Introduction
“Energy crises, then and now”
Ever since the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, there have always been issues and rumors pertaining to an income energy crisis. Some of the issues that arise are always just rumors while others are real. My stand to these is that energy crises do really exist and the countries should place measures to counter attack this miss-fortune from happening.
Currently, all the major nations of the world are always discussing on how they will evade energy crises by taking control of the leading energy producing areas. Countries have also gone to go to war just to have a control of the sources of energy for their future. An energy crisis is a real miss-fortune in the happening creating a need for action.
Fist Claim
With the existence of the world oil peak, there will reach a moment in time where there will be less oil for the consumption by the world.
According to M king Hubbert, a theorist, world peak oil is not about the world lacking oil in the near future but the production rate of oil decreasing. This is bound to happen with time as there is increased usage of the oil reserves and wells by both the public and private owners. According to Fisher, “His logistic model, now called Hubbert peak theory, and its variants have been shown to be descriptive with reasonable accuracy of the peak and decline of production from oil wells, fields, regions, and countries, and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains” (Fisher, 1974).
Nevertheless, according to Vannoccio Biringuccio, author of Pirptechnia, “Miners are more likely to exhaust the supply of ores than the foresters supply of the wood needed to smelt them. Very great forests are found everywhere, which makes one think that the ages of man would never consume themespecially since nature, so very liberal, produces new ones every day” (Nelson & Drummond, 1996). The author supports the fact that energy forms cannot end, as there is a large reservoir of it. The statement can be supported by the large amounts of fossil fuels that turn to oil after the process of decomposition.
Second Claim
Oil demand rates of the world are noted to dramatically rise causing an alarm for future consumption.
According to sources from World-Crisis, the demand rates increased by an average of 1.76% between 1994 and 2006, and 3.4% between 2003 and 2004. However, after 2006, there was a notable increase in demand by 37% per annum. With this trend continuing, it is expected that the supply of energy will be limited in no time. This means that there is an upcoming energy crisis in the market. The rise in the demand rates in the market have resulted to increase in prices causing panic among the inhabitants of the various countries.
According to World-Crisis, there has been a drop in the increase of the population rate of the country. This means that though there is increase in demand of energy, the decline in population growth rate from 2.1% in the year 1970 to 1.67% in 2007 will help solve the issue. This means that most of the energy is not consumed but stored for future reference.
Third Claim
In the year 1973, an oil crisis occurred after the Arab countries established an Oil embargo.
The Oil embargo of 1973 resulted in the increase in prices from $3 to $12 per barrel. The oil embargo resulted in both political and economic effects to many countries. With the current increase in prices, there is every reason to believe that we are heading towards such a moment as countries’ economies are already failing due to the current Energy crisis.
Conclusion
Energy crisis is a thing of the past and has continuously repeated itself all through history. Therefore, the topic, “Energy crises, then and now”, simply captures the whole event into consideration.
With the existence of the world oil peak, there will reach a moment in time where there will be less oil for the consumption by the world. Oil demand rates of the world are noted to dramatically rise causing an alarm for future consumption. In the year 1973, an oil crisis occurred after the Arab countries established an Oil embargo.
References
Fisher, J. C. (1974). Energy crises in perspective. New York: Wiley.
Nelson, L., & Drummond, S. (1996). The Human Perspective: Readings in World Civilization, Volume II: The Modern World Through the Twentieth Century (2nd ed.). Cengage Learning.
World Oil Crisis - Global Financial Crisis website. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.world-crisis.net/oil-crisis.html
