So What Is Going to Happen?

Without oil, and under the devastations of climate disruption: what is going to happen?

What oil made possible

Oil, exploited since the 1850s, makes immense economic gains possible.

Without oil, what will remain of all these forms of solidarity and of these reduced inequalities?

Unemployment did not exist before the first oil shock of 1974.

The public debt of Western states was almost non-existent before the oil shocks.

Since 2005, public debts have been exploding, the employment rate has been falling, and inequalities have been growing.

The more the population grows, the more forests and biodiversity are destroyed

Before the discovery of oil, which multiplied agricultural yields many times over, harvests were very small relative to the area under cultivation. To feed the entire population, we therefore had to cultivate large areas to make up for these low yields. In every country in the world, when the population grew, we thus cut down ever more forests to cultivate more land, in order to manage to feed everyone.

It is a fact that has been observed everywhere in the world: The more the population grows, the more deforestation increases.

When there is no more oil, with 8 billion human beings to feed, what will remain of the forest, which is already dramatically depleted? The hyperbolic growth of the population is responsible for the dizzying destruction of biodiversity. When oil is gone, and this gigantic population clears the last forests to feed itself, what will remain of biodiversity?

"Deforestation and the predation of wild species are potentially deadly for part of humanity" "Preserve the world's forests because our lives depend on them" "What we struggle to accept in the name of protecting the environment, perhaps we would do much more easily if it were quite simply a matter of staying alive." Jancovici

Without oil, how do we feed 8 billion human beings?

There is an even higher priority: simply feeding ourselves.

Without oil, we will be forced back to the way of life of before 1850. Except that in 1850, there were "only" 1 billion human beings to feed on the planet. Today, there are 8 billion human beings to feed. And today, agricultural yields are being devastated a little more each year by the disrupted climate.

Without oil, with climate disruption already underway, feeding more than 8 billion human beings is impossible.

The crops we manage to produce without the help of agricultural machinery will be regularly ravaged by storms or droughts. Hunting and fishing will not be enough to make up for this lack of food. There will therefore inevitably be deaths.

In 10 or 20 years, it may well mean total disorganisation, chaos. Famines, wars, diseases, floods, droughts, fires, storms, dictatorships.

The consequences of the end of fossil fuels (in French)

The question is how to save as many lives as possible. That is, how best to anticipate agricultural production without oil, on those areas of the planet that have not yet turned arid or that are not yet under water.

The quantity of electrical energy and the quantity of electric machines we manage to produce before the end of oil in Europe will be a meagre parachute to slow down the likely all-out brawl for survival. This quantity of electrical energy and electric machines will nevertheless have the merit of representing the proportion of the population we manage to save.

In 2050, we will remember those who, years in advance, made the right choices for the future.

In only 100 years, because of global warming, forecasts say there will be far fewer humans on Earth. And that those humans will live with far less than today. The Earth is already no longer livable for part of humanity, because of floods, droughts, and arid soils. The fraction of people for whom the Earth is no longer livable will grow a little more each year.

With underground oil stocks already past their production peak, growth has become impossible

Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible. It is self-evident. Perhaps hard to accept, but impossible to ignore.

In fact, economic recession already began with the second oil shock in 2008; we can feel it, and some are even already experiencing it acutely today. The proof lies in the facts — production in Europe today is still below what it was in 2007:

Growth will not come back. There is no point in believing the false GDP calculations whose flawed inflation adjustments still try to keep up the illusion, and which, above all, are not calculated from the stocks of the Earth's resources. The stocks of the Earth's resources ought to be the input data of these GDP calculations, yet they are simply not part of the equation.

Today, everything that is traded commercially continues to be based on withdrawals from nature: we take natural resources (soils, photosynthesis, ores, hydrocarbons, etc.) and we "use" them to make products, some called "natural", even when we used artificial auxiliaries (for example apples, which are harvested with a tractor) and others "artificial" (for example an adjustable wrench).

This observation already leads to another: without natural resources, no more GDP! And, dear reader, look around you as you read these lines: everything you see is nothing but natural resources, transformed by human hands or not. Nothing escapes it.

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Humanity's gross domestic product amounted in 2010 to about 60,000 billion dollars. To enable this production of goods and services of every kind we have:

Question: beyond what values for all of this are we fooling ourselves completely in thinking that we grew richer overall that year? For true enrichment is only achieved if the marginal value of the goods we created in 2010 (i.e. the year's GDP) is greater than the marginal value of the "natural" stocks we destroyed (immediately or in deferred fashion) to achieve it.

The multiplication of bottlenecks in the availability of natural resources, starting with oil stocks, and a stable climate to boot, will make sustaining economic growth increasingly difficult. Quite logically, if trends continue, economic crises that "nobody sees coming" will, alas, occur more and more often, even as we are awash in human capital (including financial capital) and available labour — we will quite simply no longer have resources to feed into the gleaming factories employing workers standing idle. It is urgent to change glasses! Jancovici

Let us remember that our planet abounds in natural assets that are indispensable to life and yet are free. Without even going as far as living species, the existence of an atmosphere and of a water cycle are indispensable to any business, and yet they appear on no income statement. Jancovici

So there is no point in believing the kind of talk that announces the "return of growth" or "rising purchasing power", because it is physically and geologically impossible: the stocks of oil, gas, coal, and ores are running out; most have already passed their production peak and will never return to rising production. Without fuel or raw materials, machines no longer run, no longer produce; there is no more growth. And therefore no rise in purchasing power.

Let us not wait until we are starving to change our life habits. Especially when these more measured life habits lead to better health and inner coherence — and therefore to a happier life.