" Dear Mr. Barron,
You are very uninformed about the role of petroleum in our industrialized society.
A drop in oil prices is a bad thing because it encourages people to continue our auto dependant lifestyle, which is coming to an end, whether we like it or not. Please read this introduction to the situation we find ourselves in:

Our species is facing the classic ecological dilemma.
The 6.6 billion human population on this planet is about three times more than the planet’s sustainable carrying capacity, and it continues to grow exponentially, soon to have tragic consequences. This temporary state of exuberance was only made possible because we wantonly used the stored carbohydrate energy found in ancient fossil fuels; coal, oil, and natural gas. Burning them provided us with thousands of times more energy than we could have realized from using renewable sources. As these finite resources begin to dwindle and population continues to grow, humankind will have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity, resulting in a die-off.

Those energy dense fossil fuels were deposited in a painstakingly gradual process, over hundreds of millions of years, a process that cannot ever be duplicated in any of our descendants’ foreseeable lifetimes. Our endowment of those valuable substances was therefore finite.

Our access to those treasures, oil in particular, is about to be severely curtailed, as its production decreases due to unavoidable geological factors. This peaking phenomenon is exacerbated by theoretically avoidable geopolitical factors such as those occurring in Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, and soon in Iran; and by declining exports resulting from increased domestic consumption in the exporting countries. With its price in the summer of 2008 at an all time high, oil is rapidly becoming inexorably more scarce and expensive.

Our modern civilization, with all its complexity, is based on an elaborate, global transportation and distribution system, which itself is almost wholly dependant on oil as the fuel. With its decline, a period of travail is about to begin, and according to the Hirsch report, it will cause a disruption of our economy resembling the great depression of 1929-1932, only decades long.

There are no ready alternatives that could enable us to continue our high energy consumptive lifestyle in the manner to which we have become accustomed; not windmills, not solar panels, not electric plug-in cars, not nuclear plants, not tar sands, not oil shales, not coal to liquids, and especially not corn derived ethanol (moonshine will save us!).

Considering what it’s doing to our atmosphere, it’s has become clear that it was a mistake to have released all that carbon from underground in the first place. The gradual sequestration of carbon over hundreds of millions of years is what made our planet’s atmosphere habitable for us to evolve into. Now, in a few hundred years, we have destroyed the ecological balance in our biosphere, on a scale so large as to be irreparable, making it increasingly uninhabitable for ourselves and the other species.

We are like an introduced species

The concept that best describes the overall situation comes from an article “Energy and Human Evolution”, by David Price:

Take the ecological analogy of an introduced species. A few yeast cells dropped into a vat of sugar-rich crushed grapes. Given a seemingly unlimited supply of food, they set about eating and reproducing voraciously. Their population blooms explosively until all the food is consumed, after which the population crashes in a sudden die-off.

Now think of humans as a species that consumes not just food, but also vast amounts of exosomatic energy. In fact, even our industrial agriculture system is totally fossil fuel dependant. Think of humans as voracious consumers of energy.

If that fossil energy was deposited before we even got here, (after all it has been waiting underground for a hundred million years, and we humans, homo sapiens, just appeared here 140,000 years ago, and we only started to use it a few hundred years ago), then we are like an introduced species.

We are busy about our business of using up all the stored energy at an ever faster rate, our population is exploding exponentially, and at some point for practical purposes we will have used it all. We will find ourselves woefully overextended for our planet’s carrying capacity, and we will be faced with too many people and not enough food! As the famous Princeton geophysicist Ken Deffeyes once said, “There is a simple solution for too many people and not enough food… cannibalism.”

What are we to do?

Go to the supermarket and look at the vast quantity and variety of foods offered to you from around the world. Remember it, because right now is probably as good as it will ever be. From now on, our lives are going to become increasingly more inconvenient, uncomfortable, and unpleasant.

Expect floods, droughts, severe weather, species extinction, declining energy and food supplies, and global economic collapse. Roughly four or five billion people are going to die miserably over the next 50-100 years, primarily due to famine, starvation, disease, epidemics, and of course - wars. Humans’ penchant for mass killing of each other is one thing that distinguishes us from the dumber animals.

Mitigating the problem would require action on a global scale, such as parking every one of the world’s 800 million cars, and shutting down every one of the coal fired electric plants on the planet, and not building any more of either. And stop raising animals for human consumption. And stop decimating ocean fish populations for human consumption. And stop harvesting tropical and arboreal forests. And stop depleting topsoil and groundwater. And decrease the world’s human population.

But of course none of that is happening. Some 560 coal-fired power plants were built in 26 nations between 2002 and 2006. By 2012, three key countries alone - China, India, and the United States, are planning to build nearly 850 more.

Instead of taking real action, we are busy making ethanol from corn and screwing in compact fluorescent light bulbs (made in China). In fact, every one of the destructive activities listed above increases every day. Governments, corporations, and the media actually facilitate and encourage them. It’s called economic growth, and our government is desperately trying to encourage it.

“People are not moved by timely warnings, only by the pitiless crowbar of events.” - A. Sozhenitsyn

Like the chronic cigarette smoker who is told at each doctor’s visit to stop smoking, intellectual messages about future consequences are largely ineffective. Due to the “fight or flight” hardwiring of our brains, only an emotional message impels us to action. That first heart attack can be a powerful motivator to stop smoking. Unfortunately, because of us, our planet’s biosphere is heading for a heart attack. It’s up to us as a species to “stop smoking”, to stop burning fossil fuels, to use way less energy, to stop our voracious consumption of everything on this planet. Can we do it? "