We Can Wean Ourselves off Oil
I attended the Global Green Millenium Awards last Saturday night. There I met Richard Heinberg, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and author of the books "The Party's Over: Oil War and the Fate of Industrial Societies" and, most recently, "The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse".
As a resident of Los Angeles, I am overly aware of our addiction to oil. Just look around us. Cars everywhere, no reasonable public transportation...
Our overly-paved city, populated by cars with human operators, is perhaps the most ugly face of the fact that we in the US consume 25% of the world's energy though have only about 4.5% of the world's population.
So, what do we do?
In our brief conversation Richard shared with me that he estimates that we as a civilization need to prepare for 3% less oil every year.
This is certainly a manageable prospect, yet we have to get on it right away.Although it appears to be a small amount, that means roughly ten percent in three years, etc.
We certainly have the technology, the money and power to downshift our use of Oil. And the goal of simply reducing by a measurable amount every gives us a pathway to deal with this situation.
Serendipitously, my friend and long time environmentalist Paula Daniels, who is on the Board of LA's Department of Public Works, was close by and I introduced Richard to her. We discussed the urgency of the situation and how she is helping manage the city's massive infrastructure to use less oil, energy and water. She was happy to meet him, and they intend to get together for lunch. This made my day!
Well, in the meantime the rest of us have to begin visioning the pathway to how we as a civilization use less and less oil.
Another author James Howard Kuntsler, who wrote "The Long Emergency," outlined ten ways we must kick the oil habit in an article on Alternet.
I cut and pasted excerpts from the article to highlight the main points:
"1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car.
"2. We have to produce food differently.
"3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami ...) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape).
"4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency.
"5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down.
"6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things.
"7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked Citizen Kane and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. [I don't know about this one!]
"8. We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades.
"9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come.
"10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled."
Heinberg's suggestion that we manage to live on 3% less oil per year, and Kuntslers' ten points provide a navigable roadmap to a post-carbon future. Together they underscore that it is actually possible to manage ourselves off of oil.
First then, each of us must simply allow that it is possible to live in a different way. From there we can actually get down to work of visioning and creating the new way.
Tweet- 6-14-07
- Greg Wendt's blog
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oil running out
A new article in The Independent (which I found on the excellent Truthout) states that oil is running out faster than expected:
World Oil Supplies Are Set to Run Out Faster Than Expected
By Daniel Howden
The Independent UK
Thursday 14 June 2007
Scientists challenge major review of global reserves and warn that supplies will start to run out in four years' time.Scientists have criticised a major review of the world's remaining oil reserves, warning that the end of oil is coming sooner than governments and oil companies are prepared to admit.
BP's Statistical Review of World Energy, published yesterday, appears to show that the world still has enough "proven" reserves to provide 40 years of consumption at current rates. The assessment, based on officially reported figures, has once again pushed back the estimate of when the world will run dry.
However, scientists led by the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, say that global production of oil is set to peak in the next four years before entering a steepening decline which will have massive consequences for the world economy and the way that we live our lives.
According to "peak oil" theory our consumption of oil will catch, then outstrip our discovery of new reserves and we will begin to deplete known reserves.
Colin Campbell, the head of the depletion centre, said: "It's quite a simple theory and one that any beer drinker understands. The glass starts full and ends empty and the faster you drink it the quicker it's gone."
Dr Campbell, is a former chief geologist and vice-president at a string of oil majors including BP, Shell, Fina, Exxon and ChevronTexaco. He explains that the peak of regular oil - the cheap and easy to extract stuff - has already come and gone in 2005. Even when you factor in the more difficult to extract heavy oil, deep sea reserves, polar regions and liquid taken from gas, the peak will come as soon as 2011, he says.
This scenario is flatly denied by BP, whose chief economist Peter Davies has dismissed the arguments of "peak oil" theorists.
"We don't believe there is an absolute resource constraint. When peak oil comes, it is just as likely to come from consumption peaking, perhaps because of climate change policies as from production peaking."
In recent years the once-considerable gap between demand and supply has narrowed. Last year that gap all but disappeared. The consequences of a shortfall would be immense. If consumption begins to exceed production by even the smallest amount, the price of oil could soar above $100 a barrel. A global recession would follow.
Jeremy Leggett, like Dr Campbell, is a geologist-turned conservationist whose book Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis brought " peak oil" theory to a wider audience. He compares industry and government reluctance to face up to the impending end of oil, to climate change denial.
"It reminds me of the way no one would listen for years to scientists warning about global warming," he says. "We were predicting things pretty much exactly as they have played out. Then as now we were wondering what it would take to get people to listen."
In 1999, Britain's oil reserves in the North Sea peaked, but for two years after this became apparent, Mr Leggett claims, it was heresy for anyone in official circles to say so. "Not meeting demand is not an option. In fact, it is an act of treason," he says.
One thing most oil analysts agree on is that depletion of oil fields follows a predictable bell curve. This has not changed since the Shell geologist M King Hubbert made a mathematical model in 1956 to predict what would happen to US petroleum production. The Hubbert Curveshows that at the beginning production from any oil field rises sharply, then reaches a plateau before falling into a terminal decline. His prediction that US production would peak in 1969 was ridiculed by those who claimed it could increase indefinitely. In the event it peaked in 1970 and has been in decline ever since.
In the 1970s Chris Skrebowski was a long-term planner for BP. Today he edits the Petroleum Review and is one of a growing number of industry insiders converting to peak theory. "I was extremely sceptical to start with," he now admits. "We have enough capacity coming online for the next two-and-a-half years. After that the situation deteriorates."
What no one, not even BP, disagrees with is that demand is surging. The rapid growth of China and India matched with the developed world's dependence on oil, mean that a lot more oil will have to come from somewhere. BP's review shows that world demand for oil has grown faster in the past five years than in the second half of the 1990s. Today we consume an average of 85 million barrels daily. According to the most conservative estimates from the International Energy Agency that figure will rise to 113 million barrels by 2030.
Two-thirds of the world's oil reserves lie in the Middle East and increasing demand will have to be met with massive increases in supply from this region.
BP's Statistical Review is the most widely used estimate of world oil reserves but as Dr Campbell points out it is only a summary of highly political estimates supplied by governments and oil companies.
As Dr Campbell explains: "When I was the boss of an oil company I would never tell the truth. It's not part of the game."
A survey of the four countries with the biggest reported reserves - Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait - reveals major concerns. In Kuwait last year, a journalist found documents suggesting the country's real reserves were half of what was reported. Iran this year became the first major oil producer to introduce oil rationing - an indication of the administration's view on which way oil reserves are going.
Sadad al-Huseini knows more about Saudi Arabia's oil reserves than perhaps anyone else. He retired as chief executive of the kingdom's oil corporation two years ago, and his view on how much Saudi production can be increased is sobering. "The problem is that you go from 79 million barrels a day in 2002 to 84.5 million in 2004. You're leaping by two to three million [barrels a day]" each year, he told The New York Times. "That's like a whole new Saudi Arabia every couple of years. It can't be done indefinitely."
The Importance of Black Gold
Alternative Sources of Power
Coal
There are still an estimated 909 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide, enough to last at least 155 years. But coal is a fossil fuel and a dirty energy source that will only add to global warming.
Natural Gas
The natural gas fields in Siberia, Alaska and the Middle East should last 20 years longer than the world's oil reserves but, although cleaner than oil, natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits pollutants. It is also expensive to extract and transport as it has to be liquefied.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells
Hydrogen fuel cells would provide us with a permanent, renewable, clean energy source as they combine hydrogen and oxygen chemically to produce electricity, water and heat. The difficulty, however, is that there isn't enough hydrogen to go round and the few clean ways of producing it are expensive.
Biofuels
Ethanol from corn and maize has become a popular alternative to oil. However, studies suggest ethanol production has a negative effect on energy investment and the environment because of the space required to grow what we need.
Renewable Energy
Oil-dependent nations are turning to renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, solar and wind power to provide an alternative to oil but the likelihood of renewable sources providing enough energy is slim.
Nuclear
Fears of the world's uranium supply running out have been allayed by improved reactors and the possibility of using thorium as a nuclear fuel. But an increase in the number of reactors across the globe would increase the chance of a disaster and the risk of dangerous substances getting into the hands of terrorists.
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
Kunstler's The Long
Kunstler's The Long Emergency was the first in-depth book on peak-oil I read after being alerted to the phenomenon by the excellent documentary, The End of Suburbia (an indispensable tool for introducing the uninitiated to this difficult-to-digest situation).
I feel it is important to note that Kunstler's imagining of our post-oil future is far from sanguine. His top ten list here is less a gameplan for avoiding a future catastrophe and more a concession to his critics who've labeled him a doom 'n' gloom nihilist lacking a constructive agenda. If you really do any deep philosophizing into the peak-oil scenario as Kunstler and his contemporaries present it, you'll come to the baffling realization that the project of civilization has grown so inconceivably bloated and overextended that it's a true miracle it's still cranking away to this day. It's patently impossible for our globalized world of some 6 billion people to continue on as usual minus the extraordinary energy inputs of fossil fuel -- a truly paradigm-upending substance that Kunstler incisively labels "a one-time endowment," now nearly exhausted.
I've just begun reading a seminal text for peak-oilers and conservationists alike: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann. Up to this point, I'd been explaining my current worldview to interested friends as a combination of the ideas promulgated by Kunstler -- an eye-opening, sky-darkening almanac of our unsustainable future -- and the considerably more optimistic, transformative vision put forth in Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012. Thus far, Hartmann's work appears to bridge this gap and bring the best of both of these works together, and I'm eager to see how effectively this comes off. Has anyone else read this? I'll be sure to report back when I've finished.
;)
st
"The future is frightening, but I feel fine." - The Dandy Warhols
We Will Be Weaned
Great article Greg. And to Daniel's point, yes, the supply of oil is running out faster that we realize. There are many proposed solutions to this emerging energy collapse such as hydrogen fuels cells and biofuels, but there is frankly not enough energy or productive capacity for either of these alternatives to support current high energy consumption lifestyles in a manner that are sustainable to this planet. If all fuels, for example, were to become biofuels we would require many planet earths to supply the necessary agricultural land. In tandem with this how much rainforest and/or current land committed to growing food do we sacrifice to produce fuel to keep our cars on the road? The great paradigm shift emerging before us will, I believe, be based on more localized economies that have little to no need for automobiles. Agriculture will still have use for machinery such as tractors and plows, but since these tend to be diesel based contraptions such machines can be converted to biofuels that farmers can grow from crops on their own land. This was, in fact, Rudolph Diesel's vision when he first invented the diesel engine. After his mysterious death the technology he developed was converted for use to burn fossil fuels. And to ST's point, yes, I have also read and enjoyed Hartmann's book. On that note I can suggest one other:
"Ishmael", by Daniel Quinn ISBN 0553375407
Ishmael is the story of a man, disillusioned by the violence society inflicts upon the world and itself, who answers an ad in the paper placed by a teacher looking to instruct students on how to save the world. Surprisingly, the teacher is a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael who has been studying human history and culture for many years. Analyzing familiar secular and Christian stories, Ishmael uncovers an underlying belief shared by most modern societies: Man is at war with nature and his position at the apex of evolution can only be maintained by completely conquering the world. Modern man assumes that natural law does not apply to his species, and that his sentience and his technology protects our species from the famine, disease, and extinction which inflicts pain and death on the other species in the wild. Therefore man is freed to act with malice toward the world without any consequences from these actions. Here is the crucial concept which forms the basis of Ishmael: these hidden or implied beliefs are the primary force driving modern societies to behave as they do toward the earth. Quinn goes on to argue that the solution to our problem is to first recognize how our current mythology guides our actions and then to adapt a new belief system which compels man to live within the bounds of natural law. In doing so man will then be able to create a sustainable society and can begin to live again in harmony with the planet. Where to get this new mythology? Interestingly, Quinn examines the belief systems of the various indigenous peoples. Many of the indigenous tribes of the earth appear to have developed systems of beliefs which allow them to live within the bounds of natural law and create sustainable societies lasting thousands of years. Despite its sometimes oversimplified view of the world, I found Ishmael to be both an enjoyable read and a thought-provoking tale. I highly recommend it.
novelty