World uses less oil for first time in 20 years
The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that the developed world used 0.6% less oil in 2006, marking the first decline in over 20 years. It was no doubt due to high oil prices and its attendant economic effects.
This is good news on a lot of fronts. America’s addiction to tightening supplies of foreign oil is a major economic and national security problem. Burning of petroleum also releases greenhouse gas. China and India are increasingly competing with the West for oil supplies. All these reasons work in favor of getting the world to use less of this resource.
There is so much waste in our society directly attributable to petroleum. Last night my significant other and I were shopping at Costco, and we couldn’t help noticing the wastefulness of the apples individually wrapped in plastic (a petrol product) and the bell peppers flown in from Israel. Is all this really necessary? We’re paying a terrible environmental and economic price for those apples and peppers that is not listed on the sales sticker. Those apples would be just as good in a single plastic bag, and I’m sure locally grown peppers taste just as good as Israel’s (probably better, actually, since they can probably get to your table sooner and are grown in season). If there’s anything encouraging about all this waste is that should oil production peak in the near future as some scientists predict there is a hell of a lot of waste we can cut out of our society before we start to suffer from oil deprivation.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: environment, global-warming, peak-oil, petroleum
That good news! I didn’t expect it, and I agree with what you say about wasteful wrapping. I know here in Britain we get more wrapping than goods. There’s something to be said for local products in simple glass bottles. It takes oil to make plastic, and we waste so much of it.
That’s a good sign, but it may not necessarily be an indication of a larger trend. The global oil demand, in fact, did not decline — including the rapidly increasing demands of China and India. It’s possible the decrease is not merely weather related, as the article suggests, and that the developed countries are finally starting to get their acts in gear. But it may just be a blip on the way to ever-increasing demand…