No. The problems have already started - countries worldwide are already experiencing regular blackouts and fuel shortages. It just hasn’t hit North America (yet).

Here’s a quick summary of why we don’t need to wait around for peak oil to have problems:

Global oil supply is probably peaking around now, but that doesn’t matter because…

Whether oil supply is peaking or not, global oil supply growth won’t keep up with global demand growth, but even that doesn’t matter because…

Oil exporting countries are going to stop exporting early because they have growing internal demand, and will save oil for later, when the price is even higher, creating a few countries with plenty of oil and many countries with insufficient supplies, but even that doesn’t matter because…

The global EROI of oil has declined drastically and continues to decline. Per Charlie Hall, professor at SUNY and inventor of the EROI concept, maintaining the current complexity of human civilization requires a minimum of something like 5:1 EROI to continue (5 barrels back for every 1 barrel worth of energy put into producing those 5 barrels), and most of our future alternative energy sources, including ethanol, nuclear, heavy oil and tar sands, are beneath that figure. It doesn’t matter if there’s a TRILLION barrels of oil left on earth, if it’s all less than 5:1. Below 5:1, we can no longer maintain the teetering complexity of our civilization, and things will start to “simplify”, i.e., break down. Charlie points out this is already happening in an uneven way; we maintain tremendous complexity in some areas by allowing complexity to collapse in other areas, like the maintenance of infrastructure (electrical grid, highways, water and sewage systems, etc.)

VPOE member Rick Balfour adds these other examples of system failure which may well precede an actual supply stoppage:

1. Oil pipelines which run at full capacity can be slowed down as supplies start to run out, or run low at the input end. This causes low supply at the output end, but it’s manageable.

If the flow slows down below, say, 30% of capacity, the pipeliness will shut down. Different materials (besides oil) can be shunted through to keep the flow moving, separated by plugs to provide continuous feed, but the pipelines cannot pump air or a vacuum.

Some folks suggested filling the void in supply with water, but unfortunately this causes rust, bacterial growth etc, so this is counterproductive. The conclusion is that long before big shortages hit a continental system, the shortfall of input will trigger main city shortages in any manner of primary and secondary fuels: from crude to jet fuel.

2. The heavy push for moving to electricity is a systems bottleneck, in that the grid is already loaded to capacity. Even if we were able to find the time, money and natural resources to build massive wind, solar, tidal, hydro or other new electricity sources, in an attempt to replace liquid fossil fuels with electrical energy, the grid could not carry it. No capacity.

The one caveat is that if private home and electric car systems can download and store energy locally, it could help the carrying capacity of the grid, but only in a local way - the main grid is still a botteneck.

This will inevitably bring up the issue of clawback of local power for survival when other systems run out, such as tapering off of natural gas in cold climate areas.

Per Balfour, conversion of transport to post-oil alternatives and changes to our pattern of community are our first lines of defense. See SSP5 slide sets for a BC-specific vision for post oil community and national level aspects of global impacts on regions. These slide sets are part of the Canadian Institute of Planners series.