Global oil exports declining
July 13th, 2010Here’s a sobering graph from The Oil Drum: Europe showing that oil exports – oil available for trade on international markets – have been declining since 2005 and that the decline is projected to not only continue, but accelerate.
This decline in oil exports is consistent with the Export Land Model. Consumption within oil producing countries continues to increase even as production lags or falls, leaving less available for export to oil consuming nations.
Luis de Souza writes this situation bodes ill for Europe.
It is hard to envision how Europe will fare in this race for the dwindling international oil market. One thing is for certain: Europe, with its heavy foreign dependence and its now very small internal production, is the Economic block with the most to lose.
But it’s hard to see how the U.S. will fare any better. At least Europe has an infrastructure of cities and villages that mostly developed prior to the automobile age. Population centers have some semblance of a relationship to the surrounding countryside, a relationship that could conceivably be renewed and strengthened without too much disruption. And Europeans have long been used to high transportation fuel prices. High population densities and high fuel prices are two factors contributing to the survival of viable transportation alternatives in Europe . The U.S. has kept fuel prices low and subsidized sprawl since the end of WWII. As a result, much of the built environment in the U.S. will prove to be “stranded investment”, infrastructure whose fate is to be abandoned.
Souza warns that energy scarcities mean the end of an economics we erroneously believe is the natural order of things.
An unsustainable economic paradigm is coming to an end. If economic recession is the only way for Europe and the OECD to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, then economic recession is what it will be.
He’s writing of Europe, but what he says applies more generally to the post-WWII enshrinement of growth and free markets. After causing untold damage to human societies and to Earth itself, the wheels are finally coming off and that age is grinding to an end. Walt Whitman Rostow and The Stages of Economic Growth, RIP.