Peak Oil, the Elephant in the Media Sitting-Room
By Julian Jackson
Peak Oil and its extensive ramifications are virtually ignored by media commentators and politicians; George Monbiot “The Bottom of the Barrel” (www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/12/02/the-bottom-of-the-barrel) and Michael Meacher “Plan Now for a World without Oil” (www.energycrisis.com/uk/planNow.htm) being honourable exceptions.
The information is on the Internet and in a few books, but it is virtually off the radar screen of most people.
Here’s the Red Pill – take it and nothing will be quite the same again:
Oil fuels our society: transportation, plastics, pharmaceuticals….and non-organic food production and distribution depend almost completely on plentiful, cheap oil.
There is a finite amount of oil in the world. But the Peak Oil crisis is not about Oil Running Out. It’s about what happens when oil production declines and there is a shortage caused by demand exceeding a declining supply. This is named a Hubbert’s Peak after the geologist who postulated this theory of oil depletion, and who in the 1950s accurately predicted the decline of the U.S oil fields after 1970 (www.hubbertpeak.com). Followers of this method have improved and applied his techniques to other oil fields and other resources such as natural gas, and found it to be an accurate model of resource depletion.
What will happen after the oil supply starts to decline?
Prices will go up. And up. Shortages will cause economic problems. This doesn’t sound very serious, until you realise that oil shortages cripple industrial societies – petrol, diesel, heating, lighting and food prices will go up substantially, the economy will falter, unemployment and business collapse will increase, and a scenario akin to 1920s Germany beckons. For an example of what happens when a society gets its oil cut off abruptly see North Korea in the 1980s as Russia turned the taps off after the collapse of communism: mass starvation. Probably the only thing that held the society together was its extreme authoritarianism.
There are two schools of thought about oil depletion, The Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) (www.peakoil.net): “a network of scientists, affiliated with European institutions and universities, having an interest in determining the date and impact of the peak and decline of the world's production of oil and gas” who believe the crisis is imminent, deep, profoundly destabilising and destructive. And a variety of others (the Optimists school) who say if there is a crisis it’s far off and the oil won’t run out anyway because more oil will be found.
Anyone who reads ecology lecturer Richard Heinberg’s calm, measured, left-of-centre analysis, The Party’s Over – Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Clairview 2003), will see that the former view is likely correct:
“The core message of this book is that industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have known it during the twentieth century.”
(Heinberg, p. 1)
One of the outcomes Heinberg forsees:
“The energy-led collapse of the global economy…energy scarcity will cause a recession of a new kind, one from which anything other than a temporary, partial recovery will be impossible.”
(Heinberg, p. 203)
How long would it take to develop and implement an alternative energy strategy based on renewables?
“This [oil peak economic shock] will mark the beginning of the end of the oil-based market economy, and it is for this moment that we should by now have prepared an infrastructure of renewables, backed by conservation systems to reduce energy demands to less than one third of what we use at present. However, this infrastructure takes a minimum of 25 years to build, and since it has been barely started, the oil famine which can be expected to develop in the next ten years will be catastrophic.”
(David Fleming, The Reality Principle, 'The Ecologist' 31/9 , Nov 2001)
We seem to be at the peak now (August 2004), as evidenced by Saudi Arabia’s inability to increase their production. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, has customarily helped to iron out fluctuations in demand. It appears that, even under enormous political pressure, the Saudi oil fields are unable to raise their production any more. When Saudi is at the peak, world oil is at the peak too. We, as a global society, have made almost no preparations to avert this crisis.
Oops! Bush and the Neo-Cons have. Their plan is to go to war to sequester the remainder of the oil, which is likely to deplete it more quickly. If you watch their invasions and threats carefully, you can see they are pursuing this strategy, by various means. It appears unlikely to me that any changed U.S. government will act much differently.
Important points to note:
The oil reserves in the world are smaller than most commentators make out – the oil companies and petro-states have been cooking their books for economic and political reasons for years. The ASPO analyses this in great detail on their site. For example, OPEC rules state that a country can only pump oil in relationship to their reserve, so in 1986-7 suddenly all OPEC countries inflated their reserves by hundreds of billions of barrels of oil – even though they had not registered any giant new fields – to allow them to export more oil.
Conventional power systems cannot replace oil: nuclear, natural gas, coal, all have considerable disadvantages.
Alternative power systems cannot replace oil: they cannot be used realistically for transportation, plastics, or fertilisers. Many of them, such as photovoltaic solar panels demand a great deal of cheap oil input for manufacture and distribution.
Ironically the poorest 3rd worlders, largely living on subsistence with no oil input, will not feel the the initial blows. The first impact of this will be on the poor of the western world, who will feel acutely any increases in the price of food, heating and transportation. However, I doubt even the richest will be immune to the deterioration in the social fabric caused by this problem.
If oil were to be paid for in other currencies than the dollar, e.g. the Euro, Yen, Yuan, the hidden subsidy to the U.S. would disappear, causing the trillions-indebted U.S. economy to collapse. As they are the greatest per-capita consumer of energy and polluter, some might think that the economic dislocation is a small price to pay for a breathing space to reduce the crisis.
Conclusion
If the theories of oil depletion are correct our globalised society faces the largest problem it has ever faced short of nuclear war, yet we haven’t woken up to it. Follow these links for some sleepless nights:
Richard Heinberg’s books:
The Party’s Over – Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
PowerDown – his latest due out Sept 04
www.hubbertpeak.com Explains what a Hubbert Peak is, and how it models depletion of natural resources – particularly oil, but also natural gas, coal, uranium etc. A variety of illuminating articles.
www.peakoil.net Association for the Study of Peak Oil: a number of experts in oil who have been warning about this for years.
www.dieoff.org various theories about what happens when a species depletes its key resource.
www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net a simple, readable primer to the oil crash, on the pessimistic side.
www.fromthewilderness.com investigator Michael Ruppert has covered this subject extensively, search for Peak Oil.
Contact Julian Jackson at julianj@totalise.co.uk