By theWedge.LIVE
The global campaign to demonize fossil fuels continues unabated–and well-funded. Will Canada be its first casualty?
While dialoguing with experts on the great collision, “climate change” head-on with fossil fuels, we mused on a world without the latter. In other words, those who aim to end oil and gas have succeeded and there is no longer a drop to be found.
We began to muse on the outcomes.
This is when we were introduced to a realist, a prolific scientist, Dr. Blair King, who resides in beautiful, Langley, British Columbia.
In King’s blog, we unearthed the post fossil fuels scenario. Readers are warned this is progressing quickly and therefore would be wise to prepare by reading the following excerpt from his blog–especially Canadians.
A thought experiment on what would happen if all fossil fuels disappeared tomorrow.
In this thought experiment we will assume that a mystical power has arrived on Earth and using some unknown technology eliminated all fossil fuels from the planet. What would happen? Since I live in Langley, I’m going to consider this from a Lower Mainland perspective.
If you lived in the Lower Mainland, all transportation systems (except Skytrain and a few hundred electric vehicles) would immediately stop. Stores would cease to get new supplies as all supplies are transported from warehouses by truck. No new supplies could get to the warehouses as all the trains depend on diesel, transport planes on aviation fuel and container ships on bunker oil or diesel. Soon the folks in the urban areas would be fighting over the remaining scraps in the stores and once those supplies were gone there would be nothing to replace them.
Starvation would not be the biggest concern though as in area likes Vancouver, the potable water and electrical supplies are dependent on diesel for pumps and the electrical system is maintained by men and women with trucks. We in BC pride ourselves on getting most of our energy from non-fossil fuel sources but absent those pumps and those trucks within days (perhaps weeks if we didn’t have any storms) our electricity supply would be down as well. With no electricity and no diesel all the pumps would fail and Vancouverites would suddenly discover that living in a rain-forest means nothing if you don’t have access to stored water.
Within a couple weeks, the city-centers would look like a scene from The Walking Dead, with corpses everywhere as the weakest folks lost out in the battles for the gradually diminishing supplies of food and water. Absent the sanitary system, the remaining folk would be fighting dysentery as human waste polluted the limited freshwater aquifers. Anyone with the capacity to do so would be moving away from the city-centers as quickly as possible to forage as far as they could roam by foot and on the remaining bikes (the remaining electric vehicles having used their last charge after the electrical system failed).
In the Lower Mainland the city folk would be streaming out towards the Valley where they would discover that virtually everything edible (from plant to animal) had long since been eaten by the Valley folk. Within a few months over 90% of the population would have succumbed to the lack of clean water and food leaving a small minority fighting it out over the few remaining crops. Come winter, absent fossil fuels, the remaining few would go back to burning wood for heat and in doing so would add to the ecological devastation wrought by the first wave of city folk cleansing the ecosystem of everything edible. Certainly in parts of the developing world and in portions of the prairies, subsistence-level communities might remain intact but they would be re-building on a planet that had been systematically stripped of everything edible by the 7 billion souls who did their best to survive and in doing so wrought an ecological apocalypse.
In television shows like The Walking Dead, the zombie apocalypse addresses our population density before the millions of hungry humans have had a chance to devastate the planet. In a post-fossil fuel world, those 7 billion souls would be fighting tooth and nail for every scrap of food and whatever large or mid-sized animals left behind would take hundreds of years to regenerate their populations and the ecosystem that came back would look a lot different from the ecosystem that existed before humans. Climate Change may represent a real threat to humanity, but absent fossil fuels it is likely that 6 billion or more people would pass away in the first six months in this post–fossil fuel world.
“My fear is that we continue to waste our moral and financial capital on emotionally-charged and scientifically-indefensible projects leaving us without anything to spend when it comes to making real changes that can make tangible improvements locally, regionally and nationally.” Blair King
Clearly, there is little to celebrate with the end of oil. Even its adversaries–those raking in millions on the cap and trade scheme–will fall without oil.
About Dr. Blair King
- Interdisciplinary PhD in Chemistry and Environmental Studies with an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and Biology.
- Registered Professional Chemist and a Registered Professional Biologist
- Appointed to the Roster of Approved Professionals by the BC Ministry of Environment’s Director of Waste Management both as a Numeric-based Standards Approved Professional and a Risk-based Standards Approved Professional (under the Society of Contaminated Sites Approved Professionals or CSAP)
- Graduate research was in the fields of Chemistry and Environmental Studies and involved in improving the availability of high-quality multidisciplinary scientific data for use in environmental decision-making. This included developing standardised protocols to evaluate multidisciplinary data including specialised protocols for organic trace data, toxicological experiments and biological responses to organic contaminants.
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