How Do We Prepare for a World Without Cheap Oil?

It appears this business of end of cheap oil is getting more attention. The title above comes from an article from a Harvard Business School e-newsletter I got this morning. The meme is getting around.

So I pose the same question to the ACS: How do we prepare for a world without cheap oil? The reason I ask is because the Society’s business model still seems to be so based on physical transportation of people: lots of local offices, lots of staff driving round (much as I did 30 years ago when I came to work for the Society), lots and lots of meetings involving air travel and expensive hotels. I have often wondered what proportion of our budgets we spend moving bodies around. Could we start considering a business model based on electronic communication instead of movement? Cheap oil or not, it seems to me examining other possibilities is worth doing.

Leave a Reply