Societal Collapse Due to Peak Oil ‘Inevitable,’ According to Researcher

In a new article, an Oxford researcher has examined what will happen when peak oil hits. According to Jörg Friedrichs, the outlook is not good. In his article Friedrichs doesn’t attempt to answer the question when peak oil will happen (or if it already has). Instead he imagines that it has happened and the world has to deal with it.

His conclusions: the world will have a “slow and painful” adjustment to peak oil lasting a century or more with the inevitable collapse of industrial society and the disintegration of free trade. How cheerful.

In his research, Friedrichs used three historical examples to guide his thought process of how the world’s different governments will deal with being energy constrained: North Korea, Cuba and Japan.

North Korea and Totalitarian Retrenchment

In the 1990’s North Korea entered a period of time that is akin to what the world might face when confronted with peak oil. As the Soviets stopped delivering subsidized oil to its comrades, North Korea was faced with a severe oil shortage. To deal with the catastrophe, the North Korean government “basically screwed its own population,” said Friedrichs in an interview with Miller McCune. “Elite privileges were preserved, while hundreds of thousands of ordinary people starved.” This type of governmental response  to an oil chortage Friedrichs has labeled as “totalitarian retrenchment.”

Cuba and Mobilization of Local Resilience

Due to the same pullback that North Korea faced from the Soviets, Cuba also entered a period of severe oil shortages in the 1990’s. But, instead of enacting more totalitarian control tactics, Cuba — with its history of grassroots communist organization and reliance on friends and family — fell back into what Friedrichs calls “mobilization of local resilience.” In other words, people being a community. “People helped each other at the neighbourhood level, and the wastelands of Havana and other cities were utilized for urban gardening,” said Friedrichs. “As a result, Cuba did not experience mass starvation despite considerable hardship in the 1990s.”

Japan and Predatory Militarism

From 1940-1945, Japan was on the brink of entering the war. For decades Japan had sought to expand its influence in China and secure energy resources — long considered its major growth restraint, having virtually none of its own. At the time, Japan was almost completely dependent on oil imports from California to fuel its growth. Given that Japan had its sights on a pre-emptory invasion of Pearl Harbor, they decided to invade the East Indies to secure their oil supply. This kind of response to an oil shortage Friedrichs calls “predatory militarism” — that is, using military might to steal resources from other areas.

How will the Various Governments of the World React to Peak Oil?

According to Friedrichs, all countries of the world that are wholly dependent on an oil economy will react to peak oil in one of the above 3 methods. “Countries prone to military solutions may follow a Japanese-style strategy of predatory militarism,” he said. “Countries with a strong authoritarian tradition may follow a North Korean path of totalitarian retrenchment. Countries with a strong community ethos may embark on a Cuban-style mobilization of local resilience, relying on their people to mitigate the effects of peak oil.”

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