I’ve just finished reading two compelling books that begin to paint a portrait of what life might be like in the North Country in the coming age when cheap oil is a fading memory.<\/p>\n
I’ll acknowledge as a personal bias that I think this is inevitable.<\/p>\n
After covering the Exxon Valdez and BP Gulf oil spills, I am left with the conviction that oil companies are already pushing into increasingly dangerous, volatile and unstable environments in search of our oil.<\/p>\n
In a single century, we went from getting cheap oil from our backyards, where the stuff was literally bubbling out of the ground, to a pursuit that verges on science fiction in its technical challenges.<\/p>\n
Whether it is a well drilled a mile under the surface of the hurricane-wept Gulf of Mexico or rigs that sit in war-torn regions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, these are tough and costly places to get our energy.<\/p>\n
Ten years from now, the pursuit will take us into even more troubled terrain — and ten years after that we’ll have to go farther and deeper.<\/p>\n
It is worth noting that a single screw-up last year nearly destabilized BP, one of the world’s largest energy producers.\u00a0 The likelihood of catastrophic failures going forward seems certain to grow.<\/p>\n
So what will life be like in our neck of the woods when a gallon of gas costs $10?\u00a0 Or when gasoline is all but impossible to find at all?<\/p>\n
Jerry Jenkins with the Wildlife Conservation Society points out in his book “Climate Change in the Adirondacks”<\/a> that “fossil fuels changed the Adirondacks, as they did the world.”<\/p>\n “Consider a small Adirondack town, perhaps North Elba, in 1840….A man and a [horse] team working steadily could do less work than a medium-sized riding lawn mower.\u00a0 A week of eigh-hour days netted them less useful work than we get from 5 gallons of gasoline.\u00a0 The town gristmill, or the massed person-power and horsepower of the town, had less mechanical power than a small motorcycle.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jenkins makes it clear that replacing the ease, simplicity and efficiency of fossil-fuel engines and products will be a very difficult task, and could result in sacrifices to “our material welfare…that none of us would willingly choose.”<\/p>\n