Our+World+Without+Oil

I conducted a few interviews with others, asking them how their lives would be affected in a world without oil personally. It struck me that many people did not realize oil’s affect on their daily lives. **Girl1:** It’s not really that important. I walk to school every day, so to me, there isn’t much use of it. **Girl2:** Without oil, I wouldn’t be able to get to school. The buses run on oil, right? My parents would also not be able to get to work. The economy would collapse without oil. I think the economy relies too heavily on oil—maybe it’s even based on oil. **Boy1:** Are you talking about cooking oil or gas oil? Oh, well it’s sort of important. We need oil for gas and for transportation. It was interesting to see how little people thought of oil in their daily lives. All of the people I interviewed associated oil with transportation, as I did when I was first faced with this question. However, oil is directly and indirectly linked into almost everything we own. I then told them a bit more about oil. **Q:** **Did you know that almost everything you own is made with oil? Makeup, nail polish, video games, computers, etc? What would a world without oil mean to you?** **Girl1:** Oh my god, are you serious? Without oil, I would not be able to function. **Girl2:** I think that we would experience an economic crisis like never before. If everything is related to oil, then everything would be affected. I might move to my great-aunt’s farm in Nebraska. But even there, we would not be able to make a comfortable living if we aren’t able to transport our harvest. **Boy1:** No video games? I would die. No computers? How would society still function? Yes, we would all be VERY affected; I would probably move to the Himalayan Mountains or the plains of Mongolia and live with all those people that DON’T require oil. Or do they? If everything is linked into oil, then we can’t escape it. Hey, would we still be able to EAT? Once everyone realized how much we relied on oil every day, they acknowledged how much it would affect them. I think that one reason why people are not so concerned about the oil crisis is that they do not realize the importance of oil in our daily lives. **Girl1:** I think things like that would no longer be important. We should just all go back to the Native American lifestyle! **Girl2:** I think it would still be important to a certain extent. I think that we should still learn these skills to the best we can—as well as facilities will allow us so, in case we come across a new fuel or something that brings our old lifestyles back. However, I also think that we should incorporate other skills into our education, like survival skills, in case we really have to change our way of life. **Boy1:** No, these would not be useful to learn so we should stop learning them! We should stop learning this now! It’s not like we’re ever going to use these skills. We should learn stuff like farming and Boy Scout things, in order to survive. Or maybe we should learn about inventing things, and then we could invent a new fuel! I enjoyed listening to their replies over the issue regarding a world without oil. One must hope that we will never reach that peak, for if we do, our lifestyles will be changed drastically.
 * Q: How important do you think oil is to your daily life? **
 * Q: Do you think the classes we take now would still be important if we no longer had oil? For example, we would no longer have calculators, so would skills like calculus still be necessary? **