Peak oil is here right now, for all intents and purposes. Sure, the notion has alternatively been laughed off and become the focus of intense doom-saying over the last few decades—hence the appropriately melodramatic oil apocalypse pic up there. Yet oil companies shrug it off—we’ll drill deeper and better and with new technology; just keep driving, folks. But there’s no doubt now that oil is getting scarcer and more difficult to extract: the easily accessible stuff is vanishing fast, and tensions in the regions that produce much of it perennially complicate matters.Oil companies argue that there’s still tons of oil from “unconventional” sources out there in places like shale rock and the Arctic deepwater. But, as this fine animated video from the Post Carbon Institute points out, that stuff is extremely difficult to get to, and therefore quite costly.So even if we haven’t reached the precise “peak” in our quest to deplete the total amount of oil locked away around the world—even if there’s still “plenty” of oil left out there, under miles of freezing ocean and deep into the earth’s crust—we’ve definitely peaked on the cheap stuff. Because sometimes, when we try to get it, this happens:And the economy depends on the cheap stuff.“What’s new is high oil prices and the economy hates high oil prices,” Richard Heinberg says. And the PCI notes that "We can fall for the oil industry hype and keep ourselves chained to a resource that’s depleting and comes with ever increasing economic and environmental costs, or we can recognize that the days of cheap and abundant oil are over.It’d just be better for everyone if we all accepted the fact that those days are behind us, and began directing a truly serious proportion of our resources towards the tremendously difficult project of transitioning away from a global oil-reliant economy. We’ve undertaken such large-scale transformative projects before. The future calls, and it’s not going to be run on 10 million year-old fossil fuels.
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