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Oil, the grease that fired up our civilisation, is becoming the very thing that will burn it down.
Aug 11, 2007

If anything stands at the heart of making our day to day society work, it is money and oil. Therefore it is mind boggling that average people know so little about the two most important subjects of our time.  Let’s talk about oil, for it is the most important of the two. Money is only a (strong) illusion in how we value something. The illusion is the idea that that value is a real thing and not only a mind construction.  

Oil is however a real thing, and it is the thing that powered the illusion.
Oil is at the heart of our civilisation. Not our far evolved intellect, nor our sophisticated creativeness and hard work led to our high standard societies, but the discovery and use of the black stuff we called oil gave us the power to divert work to machines to give us the time to expand our knowledge and get creative in constructing our high powered societies. Oil took over a large part of our physical work and gave us room to develop our minds and independence from each other. Not the car, but oil gave us individual freedom.  

What is oil?

Crude oil is a naturally occurring mixture of hundreds of different hydrocarbon compounds trapped in underground rock. These hydrocarbons were created millions of years ago when ancient marine life or vegetation died and settled on the bottoms of streams, lakes, seas and oceans, forming a thick layer of organic material. Sediment later covered this layer, applying heat and pressure that ‘cooked’ the organic material and changed it into the petroleum we extract from the ground today.

It takes the Earth millions of years to make oil, while we accomplished to use up half of it in about two hundred years.

The sad thing is, that we didn’t use this power in a way that served mankind and the world, but we used it to extract even more power from the Earth to create an illusionary world where we can see ourselves as masters of nature who could control the flow of life and determine the fate of the planet. We considered ourselves Gods and became addicted to the image this power could create for us. We where very good in convincing each other that we where more then mere humans. We can fly and travel across countries with speeds no animal can reach, we travel to space and visit the moon, make nature move when it comes in the way of our convenience. And we did it all with oil. Oil was our Genie in the bottle. It conjured up the world we wanted to have.

The magic of oil is its energy return. You put one calorie of energy in and you get one hundred calories back. No clean energy source, nor nuclear, or coal, can match this return by far. One gallon of gas has the equivalent energy of a man working for 600 hours. If human beings were producing the electricity to run that light bulb with muscle-power, it would take 5 people working continuously to keep it glowing. They would be mightily upset if you had simply forgotten to throw the switch.

Because oil is a finite resource and we are near the maximum we can extract each day from the Earth, while the demand keeps on growing fast, it leaves us with a massive problem. We need to put in more energy to extract less oil, while global warming and environmental deterioration and the threat of an all out war, is pressuring us from another side to put the genie back in the bottle.  A very short conclusion could be that the illusion is going to cave in on us, or we are going to cave in on the illusion. The free ride is over. It’s time to get real.

The luxury oil gave us left us growing away from nature and the land. We became dependant on food that travels an average distance of two thousand miles to our nearby supermarkets. We became dependant on clothing being produced in third world countries and shipped to us over large distances, and big chunks of our industry have moved to the low wage countries. All thanks to oil and the illusion of money. And the poor of the world still have faith in the mighty Wizards of the West, who are able to let it rain bombs on their homes and who can make them starve to death on street corners when they do not obey the forces of the illusionists.

Who will win when the illusion caves in? Who will be the stupid ones?

The pyramid of Maslow is build on a broad foundation of knowing how to survive and have the means for survival. Out of this knowledge and these means for survival comes the wish to secure survival and create a sense of security. The next step is the need for social contact. Create a network of people you can depend on, a family. Following step on the pyramid is the wish for acknowledgement and approval of who you are. If you have been so successful to make it to these heights of the pyramid you will ultimately feel the need for self-realisation.

Oil brought our civilisation to the last two stages of the pyramid where we long for approval and acknowledgement and are on our quest for self-realisation, but we became alienated from our roots in the Earth and our dependence on each other. Oil covered our basis, but cannot go on with that to the end of times. The end of oil, global warming, pollution, environmental destruction, it is all mother natures way of saying ‘grow up’. It’s like mama bird pushing its young ones out of the nest to see if they can fly.

Can we?
Visibility: Everyone
Posted: Saturday August 11, 2007, 5:09 am
Tags: end war oil power of environment global warming [add/edit tags]

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Phil Heinlein (409) 		Saturday August 11, 2007, 2:48 pm
Certainly we can survive, if we use our brains and make rational decisions, instead of letting greed and self-interest rule. We have to begin the transition to other cleaner sources of energy. It's either that, or give up our dependence on all of those nice things we've become attached to.

Doris N. (245) 		Sunday August 12, 2007, 3:59 pm
Splendid blog, and alarming perspectives. I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly about the human predicament and think it is great you've given these thoughts a crystal clear wording - I hope it reaches the front-page and many more can take part of it. Keep writing, Marc, you have so many points to share, and we sure need to reflect on our past and future paths. Thanks a lot for your compassion!

Mary H. (39) 		Sunday August 12, 2007, 4:51 pm
Excellent -- I hope more people will read...

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