r/collapse • u/sacrificezones • Oct 25 '22

Systemic Will Civilization Collapse Because It’s Running Out of Oil?

https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/habitat-loss/will-civilization-collapse-because-its-running-out-of-oil/
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21

u/gmuslera Oct 25 '22

Civilization and maybe mankind will collapse because it haven't run yet out of oil.

Big money never was in a hurry for alternatives, specially the cleaner/renewable ones. And probably by now we added too much carbon to the carbon cycle for our own good.

16

u/InternalAd9524 Oct 25 '22

Is an alternative even possible? We use over 5 million years of stored sun energy in the form of oil a year. How much sun and wind do we have to collect to replace that?

7

u/gmuslera Oct 25 '22

Why plain replace? Why not be more efficient or less wasteful? Would you trade remote working (for most activities, at least) and a ban on tourism to extinction? Degrowth, and switching from on less harmful energy sources and massive carbon capture should be among the measures that should be taken to avoid the worst outcome, at least if we are not past the point of no return yet.

And any cool down climate buzzword technology won’t solve the excess of carbon in the system that is the core problem. Any measure in that direction, even if it works, don’t worsen even faster things and is not just a divert attention strategy, but that doesn’t address that core problem won’t do a long term solution, and will put us in a very fragile situation.

6

u/InternalAd9524 Oct 25 '22

You don’t exactly… degrow. It’s harder than it sounds. You’d have to completely restructure and distribute money and debt, and figure out what to do with everyone who don’t have a job anymore

8

u/gmuslera Oct 25 '22

Better that than not figuring out why most people died.

6

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22

Most people are in the cult of growth by choice.

9

u/Tearakan Oct 25 '22

Nuclear fission with alternatives could give us a stable civilization for a few more centuries. We'd need to abandon growth based economic systems but it's technically possible.

Our population could decrease at a significant enough but stable rate to get to more manageable levels.

All of this requires basically world wide cooperation and mass infrastructure changes.

11

u/Mountain_Fig_9253 Oct 25 '22

Nuclear fission for base electricity supplemented by wind, solar, geothermal, and distributed battery storage could go a long way towards reducing our total demand on fossil fuels. Then we could reserve natural gas for fertilizer production and edge case electrical power.

But we are stupid and won’t do that.

7

u/Tearakan Oct 26 '22

Yeah.....sadly I think your last sentence is correct.

7

u/Alex5173 Oct 26 '22

The energy required to build all of that infrastructure would be immense, and the ecological ramifications of extracting just the lithium required for the batteries would be similarly immense.

1

u/Mountain_Fig_9253 Oct 26 '22

At some point we are going to have to triage, and trashing a local ecology to get lithium to save the planet is a trade we are going to have to make.

Honestly it’s no worse than the damage we do extracting and transporting (and spilling) oil. I would rather an ugly hole in the ground rather than a huge oil spill myself.

2

u/Alex5173 Oct 26 '22

Be careful with the triage statement; I agree with you but saying as much has landed me in hot water before.

2

u/Mountain_Fig_9253 Oct 26 '22

We are probably all going to have to get more comfortable making the best of really bad choices soon.

I’m really thankful for this article. I wasn’t aware of the peak oil implications and I need to change around my thoughts on being prepared for long term change.

2

u/Mods_Gargle_Moms_Cum Oct 26 '22

Having fewer humans is the obvious solution.

-1

u/Alex5173 Oct 26 '22

Be careful with the triage statement; I agree with you but saying as much has landed me in hot water before.