The oilparty is over

and so is our foodparty

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Our age of oil is coming to an end, not through lack of it as we anticipated, but because we can no longer afford to use it. It goes against every grain of common sense, that oil usage is in decline because producers can’t deliver the stuff at a price the average user can afford.

This is the blind spot of humankind. We remain in denial of our situation and follow the delusion that we can vote for the return of prosperity.

we can’t.

But how can we define an oil age? It has been about 170 years since the first deep oilwells were sunk, and just over 250 years since the viable steam engine was developed. The two are linked, because the steam engine made deep drilling of oilwells possible and gave us access to a hundred million years worth of fossilized sunlight. Perhaps we have not strictly had an oil age, but rather the first and only age where we enjoy vast amounts of surplus energy that we have extracted from hydrocarbon fuels, of which oil is the most energy dense.

It has brought us material wealth, and the means to indulge in wholesale killing of each other and all other species. It gave excesses of food and a population that consumed that food and grew to five or six times the…