Posted May 7, 2008
You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media’s coverage of rising gas prices, but the squeeze we’re all feeling at the pump is just a small part of a much larger picture. The current price of gas is more than a just a little rough patch that might get worked out by the markets or policy wonks in Washington. Global oil production today is at or near its max capacity, and in the next few years current supply will begin a long and irrevocable decline that will mean dramatic changes for nearly every aspect of our lives.
We’re moving from an era of cheap, abundant energy to an era of increasingly expensive, scarce energy. Given that our entire modern industrial society has become heavily dependent on the availability of cheap fossil fuels to power everything from our transportation to food production, to a myriad of commercial goods and our overall economic growth—this is *kind of* a big deal. For college kids, soccer moms, and business tycoons alike—peak oil is going to bring a major smack down on our way of life.
While global warming has finally begun to break into the mainstream, its twin brother—peak oil—has yet to be talked about in our national discourse. However, the economic crisis that peak oil presents will likely be felt much sooner than global warming. Major price spikes may come in the next few years, and with rising demand from China and India, among other developing nations, the battle for remaining oil reserves will invariably lead to resource wars and increased conflict in the Middle East. Combine this with teetering financial markets and a devaluation of the dollar, if we do not begin to prepare for peak oil now, the overall financial chaos from all this may jeopardize our ability to address global warming with the stability and financial resources necessary to avoid an even greater environmental catastrophe.
Great news, right? Well, there is some good news. The essential solution for both of these problems is roughly the same thing: eliminating our use of and dependence on fossil fuels. The more our society transitions to renewable sources of energy, the less we’ll emit global-warming-causing CO2 emissions, and the less we’ll be racked in the balls by expensive fossil fuel costs.
Ultimately, a post-carbon society is inevitable. Whether that future looks remotely desirable to us depends on what we do now. The sooner businesses, private citizens, and elected officials stop futzing with little tweaks to the status quo, and get serious about the big picture at the end of the road, the better off we’ll be. These distractions include ethanol, nuclear power, “clean coal,” hydrogen, more efficient cars, and many of the other single-fix responses being proposed by industry and government currently. Many of these approaches may actually exacerbate our problems.
Case in point: though it may help in the short-term, we don’t need more efficient cars; we need radically redesigned cities that are not dependent on cars to get us everywhere. The city and suburban infrastructure necessary to support the speedy movement of the personal automobile requires an immense overall supply of energy and resources to build and maintain. It seems natural that the suburban model of design would have developed during the 20th century when there was such a vast supply of cheap energy to make it economically viable, but with an end coming to cheap energy, we’ve got to go back to the basics. We need to rethink the whole system.
Solutions that take into account a “whole-systems” approach do exist. In fact, the more I’ve looked, the more I’ve discovered sustainable and innovative ideas that are already being implemented in places all over the world. A resident of Oakland, California, Richard Register presents an inspiring vision of what a post-carbon, ecologically healthy city might look like in his book, “Ecocities: Building cities in balance with nature.”
Similar to New Urbanism, the places where people live would be built in close proximity to a mixed combination of work, shopping, food, and recreational spaces, allowing for easy use of bicycle or mass-transit to get wherever you need to go. The city’s economy would be re-localized, from organic food production to basic goods and services. Decentralized wind, solar, and geothermal energy systems would provide energy to the grid, while advanced efficiencies in building design would reduce energy demand by over 70 percent. Long distance travel would be accommodated by light rail or boat, and electric cars borrowed through community car-share programs would be used for medium distance trips. Gardens and plants would be integrated throughout multiple floors of buildings, and streams would weave through public centers and parks.
Finding an abundance of ideas for how to create more sustainable cities is not the problem. What we need is a national discussion at all levels of society, and at all levels of our communities, so we can start to talk about how we’re going to address peak oil here at the local level. How are we going to get from here to there?
We need to get our schools involved. We need to get our city and planning commissioners involved. Businesses, elected officials, and private citizens all need to come to the table and get to work.
Now, at the end of most problem-themed articles I’ve read, specifically ones dealing with global warming, I’ve noticed a curious trend. After spending most of the time talking about the problem, the one paragraph at the end devoted to “things you can do” usually centers solely around personal suggestions: Change your lights to compact fluorescents. Turn down the thermostat. Bike more. Buy less, and try to buy used more than new.
These are all things we should be doing to cut down on our own energy use, but I wonder why it always stops there. Presumably it’s because Americans are too lazy to expect they’d be willing to do anything more ambitious. I want to prove this assumption wrong.
Great change has never been inspired by small requests. If it seems like people in America haven’t been doing much lately to address global warming, it’s because not much has been asked of them. Most of the time, our leaders simply ask us to shop. I think if we do start to expect and ask more of each other, though, we’ll be surprised by the results. As Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R, Md.) has said, “There is no exhilaration like meeting and overcoming a big problem... and I think that Americans could be exhilarated by the challenge.”
So there it is. We’re facing some pretty unprecedented challenges. The time for just making small, personal changes is over. As I heard Alex Steffen say recently, “Don’t just be the change. Mass-produce it.”
Tim Hjersted is the director of the Films for Action project.
Comments
Bill Hoyt El_Borak says...
"The essential solution for both of these problems is roughly the same thing..."
Actually, it might be argued that one is the solution for the other. If Peak Oil is a) real and b) here, then the use of fossil fuels is going to drop in the coming decades no matter what we do. In short, it's not that it will be economically impossible to keep increasing the supply of fossil fuels to market, it's going to be physically impossible.
Heresy for a market guy like me, I know, but to see an example of that, one need only look at any chart of historic US oil production, like this one:
http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.co...
Production topped about 4 decades ago (and about 3 decades after a similar peak in discovery - duh, right?) and has been stubbornly unrelated to price* in the intervening period. The only interruption has been the addition of the North Slope, a one-time occurrence which is now past its peak as well.
The Peak occurs at the well level; when the easy oil is gone, flow rates slow year after year and there's little short of pumping water down the well to be done about it. It works at the field level, which is but a group of wells. It works at the national level (a group of fields), and it works at the world level. The timing is questionable; the math is not.
So there's good news for all you global warming worriers: at the peak of production - which may have occurred in 2006 - we will have used roughly half of the world's fossil fuels, which means that far more than half of whatever environmental damage is going to be done has already been done**.
The end of industrial civilization and the population that relies on it for food is just icing on the cake.
* this is what economists call "inelastic supply"
** If only because we have cleaner-burning technologies than we had the first half of the industrial age.
Posted 7 May 2008, 12:10 p.m. Suggest removal
Tim Hjersted tribalzendancer says...
"The end of industrial civilization and the population that relies on it for food is just icing on the cake."
Yes, well said Bill. It won't be a very tasty cake to swallow.
"then the use of fossil fuels is going to drop in the coming decades no matter what we do. In short, it's not that it will be economically impossible to keep increasing the supply of fossil fuels to market, it's going to be physically impossible."
Well, this may not alleviate the climate crisis like you'd expect.
Climate change has become an issue because we've pumped (in a little more than 100 years) just about half of the Earths estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil.
The CO2 that has been stored beneath the earth's crust for millions of years has been spewed back into the atmosphere within just a few generations (which is a tick on the clock geologically).
But there's still half of the oil left, (plus a whole lotta coal too) and as long there's a profit to be made and no international treaties stopping production of that second half, or slowing it, there's plenty of damage left to be done.
This is the best international solution I've seen to address both issues so far:
http://www.oildepletionprotocol.org/
cheers it, Tim
Posted 8 May 2008, 4:52 p.m. Suggest removal
Bill Hoyt El_Borak says...
"as long there's a profit to be made and no international treaties stopping production of that second half, or slowing it, there's plenty of damage left to be done."
With all due respect I think that's exactly where you are mistaken. Peak Oil DOES slow production, mercilessly, and far more efficiently than any treaty ever could.
Let's just take as read the idea that as a result of physically constricted supply at the current level, oil prices double from here - not unfathomable as Goldman Sachs just predicted that such could become reality within two years. There is going to be a hell of a lot of suffering. If we think food riots are bad now, how will it be when the high cost of petroleum-based fertilizer results in even less food production?
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/...
Will a treaty really be honored by any government whose people are marching in the streets? If you think it will, I suggest you have a very misplaced faith in the political process. Peak Oil, then, the hard reality that no candidate, no treaty, no fascist national energy policy can overcome, becomes the only possible force sufficient to limit demand. You say, "so long as there's a profit." Well, there is and there always will be. But when there is a physical limit on what can be produced, profits, while they will be huge*, will be irrelevant. The laws of economics must bend, in the end, to the laws of physics. High prices for whale oil do not produce more whales, they produce alternatives.
So there remains half of the damage left to be done**, but that problem is solved as well as can be expected. There is no way that any treaty can reduce usage as fast as Peak Oil's 3-5% per year estimate; Peak Oil is not beholden to angry voters. So we have, what, another 2 degrees of temperature rise over a century to look forward to? Big deal. Unaffordable petroleum-based fertilizer will reduce food production far more than whatever effect that might cause, far faster than even the most pessimistic Al Gorian estimates.
I hate to play "dueling crises," really I do, but there are no more political solutions to over-use of fossil fuels than there are Presidential candidates calling for a $5 a gallon gas tax to reduce demand. If Peak Oil is here, supply will be dictated by physics, even as what remains of that supply is fought over, with guns and bombs, by governments whose voters are most concerned with reducing food and energy prices so baby doesn't starve to death for the long-term benefit of mankind.
* It's not a coincidence that I own stakes in a number of natural resource trusts.
** If one believes the whole global warming schtick, which I don't. Sorry, I've built too many complex computer systems to place my faith in their outputs.
Posted 9 May 2008, 12:14 a.m. Suggest removal
Tim Hjersted tribalzendancer says...
###"Let's just take as read the idea that as a result of physically constricted supply at the current level, oil prices double from here - not unfathomable as Goldman Sachs just predicted that such could become reality within two years. There is going to be a hell of a lot of suffering. If we think food riots are bad now, how will it be when the high cost of petroleum-based fertilizer results in even less food production?
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/......
Will a treaty really be honored by any government whose people are marching in the streets? If you think it will, I suggest you have a very misplaced faith in the political process. Peak Oil, then, the hard reality that no candidate, no treaty, no fascist national energy policy can overcome, becomes the only possible force sufficient to limit demand. You say, "so long as there's a profit." Well, there is and there always will be. But when there is a physical limit on what can be produced, profits, while they will be huge*, will be irrelevant. The laws of economics must bend, in the end, to the laws of physics. High prices for whale oil do not produce more whales, they produce alternatives."###
I think you're totally right. Maybe my wording was misunderstood or I was just sleepy.
Though I do believe climate change is an issue, and a 2 degree change in global climate would have pretty significant impacts, many of which are ecological in nature, highly complex, and which we cannot possibly understand fully. A whole bunch of these unforeseen effects collectively happening at once is where things get tricky. It's the danger of reaching a tipping point where positive feedback loops escalate many problems exponentially and nothing can be done to stop things from spiraling out of control.
Anyway, trying to write something smart sounding when I should probably be sleeping. Good food for thought Bill. Cheers.
Posted 9 May 2008, 7:02 a.m. Suggest removal
Anonymous OtherJoel says...
You guys are bumming me out. I just want to be able to continue to eat my fried baby harp seal sandwiches in my idling Hummer with the AC on full-blast. Anything less would be un-American.
Posted 9 May 2008, 7:27 a.m. Suggest removal
Bill Hoyt El_Borak says...
"Anything less would be un-American."
Sadly, OJ, you are exactly correct. Americans do not believe in limits. It is both our great strength and our fatal weakness. It enables us to do great things and drives us to do extremely stupid ones. It underlies our historic optimism about the future yet negates whatever wisdom we might gain from the past.
It does not matter that a proposed course of action* can be shown to most likely produce effects nearly opposite those intended (e.g. mileage standards on cars necessitating the invention of the SUV), the American response is inevitably, "It's different this time." All of the children in America are above average simply because they are American.
Thankfully, it truly is different often enough that the American optimism is shown to be justified, because that's where solutions come from. However, those solutions are almost always provided by some individual**, and almost never by politicians who decree that "it shall be thus and so." And I for one do not think that is likely to be different this time.
* and it doesn't matter whether it's trying to establish parliamentary democracy in a middle eastern tribal society, building an economy based on selling our houses to one another, or ending poverty by printing up money from nothing and giving it to people to don't have any.
** Who is paid very handily for coming up with it.
Posted 9 May 2008, 9:32 a.m. Suggest removal
Terry Bush ladylaw says...
Prepare to be even more bummed out.
The days of living on cheap credit (robbing Peter to pay Paul) are about to see the bill finally come due. The idea that we all (including our governments) had a never ending supply of (fill in the blank - money, time, oil, gas, food, etc.) has caused America to be in such as hole of debt that we will only "escape" by years/decades/centuries of living a whole lot more frugally. Think the 30's Depression era, times 100. For a lot longer.
I hope I am wrong. But I fear I am not.
Meanwhile, I am really glad I reared my only child to live life as a survivor. And his wife has similar skill sets. I just hope it was enough preparation for what I believe lays ahead in the very near future. Let's just say it won't be pretty.
Posted 9 May 2008, 11:38 a.m. Suggest removal
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