Daily Trojan USC.edu

Issue date: 3/11/08 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Phillip Solis | Daily Trojan

In case anybody cared to notice: Last week oil officially hit its highest price ever.

Adjusted for inflation, the price of oil during the 1979 crisis reached a peak of $104.06 per barrel. The time period is widely recognized as having the highest prices to date.

Now it rests at $105.31.

As industry analysts suggest, consumers shouldn't expect prices to fall - and not just on a "not any time soon" basis - rather, not at all.

The $100-per-barrel mark, widely seen as a bona fide milestone of the beginning of the end, is now upon us.

As Chevron CEO David O'Reilly put it, "The era of cheap oil is over."

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the resource that single-handedly catapulted humanity into modernization is done for. Kaput. Disappearing fast and never to reappear again.

That's the essential problem with oil: It's finite.

For the most part, our planet's enormous excess of the energy-rich resource has been able to keep up with the overall demand since its discovery in the late 19th century.

After 125 years of maniacal drilling, however, with a world population that's at 6.5 billion and counting and demand continuing to rise at a frightening rate, the resource is showing clear signs of exhaustion.

As the late geophysicist M. King Hubbert first suggested during the 1970s crisis, global oil production will eventually reach a peak and gradually fall off thereafter.

Former industry exploration expert and trustee of London's Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, Colin J. Campbell, took the helm of Hubbert's venerable theory and now suggests the peak will be reached in 2010.

The current acceleration in oil's price, having far surpassed the expectations of even the most seasoned experts, is only an indication of a catastrophe on the horizon - rising demand amid exponential decreases in supply.

While American consumers are slowly starting to feel the aches and pains at the gas pump, they're going to feel it even more in the coming year. And not just at the pump.

Most people fail to realize the intimate marriage between petroleum and our food supply.

Not only does our food get to grocery stores by way of an oil-powered vehicle after traveling an average of 1,500 miles, but the food industry would not exist without petroleum.

Petroleum's derivatives are used to create synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that help grow and regulate agriculture, to power farm equipment that harvests the food and run processing machinery.

This means we should be prepared to notice an increase in the price of food.

Whether it's from the grocery store or a fast food chain, if it goes in your belly, it's going to cost you more money.

Nevertheless, while Americans face an economic recession (or perhaps a "slowdown," as our president likes to put it), record foreclosures, a gradual increase in unemployment and a myriad of other economic issues, very little is being done. We're still shipping jobs overseas, putting ourselves in record debt with out-of-control spending and, most of all, consuming more oil than ever.

Truth be told, solutions to the oil problem should've constructively been dealt with years ago. Significant solutions to the issue are simply not being implemented at a fast enough rate. Even if every American switched to a hybrid tomorrow, we'd still be faced with a plethora of oil-related issues.

In the end, it's the under-25s who are going to have to deal with what's lurking: another depression unlike anything we've ever imagined.

In the worst-case scenario, as

suggested by Richard C. Duncan in his 1996 paper, "The Olduvai Theory," we might be witnessing the elder years of industrial civilization as we know it, on the brink of a post-industrial stone-age in which human progress literally reverses.

Of course this seems like something born of the imaginative minds that pen Hollywood blockbusters such as "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Deep Impact" - worlds riddled with war and destruction and debilitated by an energy crisis that paralyzes humanity.

Yet in reality, if our generation fails to take notice of the growing petroleum shortages, we're going to have to pay for our negligence.



- Tim Strube is a senior majoring in cinema-television critical studies. His column, "What Really Grinds my Gears," runs Tuesdays.

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