Going forward, the biggest speed-breaker for growth globally is? Even kids would have a ready answer these days. Experts believe the unfortunate answer to that question is the price of oil. I believe there's more to our difficulty than just the price of oil. If it was only energy that needed to be replaced quickly, our problem would have been far simpler. But it's more complicated than that. The average human often fails to comprehend how dependent we have become on oil as a resource - and not just as an energy resource, but something that affects every aspect of our lives.
Let me throw some light here on just one of those many aspects: Food. The natural reaction to this might be: "Food?? How is food related to oil?" The unfortunate and stark truth is that something as fundamental to human existence as food is also seeped in oil. To understand how, just put this in perspective: The world's population has increased manifold over the last 50 odd years while the number of people who grow food for the world has kept on decreasing. As we have grown more complex as a civilization, our occupations have made a marked shift from those that are engaged in providing subsistence to those that are engaged in providing peripheral services, comforts and luxuries. Look around you. How many people you know are engaged in something that can be described as absolutely essential and fundamental to human existence? You'd be hard put to find even 2. That's the point. If less and less people are growing more and more food for more and more people, how are they doing it?
Surely it isn't a miracle. Modern science has done well to distinguish itself from metaphysics and so we have rational answers to almost every question that troubles us today. The way we answer those questions and the long-term effects that has on us as a people, is surely a matter that has attracted far less thought and deliberation than it ought to have. The answer to this particular problem of ours, though, has been rather cliched in scientific terms. Oil.
Oil has been an answer to almost every question that has faced the human race over the last five decades. How do we zip across the globe at supersonic velocities? Oil. How do we substitute metals for building faster and cheaper structures? Oil.( most plastics are derived from oil ) How do we provide energy for more and more people's daily activities? Burn more oil to generate more electricity. How do we feed more people with minimum effort? Oil.
When the second world war ended, man found himself equipped with a technology that promised to revolutionize agriculture and hence the world's food industry. Fertilizers. What rose out of the left-overs for the manufacture of chemical weapons in the second world war, was quickly utilized for making our crops grow faster. Nitrogen, which was earlier fixed by bacteria in the soil was now fixed with the help of fertilizers. Few people reflect on the rather obvious fact that all fertilizers are made from petroleum.
As more and more people burden the earth every day, we rely on fertilizers to grow the food that feeds them. There is no component of the industrial food chain today(almost all of us today depend on the industrial food chain; a minuscule fraction of the world's population grows its food naturally) that is untouched by petroleum. Our foods have come to include more and more artificial substitutes. These artificial components are invariably derived from petroleum.
If oil is a scarce resource today, it implies that we will now find it more and more difficult to grow our food. Something that we take for granted today, may become a disaster of epic proportions for us tomorrow. If we didn't come up with an alternative to the petroleum dependent industrial food chain today, it may just come to a grinding halt if we were to run out of oil tomorrow.
This shows us just how intricately petroleum has woven itself into our lives. We have become a species that subsists on oil. The level of human dependence on oil today is probably unfathomable. The sooner we invest in alternate technologies for every area that is petroleum-dependent, the better equipped for an uncertain future we shall be.
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