Peak Oil - My Perspective

My family use oil to drive our cars to work, school, supermarkets, and other places everyday our lives. At times we even use taxi, bus, train, even plane depending even where we are going. When there is a rise in  the price of oil, the price of transportation, health care, education, housing, services, foodstuff, household goods, clothing, sports items and etc… will rise also because most of the manufactured goods are made from oil and worse they are transported from one place to the other using vehicles run on oil. My family ends up paying more when there oil price rise. This is because we buy food from supermarkets and it's not practical to grow food ourselves. However income does not rise at the same time the rise in oil.

Of the 85 million barrels of oil the world uses everyday, 44% is made into petroleum/gasoline, 35% into other fuels and the rest goes to manufacturing household goods, chemicals cosmetics clothing building materials that we use everyday. Imagine if there is no oil than these goods become scarce!

Oil is finite resource, it is a fossil fuel and found in limited supply. What is peak oil debate? It is about the time when the maximum rate of oil production is reached, after which it declines. The scientists also debate on how much oil is left and how long it will last. Global depletion will eventually occur if no new oil wells are discovered to mitigate the process. Malaysia is fortunate to be one of the oil producing nations. If there is a price hike, our government will subsidize it. Petronas is government owned oil company and my uncle is one of the employee. Since oil is declining we can reduce our consumption and try to conserve our oil reserves by not using cars instead we should cycle or walk to nearby places or use public transport for reaching far places. We could change fuel for cars to hybrids, LNG, or biodiesel. We must recycle as much as possible to lower the demand of oil manufactured goods. We must change our lifestyle, eat more greens and fruits or else grow our own food. Buy local goods, fresh produce and not processed food. And wear clothes made from natural fibers. For a more drastic change, we just simplify our lives by building homes using recycled or recyclable materials and use far fewer resources and live in nature friendly sustainable places and not in cities. It is possible to live a simple life in Malaysia!