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People in the U.S. are starting to talk about drilling again – in ANWR, off the coasts, anywhere – and that always makes me think of Frank Sinatra. Or more precisely, his performance as a heroin addict in the movie The Man With The Golden Arm.

People who want to drill for more oil are like the addict who in desperation steals his child’s piggy bank to get a fix. This is almost a perfect analogy. Except that the addict who steals his child’s money to get a fix actually gets the fix. People who push for more drilling probably won’t. If they would only examine the reality of that future:

1. No oil will actually be produced for about 10 years.

2. When it is produced, it will be sold at market rate to the highest bidder.

3. When it is produced, it will be a trickle meandering through a mostly dry riverbed. The world will be running on 20% to 50% less oil than it is today, and the new oil won’t even offset the continuing slide.

So the perfect analogy would be the drug addict who steals his child’s piggy bank to pay a runner who will go off for ten years then return with a tiny bag of dope which he will sell to the person who can best afford his astronomical price. Someone who can afford to pay multiple times what we are paying now.

So I can understand why owners of private jets are all for drilling, because they have a huge sum invested in their jets and you’ll never fly a jet on alternative power. And of course Big Oil is pushing for it (played by Darrin McGavin in the movie). But for the average person, drilling makes no sense. But then, neither does addiction.

The Petro Razor: one of the useful precepts to come out of World Without Oil. In the game, once the global oil shock began, the Petro Razor went to work slicing away the things that depend on oil. And then the things that depended on the things that depend on oil. And then the things that depend on the things that depend on the things, etc. And it cuts away with an inexorable logic all its own. As Inky_Jewel put it: “The Petro Razor is trying to shave us clean. But nobody knows how to use it right, so it keeps cutting us instead.”

Here in the real world, the Petro Razor is also busy. I think a lot of its work has been masked by the subprime mortgage crisis, and certainly the two are working together to cruel effect. But hearing about the rise in abandoned pets and children’s activities being cut and people hiring hoods to torch their gas guzzlers and people setting fire to gas stations in protest and so on, sounds to me like the keen snick-snick-snick of the Petro Razor. Photo by I See Modern Britain via Flickr.

Alert reader Cathy sent me the link to this article by Damien Cave which begins: “Higher fuel prices are forcing cities across the country to cut public services, limit driving by employees and expand public transportation in what has become a sprawling movement to conserve energy.” The article goes on to cite that 90% of 132 cities surveyed are altering operations in response to higher fuel costs. This forced cutback in public services was a big item in the WWO game: almost every service a city offers consumes fuel, and cities draw up their budgets in advance, so sudden increases catch them flatfooted (as we’re seeing now).

But the article goes on to quote the mayors at the conference: “some of them also acknowledged that higher gasoline prices could eventually make their cities bigger, better and richer.” The mayors are reporting transit use is up, the movement to resettle pedestrian-friendly downtown is accelerating, and new interest in bike lanes.

In Newsweek, Robert J Samuelson acknowledges that the equivalent of Peak Oil is here - demand has outstripped supply - and quotes economist Jeffrey Rubin of CIBC World Markets as saying that this will help U.S. manufacturing: no longer can jobs go overseas with such impunity. Relocalization works for manufacturing as well as food. Indeed, I’ve already read of a case where IKEA moved a manufacturing plant to the U.S. for this reason - it was cheaper to build bookcases here than to ship them in from elsewhere.

Samuelson can’t see past the current infrastructure, unfortunately, but the Economist can. In their most recent issue, entitled “The Future of Energy,” the editors cite this “failure of imagination” as the key to our problem with energy. They put forward instead ideas for “a world where, at one level, things will have changed beyond recognition, but at another will have stayed comfortably the same, and may even have got better.”

What patently doesn’t work is to cling to a wasteful system that’s loaded with problems and is incontrovertibly beginning the decline of its useful life. To quote the out-of-game “addiction” teaser for World Without Oil: “You know that it’s bad for you. You’ll cut back someday.” More drilling and more wars are the addict’s groping for one more fix: they solve nothing and don’t change the fundamental forces at work.

As the effects of high fuel prices play out around the world, many people are commenting on the predictive power of the World Without Oil game – and it is remarkably eerie to see the events described by WWO players appear in real-life headlines and news stories.

But the real power of the game, I feel, goes beyond anticipating external events – i.e., telling the external truth of our relationship with oil. The real power is in activating internal truth: enabling people to see events and understand their connection to petroenergy. To pirate an old saying, telling external truths is giving people a fish, i.e. feeding them for a day; enabling internal truthtelling is teaching them how to fish, i.e., feeding them for life.

As an example, let’s look at a comment to the previous post by WWO player PeakProphet: he relates his experience trying to find a home for two abandoned puppies. This is not a story that on its face has anything to do with oil. But once he scratches the surface we see it has everything to do with oil: $4.50 gasoline has really impacted people in rural areas; many families are seriously stretched; pets are expendable. And PeakProphet knows from the WWO game that the oil crisis burden will not fall equally, that alas it will fall mostly on anyone less able to scramble out from under it: the poor, the sick, the stretched, and yes, the defenseless family pet. From two half-starved puppies we come to see an entire region overloaded with abandoned pets, and thus we begin to apprehend the ways in which our oil crisis has already kicked the legs out from under so much that we take for granted. “Tiny Little Kitten” by TrekkyAndy via Flickr.

One of the core messages of World Without Oil is that happiness does not depend upon petroleum (but unhappiness may). Think, for example, of a highway gridlocked with solo drivers, each of whom would identify “loneliness, isolation” as the thing that is making them the most unhappy.

Here’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about: check out what the New Digital History Education blog has to say about the Ciclovia idea, and then watch the video by StreetFilms. There are elegant solutions to a world with less oil.

Everywhere I go in Sweden, I see messages about energy. Car ads list fuel types first, car names second. Car magazines splash “Diesel Sport!” on the cover. New buildings have huge banners on them touting their green designs.

Even the toilets have their message. I encountered one that has a Stop button - stop flushing, that is. Another had a dual flush button - one for a big flush, one for a small. Which may seem puzzling for a country that doesn’t have much of a water problem, until I remembered that moving water around is one of the prime energy drain (so to speak). Back in California, it is the state’s single biggest energy use, for example.

The Tunnelbana – the subway – works like a dream. It’s pleasant to ride and efficient. And it’s growing: the land around my hotel is all torn up for a new spur line to be added.

The thing is, Sweden has a plan - it wants to wean itself off petroenergy by 2015. And the first step is to make efficiency a priority. This bus advertisement (at right) really summed up the attitude: whereas in the US it would probably read “Get more X for less money!” here in Sweden it reads “Get more X for less energy!”  That is a profoundly different mindset, and one that the World Without Oil game is helping to promote.

….possible within two years, says Sachs Goldman via Bloomberg and widely reported. Folks, less than a year ago “$200 a barrel” was shorthand for catastrophe. Witness our fellow simulation, OilShockwave, which in September 2007 posited a global geopolitical crisis precipitated by oil at $150 a barrel.

The Colbert Report takes on James Howard Kunstler, who is the John the Baptist figure of peak oil - a voice that’s been crying in the wilderness for a long time, that is. For all the talk about Kunstler’s new book, “World Made By Hand - A Novel,” nobody seems to be talking about it as a fictional work - as with the World Without Oil game, it’s a veneer of fiction painted on a cold hard potential reality. Watch the Colbert report segment.

Nina Simon works on cool museum stuff (like the Spy Museum [cue theme music]) and posted a thoughtful post-mortem on World Without Oil some months ago in her richly ideated blog, Museum 2.0, pointing up the game’s educational side. She’s presenting museum-quality newtech ideas at a museum conference this week and sent me the slide above with this note: “Your pic on the left. On the right, cellphone pic we took yesterday in SF. Using it in upcoming presentation. Sometimes I wish games didn’t have to be so real.”

Cherie Davis’ article about World Without Oil  in the Turlock Journal brings up a point to ponder: the particular vulnerability of exurbs such as Turlock to an oil shortage. Turlock’s recent growth is largely due to people fleeing the housing pressure cooker of the San Francisco Bay Area, and an awful lot of people in Turlock need to get to someplace else pretty far away on a regular basis, and do so by putting fuel in their cars. What happens when the fuel becomes unaffordable or simply unavailable?

Venezuelan tanks rumble toward the Colombian border. Fuel costs inch upward as money bails out of the sinking dollar into petroleum futures. Oil over $103 a barrel. But who cares? Nothing we can do about it. We at WWO would rather focus on this:

This video by Kaivido wasn’t done for World Without Oil, but it sure could have been!

As reported in the Gonzaga U. paper today.

“The current surge in the price of oil is certainly not driven by a conviction that oil supplies have peaked and can only decline from now on. The dealers in the London and New York exchanges who make the market react to the daily flow of news  and don’t bother much about longer term issues like peak oil. The market is a simple-minded beast: Supply is tight and disruptions are possible, so the price goes up. But the market is so tight because demand has been growing faster than supply for years, and now the fear is that supplies may have stopped growing altogether.” Read the rest here.

Take a look at the preview of this article in the WSJ (subscription needed to read the whole thing, but the gist of it is freely available here). This is essentially a validation of the formative assumptions of WWO: that oil demand is strong and getting stronger, while oil production is weak and getting weaker. What force is there to prevent a rupture between the two?

The U.S. Military discovers peak oil.

Thanks to our very own Marie Lamb (Gracesmom) for finding this one: scientists rebuke oil industry forecasters, question rosy forecasts. And check out the headline they gave it… coincidence?