OIL WOE$ -- Cultural doomsday?

A Florida restaurant owner posts a remarkably coherent article on Peak Oil and the need to find a reliable energy replacement soon. Mike Shannon, in an opinion piece in the Bradenton Herald's online edition entitled "Edging Closer to Doomsday," argues:

"... life has the unsettling tendency to replace one problem with another. This new challenge, while nowhere near as cataclysmic as nuclear warfare, has the potential to be equally life-altering. And I am afraid that this is one clock that cannot be stopped.

"To say that oil is important to the functioning of the modern world is the equivalent of saying that oxygen is important to the continuation of human life. At this point in time we as a society simply could not do without it."

Shannon discusses the inevitable disparagement that goes to anyone who dares challenge the prevailing "wisdom" that somehow new oil reserves will continue to be discovered and developed. Often such observations are termed "Malthusian" in an effort to discredit. This is a flawed analogy, he says.

"There is much debate about the actual date of the start of the irreversible decline in the world's supply of oil - estimates range from 10 years from now to sometime in the latter half of this century - but none about the inevitability of its eventual arrival. We will run out of oil. That is not a prediction, it is a fact. What we plan on doing about it, and even more importantly, when we plan on planning to do something about it, is all that matters.
...

the fundamental difference between the production of food and the reliance on oil, and the fundamental flaw in Malthus' thinking, is that food is a commodity that is replaceable in a relatively short and very predictable time frame. Oil is the by-product of millions of years of the decomposition of organic materials. Any and all attempts at making synthetic oil have proven to be prohibitively expensive or of too small a yield to even approach meeting the demand. And even if a heretofore unknown giant field of good old-fashioned oil is discovered in the near future, that will only delay the inevitable. We will still run out of oil sooner or later.

Finding alternative sources of energy is not a pie in the sky dream; it is an inescapable imperative.

Shannon, however, is an optimist:

"As it was with the solving of the Malthusian challenge, the problem can and will be fixed through techniques and processes that we can scarcely imagine now. But only if we take the problem seriously enough now to bring to bear the full-scale effort that it will require. This is a problem that will take the combined effort of the genius and the ingenious alike. If we wait any longer to begin this monumental task, we run the extreme risk of having waited too long.

"Unfortunately, the powers that be seem perfectly willing to maintain the status quo.

"This is not meant to imply that the mindset of the multinational corporations that dominate the world's energy markets is the sole source of the problem, but it most certainly is a major part of it - even if their internal motivations are perfectly understandable. Any for-profit business entity is precisely that: an organization whose sole purpose is to not only create but to maximize its profit. And making money, they most assuredly are. ..."

Don't just read the whole thing. Think about it.

And then try to explain to yourself how that travesty of an energy bill recently adopted by Congress does anything to combat the problem.