Aug 7, 2006

When chaos replaces oil

While resources based on oil are still available, the world must prepare to live without those same resources.

How do you make and run wind turbines or solar panels without machinery that uses oil? Dr Lloyd asks. How do you import and export if fuel for ships and planes is too expensive or unavailable?

It's no good depending on bio-fuels, he says, because the world couldn't grow enough crops fast enough to provide for existing, let alone future, energy demands.

The world's population stood at one billion by the beginning of the 20th century. Then we started burning oil and coal to make life more comfortable and efficient; to build global transport networks; to run machinery to grow more food to feed more people.

We began to chop down the rainforests that act as Planet Earth's lungs to clear more space to graze more animals to feed more people; to invent new materials such as plastics; to make drugs that cure diseases that once would have killed us.

By the beginning of the 21st century, the global population stood at about 6 billion, all highly dependent on the exploitation of fossil fuels and other natural resources. The ordinary lives of ordinary people in developed countries have become remote from the basic sources of life, Dr Lloyd says. In the US, every item of food is transported an average of 1500km to its point of consumption.

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