The Crash Course, Revised Edition

CHAPTER 17Peak Oil

If you were to glance up from this book and scan your surroundings, you'd be unable to point to a single human‐made object that did not somehow, in some way, get there because of oil.

Petroleum fuels and products are involved in every part of our economy. If you enjoy a modern lifestyle, you enjoy a ridiculously high standard of living, and oil is responsible for every bit of it. Your clothes, your car, your food, your home—everything.

Everything that is manufactured and transported either or indirectly.

That DoorDash vegetarian combo meal with cold‐brewed iced tea delivered by a bicycle‐riding vegan named Trevor? Yes, oil was intimately involved. The bicycle tires directly, the frame of bike mined by massive diesel‐fed machines, the components all shipped to final assembly by truck, Trevor himself eating foods grown hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away using gobs of oil‐based products ranging from fertilizer to tractors to plastic row covers and, you guessed it, trucked to his belly. Your food too.

It's impossible to overstate just how central and irreplaceable oil is to our entire economic system and way of life. But it's certainly possible to overlook it, and most people do. It is simply an assumed part of the landscape, a permanent feature that can safely be ignored. It will always be there for us, right? If you haven't yet heard of Peak Oil, this chapter is going to be a real eye‐opener. My purpose here is not to recreate a complete treatise on ...