the new kingdom era.

I found myself wondering if our civilisation will regress once fossil fuels are exhausted. We're supposedly past 'peak oil' now. Egypt prospered mightily without fossil fuels, although she thrived on the back of those who would have taken what she had, if she'd let them. Can it be possible in decades to come, that supposedly civilised empires, the likes of Europe and the US, not to mention Russia and China will stoop to waging wars of both conquest and defence in the drive to secure what they have, and seize what they need from those who have it?

What of nations like my own? The worlds largest island continent, securely isolated by ocean, but open to aerial incursion. Although, in days of zero fossil fuels, will any nation have the capacity to mount a viable air force? This raises other questions. Will nations have air forces, if viable fuels don't exist to power them? Evidence the ex-Soviet air forces post 1991. Aircraft atrophied from lack of use and adequate servicing, not to mention sheer lack of roubles to pay for their fuel. Times have changed somewhat, with massive investment into finding her own fossil fuel reserves and processing it, but nothing lasts forever.

Will the rarefying of viable fossil fuel substitutes make waging war a near impossibility on current scales? Will such an inability change power balances towards those nations better able to mount weight-of-numbers assaults? China, for example? Unfortunately, I find myself believing that our so-called civilisation will shatter as the pressures of dwindling fossil fuels grow. Only the rich and powerful will have access. Military collectives will hold sway on the pathetically weak excuse of providing security in national interests. We, the simple people, will probably still have reasonable lives, but cultures will change irrevocably. The freedoms to come and go as & when we please, which someone such as myself has today, will be severely restricted because travel costs energy. We'll eat and have housing, but I suspect more resources then ever will be directed towards food production and energy creation than are currently the case.

In short, I believe so-called human civilisation will change, becoming something we'd never contemplate tolerating today. Will we be worse off? In many cases, I suspect so, but the changes will be insidiously gradual, and we'll be conned and coerced by politicians into believing that all changes are inevitable, and for our greater good. Trust us, they'll say. Sound familiar? I wonder what the common people of Egypt thought and felt about their lives?