With shale oil and other extreme oil sources, many think peak oil is dead, or at least is not threatening our economies. But this couldn’t be more wrong. The historic average oil prices are of $25. Current prices are above $110 a barrel.
Five years ago, they were less than half of that. As the Conversation notes, current high prices have a huge toll on our economies as we spend $9.5 billion globally on oil every single day, amounting to a staggering $3.5 TRILLION each year.
This addiction is hurting our economies each day more are the global demand keeps on increasing, fueled by developing and emerging nations.
The sooner we wean our economies off oil, the better. As an example, France alone consumes around two million barrels per day. At $110 a barrel, that’s 1.162 billion euros leaving the national economy every single week. Money that won’t be invested locally in companies, schools, hospitals and so on.
Given our utmost inefficient consumption of the black gold – as an example the internal combustion engine waste 85 percent of total energy, talk about throwing money out of the window… – we could easily go to more efficient, cleaner and cheaper energy sources.
As the article linked above notes, it’s high time we start doing something to move beyond oil.
Not that we will run out of oil any time soon, we just ran out of cheap one all the way back to 2005.