"Last Chance for Civilization" from the Home page

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May 10, 2005
By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers


Humanity is facing a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. The final depletion of petroleum reserves is likely within this century. Without this energy source, and with no alternative sources in place, the Earth could probably not support half of the present population of six billion souls. That remnant of humanity would subsist at a level of poverty suffered today by the typical Bangladeshi.

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It is impossible to comprehend the total reliance of our industrial civilization upon cheap and abundant energy. Prior to the industrial revolution, the "civilized" life of the small minority privileged individuals, for example in ancient Greece and Rome, was built upon the backs of hordes of slaves and draft animals. The use of bio-fuels (e.g. wood) was essentially confined to cooking, space heating, and metallurgy.

Today, the average North American utilizes each day the energy equivalent of thousands of slaves (one slave = 1/3 horsepower per day) and horses (one horse = 6 horsepower per day). Fossil energy transports his food thousands of miles to his table. Petroleum products are the source of farm fertilizers and they drive farm machinery. Because of the productivity of fossil fuel driven industrial agriculture the average American farmer now feeds fifty of his fellow citizens. In a very real sense, we "eat petroleum."

If the oil supply were to dry up with no successor fuel at hand, most of our population would have to return to the land to raise their own food, only to find that the fertile land had been sacrificed to suburban sprawl or lost to erosion and desertification.

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http://www.crisispapers.org/essays-p/last-chance.htm