Tawei Liao

Oil and the End of Globalization

Jeff Rubin

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin.  I decided to read Jeff Rubin’s book after watching his presentation at the Business of Climate Change conference in Toronto.  My previous entry has a link to the video on YouTube. I have read many peak oil books already so I was a little skeptical about “yet another peak oil book”.  But this one is a little different.  Rubin does not spent a lot of time trying to explain oil field depletion or the Hubbert curve.  This is not a heavily technical book like Matthew Simmons’ “Twilight In The Desert” or Kenneth Deffeyes’ “Beyond Oil”.   This book is more about the social changes that will occur in a world of  PERMANENT  high oil prices.  It is about simple things like getting coffee in the morning or having Chinese food for dinner. Coffee beans are grown all over the world and transported by diesel powered ships and diesel powered trucks to coffee houses all over the world.  How much will that coffee cost when diesel fuel cost $10 a gallon?  And will you still be having Chinese food when the ingredients have to be transported 5000 miles and the people preparing the food cannot afford to immigrate to your country?

Thomas Friedman thinks that the world is flat.  Jeff Rubin does not.  Globalization is a brief experiment made possible only with cheap oil.  It is an experiment that is coming to an end.  Rubin goes into detail explaining the social aspects of high oil prices, from food production to immigration.  The latter is an interesting new concept that I have not thought of in the context of peak oil.  A society’s tolerance of immigrants is directly related to the health of the economy.  If the economy is under a permanent strain of high energy prices, immigration will likely not be embraced.

There will be big macroeconomic shifts in the economy. A whole lot of people currently working in the service economy like serving coffee or processing insurance claims will have to adjust to new lives in the manufacturing or farm economy.  We will need toaster repairmen because we simply cannot afford to throw the old one away and buy a new one.  We will need more farm hands instead of baristas because there will not be a lot of people drinking expensive coffee.  There will be a lot more food produced locally and local farmers need all the help they can get when they cannot afford to operate diesel powered farm equipment.

The world of high energy prices is a much smaller world.  It is a world focused on the local community.  It is a much better world in my opinion.  This is a very good book.  I highly recommend it.