EclecticLip

This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.

It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico!  [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…

The US’s “carbon inefficiency” is probably due to lifestyle — both the consumer and industrial sector enjoy fairly cheap energy costs compared to the rest of the world.  Given such conditions, is it any wonder they developed inefficient practises?  Here in Vancouver, we have (well, had) so much water, we don’t even meter it.  Any wonder that we use 40% more water per-capita than our rivals, the Calgarians?

Few know that the US (Texas in particular) was the Saudi Arabia of oil before, well, Saudi Arabia.  Being the world’s largest producer of oil, it makes sense that energy-inefficient lifestyles would evolve in that country.  Or perhaps more correctly, that an industry interested in maximizing consumption, would spawn lobbyists who’d then push the US government towards policies facilitating an energy-inefficient lifestyles.  Like the best parasites, lobby groups influence their host’s behaviour. 
James Kunstler has repeatedly claimed the suburbs were the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.  (What, esperanto  didn’t make the cut?)  While in retrospect they’re clearly a mistake, it’s difficult to fault the planners of the day of not exploiting cheap, seemingly-limitless fossil fuel energy, to build picket-fenced suburbias.  And unlike Kunstler, who seems to think they’ll be abandoned, I’m with Vail in thinking that the suburbs still have a big role (maybe even a positive one) in the post-peak world.

More broadly though, the fact that the US (and Canada too) is so inefficient with its energy use, means that there’s still a lot of juice left in the “efficiency” orange, if we just squeeze it hard enough.  And that means it should be possible to maintain “acceptably” high living standards, even with greatly reduced energy consumption (and perhaps more importantly, greatly reduced carbon footprints).

Not that maintaining our luxurious lifestyles should be our primary consideration; but the future would be grim indeed if our children’s standards of living were doomed to fall precipitously.