The end of oil: Extract from a June 2010 press clipping

Source: Colin J. Campbell / Petroconsultants

The oil crisis is confirmed with the symbolic passage of the bar of 100 dollars a barrel. We are now reaching record prices for crude which warn that petroleum, a treasure accumulated in a billion years, has been almost dillapidated 3 million times faster than it was created! (3 centuries). The protests of motorists and industrialists have been heard by the government, which uses all unimaginable arguments to soften this announcement.

But, despite the buffering effect of taxes, the oil shock was more than ever, with the three-digit drop in the price of crude, keenly felt like a knife to the throat of those who depend on their car, sometimes as viscerally as if it had become an indispensable prosthesis for us humans, forced to travel social distances measured in tens of kilometers minimum. There are solutions like fuel cells and nuclear but neither have the ease of use of petroleum. Traveling with a private car as heavy, powerful and fast as what we used to do (excluding traffic jams) becomes expensive: more than a third of the salary, it is now half that spent!

This weekend, however, was jubilation for another part of the population: cyclists and pedestrians who see in this oil crisis finally the end of a world that has become unlivable, the world of pollution on every street corner. , petroleum, the generalized vacarne of internal combustion engines.

The event was truly commemorated as an end-of-war liberation (the end of the war with cars!). They came out with their bikes, their rollerblades and even with completely redesigned bikes to replace the car, more aerodynamic and comfortable. From dawn, millions of cyclists invaded the highways of Europe, the main axes to remind us that, perhaps, the bicycle is the future in a society without excess oil, and that if it is integrated into everyone's daily life, we can live happier than before, even with gasoline at 5 euros per liter or the fuel cell at 15 euros per kilowatt hour!

As if to show that gasoline-powered locomotion was a useless myth, a group of cyclists completed the normal summer migration which consists of the Paris-Côte d'Azur descent in a single 12h stage ... in a 6h velomobile. in the morning in Paris, 6 in the evening in Marseille… on a bicycle whose fairing prevents energy loss through the air…

This huge event reminds us that, if we have ideas, we can live and at least move without oil, and, without necessarily resorting to alternatives at questionable ecological cost with an expenditure 10 times to 100 times what muscle energy allows. … (Biofuel and intensive agriculture, nuclear and risk for future generations, hydraulic and modification of rivers, wind power and degradation of the landscape, solar electricity and heavy metals…). This cycling grouping shows us that the main source of energy waste: transport, is also the easiest to question. We spend too much energy heating our homes, lighting and running the factories… Make this event really happen!

Celebrating Barre 100 of dollars Barrel

$ 100 per barrel; it is the sign of the end of the oil civilization. In May 2004, I imagined that this event could occur within a few years. It is not too early to start organizing a "mega" party and preparing public opinion. I throw the idea: when oil crosses 100 dollars, all the owners of a non-oil means of transport (bicycle, tricycle, rollerblading, horse-drawn carts, solar vehicles…) should meet and come and ride on the highways.

50 dollars a barrel, we're already there! We could start throwing a 50 dollar crossing party with a big critical mass of bikes… but that will only be a preparation for the 100 dollar party that must be monstrous.

Hover.

Jean Thevenet

Econology note: the barrel has already been very close to $ 100 as shown this page

Jean-Marc Jancovici, having read this article told me: “With regard to the barrel, we can correct the parity of the dollar, and also the rise in the
purchasing power, because since 1979 the GDP has almost doubled, so that it is from $ 160 per barrel that we will begin to have the same effects on the economy. "