Friday 7 May 2010

Will Peak Oil Turn Flying into Something Only Rich People Can Afford?

Expert physicist: 'At $150 dollars a barrel, the air industry is barely viable. At $200 a barrel, it’s going to [be] something that only rich people do.'

Sitting atop the queue in my inbox is an e-mail from a travel company advertising a $736 roundtrip flight from Los Angeles to Auckland. Captain Cook discovered New Zealand in 1769; for the next 200 years the idea of visiting it, for an American, would have been alien to all but a few very wealthy individuals. Things change. As I write this, a ticket to travel 6,500 miles — one-quarter of the circumference of the Earth — is only a few clicks away.

But how permanent is that change? In the last decade, studies have consistently demonstrated that the world’s storehouses of oil are drying up. Oil is now being consumed almost four times faster than it is being discovered, and in early March, Kuwaiti scientists projected that we will reach peak oil production in 2014. more...

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