Orlov’s vision of collapse – good news for the climate?
June 28th, 2009Dmitry Orlov at Club Orlov writes that the depletion curves touted by the Peak Oil community are ‘way too optimistic. Oil production will likely not drift down gently over the coming decades. Rather, it will collapse as the economic and social systems that support it collapse. Orlov points to the ex-Soviet Union as the cautionary example.
If the future unfolds as Orlov foresees, the climate change psychodramas we are witnessing (such as the kerfuffle over the shameful Waxman-Markey bill) will prove to be nothing more than a distracting sideshow. Emissions will collapse of themselves as the industrial economies collapse.
For example, Russia is proposing a target level of 10-15% below 1990 levels by 2020. That’s far more than Waxman-Markey, – but would actually allow Russian emissions to grow by 30% from 2.2 billion tons in 2007 to 3 billion tons in 2020. From a climate perspective, economic collapse has proven to be the most powerful measure imaginable – far more powerful than the policies proposed by the world’s politicians, which are limited by the proviso that they be politically “realistic.”
Orlov describes how events unfolded in the Soviet Union:
Firstly, the crash in oil production preceded collapse in USSR’s Gross Domestic Product. The lag time between the two, and the severity of the collapse are clear enough to ascribe causality: to say that the oil crash caused the economic collapse. On the other hand, coal and natural gas production, which also crashed, did so after the GDP collapsed, again, with a significant enough lag time to say with confidence that it was economic collapse that caused coal and gas production to crash.
What actually happens to an economy and a society under such circumstances? With oil in short supply, industrial production plummets, the economy stalls, there is a financial crisis because of debts going bad, followed by a commercial crisis because of falling demand and lack of credit, followed by political collapse caused by dwindling government revenues, followed by social collapse as unemployment rises and crime becomes rampant. After a while of this, the idea of you and your friends going out to the oil field and pumping some more oil starts to seem rather odd, and so oil production heads to zero.
We will soon see how prescient Orlov’s vision proves to be.
But don’t forget the bright side – averting climate catastrophe may not prove impossible after all!