Easter Island earth

Haven’t we heard this sort of prediction of doom before, going back to Malthus’s rather obvious observation in 1798 that exponential growth in demand has to hit limits of finite supply? The biggest factor in putting off a Malthusian day of reckoning is the mechanisation of agriculture, which relies heavily on oil. Take oil out of the picture, and I am awaiting a rational explanation as to how we could feed a human population of nearly 7-billion, set to peak at over 9-billion in 2050.

On a slightly different subject, the first European explorers to arrive at Easter Island were astonished to find large stone statues and no trace of a civilisation that could have made them and no trace of the large trees necessary to build infrastructure to create and move such statues. One theory of what happened is that the islanders harvested all their trees, leaving them incapable of not only building more statues, but building ocean-going craft that would have allowed them to escape their fate, once their unsustainable consumption caused their food supply to collapse. Consequently population of the island plummeted, amid a decline into cannibalism.

What relevance does Easter Island have to peak oil? Building renewable energy infrastructure takes energy. Until such time as renewables have reached critical mass, we will need fossil fuels to build that new technology. Wait too long, and we will not have the energy reserves to accomplish this task. The IEA’s 2010 projection suggests we do not have much time.

Will peak oil save us from climate change? The growing wedge of “unconventional” oil is a big worry: converting fuels like tar sands into oil-equivalent fuels is highly energy-intensive and if this sector has to grow faster than the IEA projects, we will hasten rather than slow the onset of serious climactic effects. There is also plenty of coal which, again, can be converted to liquid fuels at a high cost in added emissions. Leaving conversion to renewable energies so late increases the pressures to maximise use of these extremely dirty forms of energy.

To those climate change deniers who take comfort in the fact that they will only be proved wrong after their lifetimes and who hate their grandchildren: this one will happen soon. A planet-wide Easter Island collapse will not be a great time to be alive, and we are fast running out of time to avert just such a catastrophe. A Plan B world will include not only the risk of massive agricultural and industrial collapse but the marginalization into suburban slums of everyone who cannot afford to live near public transport or urban centres.

We have very little time left to act; the closer we can get to pulling back from a Plan B scenario to a Plan A scenario the better.