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Peak Oil - It's being written,
but who is reading ?
Lights Out! The End of
the Oil Age
by Jason Mark, AlterNet, April 14, 2004
Viewed on April 16, 2004
On a cold, wet night there's nothing better
than coming home to a warm house, making a hot bowl of soup and then,
after dinner, curling up under a reading lamp with a good book. But what
if there was no gas to make the soup or run the furnace? What if there
wasn't any oil to transport the dinner ingredients to you? No sweat, you
may be thinking, I'm pretty hardy. If you really believe that, then I
challenge you to sit in the dark for 15 minutes. It's no fun.
As that little mind game shows, trying to imagine life after fossil fuels
isn't easy. Hydrocarbons are the very lifeblood of modern, industrial
society. They are so fundamental to our existence that their role in creating
our quality of life often goes unexamined. What our great grandparents
would have considered luxuries we think of as necessities. But as even
a casual look at history and a quick review of physics reveal, we are
living an aberration.
A century and a half ago, we weren't dependent on fossil fuels. And by
the end of this century--at the very latest--we will be so no longer.
In the sweep of human history, the 20th century and the first part of
the 21st are a carbon interregnum.
One doesn't have to be a shrieking Cassandra to say that the oil and gas
age is coming to a close. You simply have to recognize the basic laws
of science. As we all learned in elementary school, fossil fuels are not
a renewable commodity. To wonder when the oil and gas we depend on will
start running out misses the point: We've been running out ever since
the first commercial oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. Although
oil industry types like to talk about "petroleum production,"
the fact is that no one is making any more of it.
A pair of recent books gives a long, hard look at what will happen when
the carbon age ends. David Goodstein's Out of Gas and The Party's Over
by Richard Heinberg bravely explore the consequences of the inevitable--and
immediate--oil and gas scarcity. The steady depletion of oil threatens
to be, in Heinberg's words, a "wrenching adjustment." As both
authors agree, what we're facing is not a pretty picture.
Goodstein and Heinberg each rely on the landmark work of a little-known
(but perhaps soon-to-be famous?) geologist named M. King Hubbert. In the
1950s, Hubbert was working for Shell Oil in the company's research laboratory.
After looking closely at the pattern of oil discoveries in the lower-forty-eight
U.S. states, Hubbert reached the conclusion that U.S. oil extraction would
someday peak--that is, petroleum production would reach a pinnacle and
then begin a steady decline. After figuring that discoveries of new oil
fields in the lower forty-eight had climaxed in the 1930s, Hubbert predicted
that U.S. oil extraction would peak sometime in the early 1970s.
Many of Hubbert's geologist peers dismissed his prophesy. Then it came
true. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970. Today, the United States--which
had once been the world's largest oil producer and exporter--imports nearly
60 percent of all the oil it uses.
Since Hubbert's death in 1989, a slew of scientists (most of them former
employees of Texaco, Chevron and other oil corporations) have applied
Hubbert's methods to studying world petroleum output. These geologists
examined global oil discovery--which peaked in the 1970s--and then calculated
the future rate of extraction. Their prediction? We will hit global oil
peak sometime between 2006 and 2015. From that point on, the inexorable
laws of supply and demand will make petroleum ever more expensive until
it's no longer economically feasible for society to rely on it. According
to a 1999 report by the investment house Goldman Sachs, the oil companies
are part of a "dying industry."
For a time, natural gas may be able to fill the gap. Natural gas is already
used to heat homes and light stoves, and its role in generating electricity
is growing by the year. Compressed natural gas can also be used to power
automobiles. But gas, like oil, is also held hostage to the rules of science.
Geologists expect natural gas production to climax within just a few decades
of the petroleum peak. The magic of convenient energy is about to do a
disappearing act.
What will this mean for our lives? For one thing, cheap travel will become
a thing of the past--goodbye backpacking trips to Bali and cross-country
road trips. Our transportation infrastructure is utterly dependent on
oil. Forty percent of all the petroleum we consume goes into our personal
cars and trucks, and another 20 percent is burned by our trains, 18 wheelers
and airplanes. As fuel costs rise, our freeways will crawl to a stop,
our airports will be shuttered. The process of economic globalization,
which is so dependent on inexpensive transport, will hit a brick wall.
By necessity, economies will have to retrench and become more local, more
self-centered.
That is not likely to be a painless process. A spike in oil prices will
almost certainly spark massive inflation--a' la the oil disruptions of
1972-73 and 1979-80--that will wreck havoc on the global economy. Recession
could quite easily turn into an international depression.
Then things get really ugly. As Heinberg notes, modern agriculture has
become completely reliant on carbon energy inputs. Pesticides and herbicides
are synthesized from oil. Ammonia made from natural gas is key to the
fertilizer that keeps crops growing. Diesel-fired trains and trucks take
the food from farm to market, with the average North American meal traveling
1,300 miles before it gets to your plate. Without the help of fossil fuels,
farming as we know it would collapse. According to Heinberg: "The
agriculture miracle of the 20th century may become the agricultural apocalypse
of the 21st." He speculates that an agriculture meltdown would lead
to a nightmarish global "die-off": Somewhere between 2 billion
and 4 billion people would perish.
Far-fetched? Maybe. But a recent report by none other than the Pentagon
explored what would happen in the case of global food and energy shortages.
The military thinkers predicted a spiral of violence and nuclear war that
would lead to a Hobbesian "war of all against all." As Goodstein
puts it: "Civilization as we know it will not survive unless we can
find a way to live without fossil fuels."
The Party's Over and Out of Gas tell basically the same story. Heinberg
goes farther down the rabbit hole of doom and gloom, while Goodstein struggles
a little more to find the silver lining. Goodstein's prose is a bit jazzier,
but both authors have a tendency to get bogged down in the minutiae of
science. It's important to note that their similar views come from different
perspectives. Heinberg teaches at that radical bastion of higher learning,
The New College of California; he grows his own food and drives a bio-diesel
car. Goodstein is the vice provost at Cal Poly and a strong supporter
of nuclear energy. Yet both agree that, when it comes to our slavishness
to fossil fuels, the days of complacency are over.
That's not to say that among energy industry watchers there is unanimity
on the issue of oil peak, as readers of Vijay Vaitheeswaran's Power to
the People will see. Vaitheeswaran glibly dismisses the idea that oil
scarcity is around the corner, suggesting that Hubbert's followers are
a "conspiratorial cabal." The world is "not about to start
running out of oil," Vaitheeswaran writes. What Vaitheeswaran doesn't
seem to grasp is we don't have to wait until we have reached the last
drop of oil for the energy crisis to arrive. Rather, we will start to
be in trouble when we have used up more than half of all the oil that
exists. Why is the oil peak the point of no return? Because from that
point on we will confront what Goodstein calls the "rate-of-conversion
problem." With the disappearance of cheap and convenient gasoline,
converting to other energy sources will become ever more difficult and
expensive. Sure, we can build a hydrogen infrastructure or mine more coal,
but it will require oil to move the machines to do those things. Simply
put, it takes energy to make energy. If we wait too long, at some point
conversion to other energy sources will be beyond our means.
Given that Vaitheeswaran is a correspondent for The Economist, it's odd
that he overlooks how energy peak--whenever it occurs--will reshape energy
markets via the basic laws of supply and demand. In the end, Goodstein's
and Heinberg's arguments are the more persuavive. For one, Heinberg spends
many more pages grappling with his intellectual opponents than does the
too-often supercilious Vaitheeswaran. More important, the oil peak argument
rests on the immutable laws of science, whereas Vaitheeswaran relies on
the dubious notion that the market's invisible hand will take care of
everything. Perhaps it's best to let the oil bosses settle the argument:
"We are always running up a down escalator," a petroleum executive
says, in a quote that comes from Vaitheeswaran.
What makes Power to the People an important book is that Vaitheeswaran
asks the question: Even if the oil isn't running out, can we afford to
keep burning it? Global climate change, he points out, is real, and the
sooner we tackle it the better.
Fossil fuels' contribution to global warming was first posited as long
ago as 1896. Today there is a near unaninimity among climate scientists
(at least those not on the oil industry's payroll) that the earth's atmosphere
is heating up, and that human beings' consumption of fossil fuels is at
least partly contributing. Since the beginning of the Industrial Age,
we have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 30
percent; if we burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, we will end up
doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Although it's clear
this carbon burning is contributing to global warming, it's unclear what
exactly the consequences will be. If we're lucky, only some more March
heat waves. If not, we could see the destruction of island nations and
the inundation of coastal cities. Or, counter-intuitively, global warming
could disrupt the North Atlantic Gulf Stream, thereby ushering in another
Ice Age and giving Provence a Siberian climate. It's precisely because
we don't perfectly understand how the global climate works that we are
best off not toying with it at all.
Relying on coal--which, although it remains abundant, is horribly dirty--is
not an option. For Vaitheeswaran, the path toward a "squeaky clean,
not-to-distant future" lies in hydrogen. And what a future it could
be, at least in Vaitheeswaran's view. Our cars will run on hydrogen fuel
cells. Our homes will be powered by micropower units that will allow us
all to get off the grid. In poor nations, remote villages that never before
had electricity will be able to turn on the lights and log onto the internet.
The problem lies in finding where the hydrogen will come from. Although
it is a basic building block of the universe, hydrogen does not naturally
occur on earth. You have to make the stuff. This means that hydrogen is
not an energy source like petroleum--it's an energy carrier more like
electricity. So how do you make it? One way is through trapping the hydrogen
byproducts created in burning coal or natural gas, but then you're still
sending some carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Nuclear plants can also
produce hydrogen, but then you get into the question of where to store
all the radioactive waste; plus, the world's supply of uranium may run
out even before the oil does, according to Goodstein. The final option
is electrolysis, in which water is essentially electrocuted and the H
of H20 split off. Environmentalists like the idea of using sustainable
energy from windmills and solar panels to do electrolysis.
But no matter how the hydrogen is created, it's unlikely that even a complete
hydrogen energy infrastructure will provide the kind of lifestyle we enjoy
today. The problem is that there is simply nothing as abundant, as easily
transportable, and as energy intensive as petroleum is--or was. Renewable
energies such as wind and solar, combined with hydrogen, won't allow all
of our current conveniences. Heinberg writes that the "alternatives
will be unable to support the kinds of transportation, food and dwelling
infrastructure we now have. ... The transition ... will entail an almost
complete redesign of industrial societies." Just as the arrival of
fossil fuels once transformed our lives, so will their disappearance transform
our lives once again.
As the axiom goes, it's best to prepare for the worst and hope for the
best. For that reason, these three books make a good collection. You get
the worst case scenario (Heinberg), the middle case scenario (Goodstein),
and the glimpse of a rosy future (Vaitheeswaran).
For all their differences in predictions, the authors agree that it's
entirely within society's power to successfully meet the twin challenges
of resource depletion and climate change. The technological solutions
exist. The problem is political: Our leaders are so deep in the pockets
of the Carbon Barons that they are failing to respond to the impending
crises. So it's up to us--ordinary concerned citizens--to lead the charge.
In the absence of political leadership, we are going to have to be the
ones to lead, and demand that our elected officials start looking past
the next election and toward our children's future and their children's
future.
If we don't? Then, as Vaitheeswaran writes, "the future for all may
be needlessly grim."
Reviewed in this essay:
The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
Richard Heinberg
Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers
275 Pages
Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil
David Goodstein
New York: W.W. Norton
140 Pages, Illustrated
Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an
Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet
Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
358 Pages
Jason Mark is the co-author, with Kevin Danaher, of Insurrection: Citizen
Challenges to Corporate Power.
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© 2004 Independent Media Institute.
All rights reserved.
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