In as much as it does not greatly impinge on the present or
demand immediate behavioural change, for many people "peak
oil" is an elusive concept that floats about on the periphery
of consciousness and intrudes only in the rhetoric of
environmentalists, academics and alternative-lifestylers.
The term refers to the point when the maximum rate of global
petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of
production enters terminal decline. Given simultaneous
ongoing population increases and a continued drive towards
economic growth, petroleum prices will become a constraining
influence in the nature of society as it is now, and a
determining factor in how it might evolve.
A variety of analyses pinpoint "peak oil" as either having
just been reached or predict its imminent arrival.
Regardless, a 50% reduction in oil production is expected by
2050, so the society inherited by our grandchildren and
great-grandchildren is likely to be markedly different from
our own.
Exactly how continues to be a matter of some debate, with
those portraying a world shackled to petroleum-related
technologies predicting gloomy scenarios lived out in
energy-impoverished, "self-sufficient" communities.
Others have greater faith in the creative capacity of
humankind to overcome such limits in ways as yet unknown.
How the future is imagined depends to a large extent on the
position taken on the continuum between these polar opposites
- and the extent of the lag between severe energy supply
depletion and the development of accessible, cheap and
sustainable alternatives.
Change, however, there will be, and while its precise nature
and reach cannot yet be gauged - beyond an uneven future oil
supply characterised by periodic price rises and shortages,
and long-term gradual decline - it is just as well to prepare
for it.
To this end, the Dunedin City Council's Peak Oil
Vulnerability Assessment for Dunedin is a welcome initiative.
Peak oil is an issue over which individual communities, this
city and region included, will have no control.
Identifying how the council might play its part in managing
its economic impacts and potential risks, in particular with
respect to energy efficiency, is a responsible approach to
local government, regardless of intervening technological
innovation.
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