Once global supply shortages kick in the breakdown will be chronic
In the last week there was not a drop of petrol at garages in Gauteng, the Eastern and Western Cape. What happened this weekend in Jozi is a little like when you turn open a tap, or flick a switch, and nothing happens. Our attitude to energy is not simply that we expect it to be there, but that we expect it to always be there. We’re expecting to continue cheap and easy motoring, I guess, until the cows come home. Sorry, it’s not going to happen.
In the same way that wishful thinking does not make us immune from reality, other warnings have been dismissed. In the financial industry, where hopes and anticipation often underpin sentiment, investors have been warned that the housing bubble in the US would infect world markets. Adrian Saville* from Canon Asset Managers dismisses the effect on credit markets as follows: “If you put a gram of poison into 999grams of really good food, you won’t taste the poison…”I’m not sure about you, but I would still avoid poisonous food, no matter what the proportion that tasted good. And in addition, there is growing consensus that the US has only advanced from the last recession (which officially ended in November 2001) as a result of borrowing.
You can always find some information to support your view, reality in the Information Age depends on who is writing it, and what it is for. But sooner or later, reality conflicts with so-called reality. The poison, however deeply it is embedded into our lives, will sooner or later, take effect.
On my way back from work on Friday I edged by a charcoal grey golf that had obviously run out of petrol in the centre lane of a three lane highway. Its occupant was talking into a cellphone, meanwhile the nearby forecourts of two petrol stations were cordoned off. Did the maiden in distress really think she would get home on thin air? Did the people on Jozi’s highways, on Saturday especially, and on Sunday, were they driving on anything other than hope and expectation? Because with virtually all petrol stations empty, from a particular line of logical thinking it would just be a matter of time before the charcoal car stranded in nowhere became you, me and the next person. All the vehicles on the highways yesterday were cars running out of time, running for the moment on hope and expectation. Here’s a reality check: this remains true of the world’s 600 something million vehicles that drink tens of millions of barrels of refined petroleum on a daily basis. They’re just hoping it will go on and on. It won’t.
The most chronic sufferers of the delusion that machines like cars are powered by thin air didn’t even notice the breakdowns in Jozi. They expected everything to be okey dokey on Monday, and luckily for them, it probably will be. In a way it is a shame we didn’t have another week of no petrol to practice and fully integrate just how not fun The Land of No Fuel will be. People need to spend a little time working out how they would cope if the petrol pumps didn’t work. How would they get to work, how would they buy groceries, what other difficulties would there be?
I saw mini bus taxi’s being pushed by their former occupants, cars stranded at roadsides everywhere, and people still driving into forecourts despite the red and white tape or orange traffic beacons which obviously suggested they were empty anyway. One blue car was so close to empty, they demanded to be first in the queue for whenever the next supply load arrived. They parked the car in the empty forecourt, and proceeded to stand around. Presumably the expensive oil era will involve a lot of that: people standing around, people waiting for something. I presume then that the blue car driver left his vehicle in the forecourt overnight with the understanding that the driver would be alerted when the next supplies were imminent. Probably that blue car did a lot of false advertising through the night. People seeing a car in the forecourt, apparently getting petrol. Except, of course, it wasn’t.
An added dimension to this story is that driving on a half full tank we visited 2 garages to pump up a friend’s MTB tire. Even the air pumps were out of commission because, the owner told me, the station had suffered a power surge. Back home we got down and dirty and it took a while to pump the wheel up ourselves using a slightly defective hand pump. There’s a small reality clip from The Land of No Fuel.
Do cars run on thin air? No they run on a precious and limited resource. It’s a pinkish liquid called petroleum.
Reality is that fuel energy for our cars is brought to us from faraway countries in ships. When pumps run dry we have to wait for ships to bring more petrol, and then trucks to drive, and pipes to pipe the petrol to where we are.
But what if the place where petrol comes from starts to not have enough for all the waiting ships? What happens then is that only some ships sail the seas, and only some countries (presumably the richest) get what they want. Smaller, poorer countries will increasingly go without these endowments, and that feeling of entitlement and expectation will increasingly be first tempered then eviscerated by feelings of first frustration and then anger.
The dress rehearsal that happened this weekend shows how quickly supplies can run out, and just how dependent everyone is on these fuel resources being there. Our chronic dependency on petroleum to run suburbia, to run essentially the world (the way it has been configured), will give rise to strong feelings of powerlessness and resentment when these shortages are unremitting and unalleviated.
It is not a pleasant place to be where we were this weekend. But without very significant reconfigurations to how we run our highway and other transport systems, without re-engineering how and where we live, we face an austere future. The reality, whether we face it or not, is grim: global shortages are imminent. We need to deal with this now, not only as citizens but as nations, or face the whirlwind.
*Quoted from Chris Needham’s article, The rough ride begins, in the August 5 edition of Business Times, Money.
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