The bigger picture life without oil full#

The list of essentials that we'd soon be doing without is prodigious: virtually all plastics, paints, medicines, hospital machines that go 'bleep,' Barbie dolls, ballpoint pens, breast implants, golf balls ….Įating would get tougher, too. It gets much worse still, of course, because a world without oil would quickly become a world without all of the products made from petroleum that we have come to know, love and depend upon. Can we quickly put together some solar panels and batteries? A wind turbine? What do we have growing in the back yard that can burn? Environmentalists have been nudging us to insulate our homes and generate electricity from renewable resources for a while now this might be the time to start paying attention.

Heating and cooling our homes would suddenly get a lot more complicated, and our televisions and laptops would be just a few more weeks away from shutting off forever.įorget even trying to get to work anymore we now have another set of problems to solve, especially if it's winter and our houses are getting cold. Sure, our electricity is generated mostly from coal, but how would the coal be extracted without those diesel-guzzling yellow trucks? How would it be hauled to the power plants? (Remember, our trains all run on diesel, too). And this would be possible, for the first month or so, because only 1 percent of America's electricity is generated from oil - coal carries the largest burden, along with natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power.īut brownouts and blackouts would soon begin. Our enslavement to black gold goes much further than the problem of getting from Point A to Point B. But we'd be waiting for some time to secure adequate natural gas supplies, establish delivery infrastructure and switch over our cars. Soon, we'd all be looking for an electric car (but there are precious few of those for sale) or converting our vehicles to run on natural gas. How far is it to the nearest grocery store? How long does it take to walk - or bike, or skate - to work? Finally confronting our dependence on motor vehicles, we'd reach for whatever solutions we could find. Within a month, every fuel tank would be dry, all our gauge needles would point to 'E,' and the roads, rails and skies would be virtually empty. A strategic reserve of finished petroleum products - gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel - has often been suggested but never created. The lines wouldn't last, though, because the gasoline would soon be gone. Price-gouging would begin right away, and long lines would form at gas stations. With the overwhelming majority of the oil we produce and import devoted to powering our cars, motorcycles, trucks, trains and planes, the impact on getting around would be most dramatic.

The bigger picture life without oil full#

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