Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Oil/Population Ratio

The US with 5% of the world's population consumes 25% of the world's oil production. Consider the implications.
We use petroleum as transportation and heating fuels and for lubricating everything. Every industry, including agriculture, is oil intensive. No fuel comes close to petroleum for convenience as a transportation fuel. Our lives will be much less comfortable, convenient, efficient, equitable, flexible, affordable and safe when oil becomes far more costly. Distant bedroom subdivisions will be almost worthless. Our economy will be much less productive and supportive. Imagine our important life-style and economic options taken away owing to limited and very expensive oil. Which options would you gladly forgo?
Our economic/educational/political system calls for ever increasing population, mainly as immigrants, so our own internal dynamics require an increase of oil consumption or a diminution of conveniences on average.
If for simplicity, we assume that oil and population are zero-sum quantities, one might estimate life-style convenience as the ratio of % oil consumption to % population, 25%/5% = 5. This approximation is justified by the small and diminishing oil-production flexibility. The convenience ratio for all other nations on average is 75%/95% = 0.8. Thus, our life-style is about 6 times as oil intensive and convenient as that of the rest of the world, on average.
Large segments of non-US populations are more robust than the US, and are catching up in productivity and income. In fact, we are indebted to them by trillions. Leaders of those robust nations continue lending to us to keep their populations employed and peaceful. When those populations demand happier life styles, they will have the money for the implied increase of oil consumption.
But, their life styles will improve very little as ours diminish dramatically. For example, a halving of our oil consumption to 12% of production would be very painful (a ratio of 2.5), but the corresponding increase in their consumption to 88% (a ratio of 0.9) will be modest indeed. That is, a more equitable distribution of oil consumption will be very disruptive to us but minor help to them. The envy, demands, expectations, resentments and entitlement habits will result in deterioration of international relations worse than we have experienced since the second world war. And we will be the weaker of the competitors.
This simple dynamic has been obvious for decades, but no US administration has addressed it competently.
Finally, this will happen as world population increases from 6 billion to 9 billion, so the average convenience ratio for the world will decline about 30% unless oil production increases. It's a question of how fast we are able to destroy the climate. All these problems could be avoided peacefully by a worldwide embrace of family planning.

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