It's Memorial Day weekend in the US as I write, and gas is hovering arond $4 a gallon.  Analysts and economists are prediscting worse prices over the summer.  And on TV and radio, more and more pieces are being done about high oil prices.  The Senate even grilled top oil executives this week about the moral offensiveness of their windfall profits as regular working people struggle to maintain their way of life.  But typical of the coverage was an NPR program from earlier this weekend, where everything except the Peak Oil angle was covered: Alaskan drilling, dipping into the Strategic Oil Reserve, finding alternative forms of energy, etc.  The mainstream media is extremely averse to the Peak Oil story, and that does not bode well for the public.  But there was a good sign last week, when the Financial Times ran a long piece called "Running on empty? Fears over oil supply move into the mainstream" (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5c9d05aa-25ca-11dd-b510-000077b07658.html).

So what is Peak Oil?  Since the title of this blog is "Post-Peak Liberal," what peak are we talking about?  Well, the general idea is this: oil production from a certain oil field has a particular shape, like a bell-curve.  Output surges as the field is in its first half of life, then reaches a peak, and finally drops off as the field taps out.  Similarly, the entire planet will follow the same general shape of oil production (oil is a finite resource, after all).   Once we reach a global peak, we'll be pumping the maximum amount possible, and a declining slope of production inevitably follows.  More and more evidence indicates that the world may be at or even past peak oil production (my own inclination is that the peak happened about three years ago).  And when we talk about a peak, we're not saying that particular spot-factors can't drive a bumper year here and there.  It's just that the general pattern, on average, will begin to trend down.

Now, we're not talking about the spigot running dry here.  On the downslope of the peak, we still have about half of the oil left.  But the key idea of Peak Oil is that the last half of the world's oil is the hard half to get.  The first half was the easy half, the light, sweet crude that was anxiously spurting from the ground.  What's left is more difficult to harness, oil that is more expensive or more politically-volatile to get at, and thus returns less net value.  All of the huge oil fields have already been discovered and have been in production for decades.  Future oil will come from smaller fields, inefficient forms like tar sands, or cash-intensive locations like the ocean floor.  Future oil will offer a much worse EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) than what we have enjoyed so far.  It always takes energy input (bulldozers, oil rigs, transportation, labor, etc.) to get resouces out of the ground.  And it will take much more energy input in the future to maintain the same kind of output, with the result that prices will continue to ratchet upwards.

So if half of the oil is still down there, what's the big deal?  One big deal is that the United States was built on the upward slope of oil production, when petroleum was flowing nicely.  So our entire society is predicated on cheap oil.  Our houses are too big, our living arrangements are too spread out, our agriculture is too petro-dependent, and our general production processes too wasteful.  Oil courses through every facet of our lives, from plastics to fertilizers, lawn mowers to computers.  All of the things that were economical and second-nature on the way up the oil slope will be painfully expensive on the way down.  The other big deal is that China and India are ramping up their oil demands just at the point when it will become more difficult to get, a situation that almost guarantees resource wars, whether hot or cold.  Finally, the exploitation of the first half of the world's oil has not exactly been good for the environment.  If we refuse to alter our general social form and turn to dirtier forms of fossil fuels to run the entire system (tar sands, coal), then we could send the planet over the climatic edge.

That's the general Peak Oil scenario.  A society built on cheap oil will struggle mightily as energy becomes more and more expensive on the downslope of production.  And as James Howard Kunstler is always reminding us, technology and energy are not interchangeble.  As oil prices surge, we can't just plug in the next technological doodad to run our lives.  Oil is a very unique commodity, and the infrastructure we have built can only be run on petroleum.  If we are able to transition to other forms of energy, their physical characteristics will necessitate a radical restructuring of our general social form.  We will not be able to sustain our patterns or work, habitation, travel, or consumption, once we move away from oil.  That's what it will mean to live a Post-Peak life.