Oil Gone... the last days of western civilisation

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Metroactive Features | Oil* Texas Tea: Richard Heinberg thinks we may have already drunk too deep.Oil GoneIf peak oil theorists are correct, our dependence on oil is not onlyfoolish, it's lethal. Does modern civilization have just two choices--changeor perish?By R. V. Scheidehttp://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/06.09.04/oil-0424.htmlNo blood for oil!" antiwar activists cried worldwide in the months leadingup to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. Their pleas fell mainlyon deaf ears, dismissed by various government officials and media punditswho assured Americans that in the wake of 9-11, U.S. foreign policy hadbecome far too complex to sum up in such a simple, outdated slogan. "Noblood for oil!" the activists doggedly insisted, drowned out by thetechnological thunder of shock and awe.That might have been the last the general public heard of the phrase if notfor an unexpected turn of events that began not long after President GeorgeW. Bush crowed "mission accomplished" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincolnone year ago: the price of oil began rising, and gasoline followed suit.Heading into Memorial Day weekend this year--the second-largest drivingholiday of the year in the United States--the average price for a gallon ofregular grade gasoline in had climbed 58 cents to $2.05 per gallon, thehighest in two decades.What a difference half a buck per gallon makes! Oil was back in the news.The financial community panicked. Supply shortages and reduced refinerycapacity were pushing prices up; analysts warned that any long-term rise inprices would threaten the global economy's fledgling recovery. Saudi Arabia,already pumping millions of gallons per day beyond its quota, promised topump even more to increase supply, but the price still gushed to nearly $40per barrel. That didn't deter a record number of Americans, including anestimated 4 million Californians, from hitting the road for the holidayweekend.As travelers settled down to family barbecues, terrorists linked to al Qaidaattacked an oil-industry compound in Saudi Arabia, murdering 22 Westernemployees housed at the facility and casting doubt on the security of Saudioil fields. No production facilities were damaged, but by the end of thefirst trading day after the attack, oil had jumped a record $2.45 during thesession, reaching $42.33 per barrel and showing no signs of slowing itsascent.Suddenly, after the terrorist attack, "No blood for oil!" didn't sound quiteso silly. Almost overnight, mainstream media discovered a global oilshortage. The media have yet to state a direct connection between theshortage and the blood that's currently being spilled in Iraq, but it'sgetting warmer.In recent weeks, major outlets including CNN, the New York Times andNational Geographic have run prominent features on "peak oil theory," untilrecently a little-known concept outside the circles of petroleum-industrygeologists and hardcore conservationists. The theory's implications areliterally nothing short of apocalyptic, which makes its recent disseminationby such mainstream sources even more worrisome. No blood for oil? If thepeak oil theorists are correct, we are about to enter an age that makes thatprice seem like a bargain.In fact, this age may already be upon us.The Party's OverWhen Santa Rosa author Richard Heinberg first encountered peak oil theory inthe late 1990s, he had a revelation. Somehow, he'd previously managed towrite A New Covenant with Nature: Notes on the End of Civilization and theRenewal of Culture without listing "oil" or "energy" in the index--he'dhardly touched upon the subjects in the book. His revelation was that whenit comes to the end of civilization as we now know it, oil and energy arethe primary areas of concern.Sitting in a meeting room at Santa Rosa's New College of California campus,where he teaches courses such as "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecologyand Sustainable Community," Heinberg, one of the nation's leading experts onthe ramifications of peak oil theory, humbly explains how just a few shortyears ago, he knew very little about it.A self-described generalist who now drives a biodiesel Mercedes Benz, heimmediately set out to learn everything he could about the subject. Hestudied peak oil theory, attended many obscure energy conferences andeventually published The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of IndustrialSocieties in 2003. Peak oil theory, originated by the late geophysicist M.King Hubbert in the 1950s, figures prominently in the book, which begins onan exceedingly ominous note:"The world is changing before our eyes--dramatically, inevitably andirreversibly. The change we are seeing is affecting more people, and moreprofoundly, than any that human beings have ever witnessed. I am notreferring to a war or terrorist incident, a stock market crash, or globalwarming, but to a more fundamental reality that is driving terrorism, war,economic swings, climate change and more: the discovery and exhaustion offossil fuel resources."Simply stated, peak oil theory holds that total annual global oil productionover time, from the oil industry's beginning in the mid-1800s to itspredicted end sometime within our own century, conforms to the familiarbell-shaped distribution curve when graphed. Production rises steadily untilreaching the graph's peak, at which point half of the world's total oilsupply will have been used up. Once the peak is reached, annual oilproduction begins steadily declining, unable to keep up with rising globaldemand, and the price skyrockets, leading to widespread financialinstability.Could we be peaking now?"The short answer is that no one knows," Heinberg says, adding that the peakcan't officially be declared until global demand exceeds production, whichhasn't occurred yet. While one group of scientists predicts the peak couldoccur anytime between now and 2008, the current consensus is sometimebetween 2006 and 2016. Heinberg has seen government estimates as high as2035, which he says is extremely optimistic. "Those of us who study it thinkit will be sooner rather than later," he said. "It's starting to look like2007.">From the point at which the peak occurs, the competition for the remaininghalf of the world's oil will grow more intense. Depending on how it'smanaged, there could be anywhere from 20 to 50 years' worth of oil left inthe ground. Heinberg firmly believes that how we manage this oil during thecoming decades will determine, for better or worse, the fate of humanity.The problem, as Heinberg sees it, is that oil has been too good to us. Sincepetroleum helped spark the industrial revolution, the global population hasexploded, from less than 2 billion people in post-industrial times to morethan 6 billion today, stretching the planet's natural carrying capacity.Without oil fueling machines and factories and farms, such large numberscannot be sustained. When the oil peak hits and the shortages begin,civilization will be faced with the delicate task of determining whosurvives. It's hard to get any closer to trading blood for oil than that."The entire economy runs on oil," Heinberg says. "The adjustments are notgoing to be easy."Indeed, the worst case scenarios are terrifying: genocide on a scale neverbefore seen, as control of the remaining oil divides along racial, ethnicand national boundaries. Even the best-case scenarios, all of which requireunprecedented levels of international cooperation, political courage andpublic participation, offer grim life-and-death choices. There's simply noreadily available source of energy that can replace oil as it steadilydeclines over the coming decades. Alternative sources such as wind, solarand tidal power, if applied on a massive scale, will help, but they won'tfill the energy gap.Nuclear power may be part of the solution, but it can't be the onlysolution: the uranium supply is expected to peak by 2100. In fact, all ofthese measures put together won't be able to make up for the energy lostthrough oil depletion. Civilization appears to be on a nonstop collisioncourse with a second Dark Age.Nevertheless, Heinberg manages to end The Party's Over on a positive note,present-ing an ambitious "complete redesign of the human project," animmediate about-face "from the larger, faster and more centralized to thesmaller, slower and more locally based; from competition to cooperation;from boundless growth to self-limitation.""If such recommendations were taken seriously," he insists, "they could leadto a world a century from now with fewer people using less energy percapita, all of it from renewable sources, while enjoying a quality of lifethat the typical industrial urbanite of today would perhaps envy."Sounds kind of like west Sonoma County on a Friday night. Of course, it waswritten a couple of years ago, before the invasion of Iraq, before oilpushed past $40 a barrel, before Heinberg gained a fuller under-standing ofthe complex interconnections between money, oil, food, water, populationgrowth and pollution. People who study the oil peak have a saying: The moreyou learn, the worse it gets.That's true in Heinberg's experience. His latest book, Powerdown: Optionsand Actions for a Post-Carbon World, due out this month, presentscivilization with four possible paths to the future. Foreshadowing the blackhumor sure to be found in the dark days ahead, only one of the paths leadsto anything remotely resembling civilization as we know it, and as it turnsout, the United States is already a long way down the wrong path.Oil Gets in Your BloodPeak oil theory is one of those subjects that just gets into certainpeople's blood. When someone with a willingness to test the truth of his ownconvictions tackles the subject, obsession often ensues. Santa Rosa residentMark Savinar is a case in point.A year ago Savinar, 25, had just completed law school and was waiting forthe results of his bar exam. While researching on the Internet the role ofdrug money in the global economy, he ran across a reference to peak oiltheory. Intrigued, he studied more and suddenly everything fell into place:the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the invasion of Iraq, the whole war onterrorism. "Oil made it all make sense," he says over orange juice at adowntown Santa Rosa cafe.Savinar gathered some of the research he'd collected and posted it on hiswebsite, expecting to get maybe 10 hits from likeminded visitors. He got 800visits the first week and a $250 donation. "This is what I should be doing,"he said to himself. He passed the bar, but he'd already found a new calling:preaching the peak oil gospel on the Internet. Instead of entering lawpractice, he built up his website, and now www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net isthe top linked peak oil site on Google."I wasn't going to hitch my wagon to something that wasn't going to bearound," Savinar says, underscoring just how seriously he believes the oilcrash is coming--there will be no need for lawyers after civilizationcollapses. His mission is to prepare as many people as he can for thecatastrophe to come.Savinar doesn't ask readers to take just his word for it. In addition toproviding links to reputable peak oil research, he includes quotes frommembers of the Bush administration who fully acknowledge that the crisis iscoming, if it's not here already."The situation is desperate," Bush energy advisor Matthew Simmons said in aninterview with online magazine From the Wilderness in August 2003. "This isthe world's biggest serious question." Asked if it was time to include peakoil in public policy debates, Simmons said, "It is past time. As I havesaid, the experts and politicians have no Plan B to fall back on." Is thereany solution to the crisis? "I don't think there is one," Simmons said. "Thesolution is to pray."In 1999, before he was elected vice president and was still CEO ofHalliburton, one of the world's largest providers of products and servicesto the oil industry, Dick Cheney slipped a little peak oil theory into hisown economic projections at a petroleum conference in London."By some estimates, there will be an average of 2 percent annual growth inglobal oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a 3percent natural decline in production from existing reserves," Cheney said."That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 millionbarrels a day."As Savinar points out, that's six times the amount currently pumped daily bySaudi Arabia, one of the few countries still possessing excess capacity.Where does Cheney think we're going to get the extra oil? Does the Bushadministration even have a plan?They haven't announced it publicly, but with a little creative connecting ofthe dots, it's not too hard to decipher how the Bush administration plans todeal with the crisis. One of the first things Cheney did after takingoffice, besides meeting in secret with energy industry leaders, was to make"energy security" a national priority. Even before 9-11, Cheney stronglyadvocated invading Iraq, ostensibly to rid the world of an evil tyrant, butno doubt with an eye on the Iraqi oil fields, the second largest reserves inthe world after Saudi Arabia's. Indeed, detailed maps of the Iraqi oilfields are among the few items that have been publicly released from hissecret energy meetings.After 9-11, it was immediately clear to intelligence officials that SaddamHussein and Iraq had not played a role in the terrorist attack. Cheney andSecretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pushed for the invasion anyway, andthanks to some trumped-up intelligence on Iraq's weapons of massdestruction, the administration was able to cajole Congress into approvingBush's "preventive war" doctrine; by March, 2003 the invasion was on.More than a year into the conflict, no WMDs or connections to the 9-11terrorists have been found; the Iraqis have welcomed their "liberators" withbullets and rocket-propelled grenades instead of open arms; widelydisseminated photographs of American prison guards torturing Iraqi detaineeshave shamed the United States in front of the world; and more than 800American soldiers have died, not to mention some 10,000 innocent Iraqicivilians.That doesn't sound like much of a plan, as the Bush administration'sdetractors have increasingly pointed out. But as Savinar says, oil makes itall make sense. Another dot to connect: Cheney is now being investigated forallegedly participating in secret dealings that granted his former company,Halliburton, the contract to rebuild Iraq's oil industry. Suppose the goalall along was to seize control of Iraq's oil reserves?"The reason we don't have an exit strategy is that we don't plan to leave,"says Savinar. There's an estimated 20- to 30-year supply of oil in Iraq'sreserves, and the longer it stays in the ground, the more valuable itbecomes. Heinberg is inclined to agree that the United States has nointention of leaving Iraq, pointing to 14 permanent military bases that havebeen built there since the war started. These bases complete a line ofmilitary outposts stretching through Afghanistan, all situated near areaswhere large reserves of oil are known to exist.Heinberg says this is the wrong path we have chosen, the path of cutthroatcompetition that treats blood and oil as commodities to be freely traded, asif neither had its own intrinsic value. As far as Heinberg is concerned, itis the road to ruin for us all.Last One StandingSitting in the New College meeting room, Richard Heinberg hardly looks likea prophet of doom. Thin, with a sparse beard and impish face, he enjoysplaying violin with his wife in their energy-efficient home. He grows muchof his own food and doesn't mind that his car's exhaust smells like Frenchfries. Once, he thought individuals living in this manner might be thesolution to the impending oil shortage. But the more you read peak oiltheory, the worse it gets."We can reduce personal energy usage, live closer to work, grow our ownfood, reduce our consumption," Heinberg says. "Beyond that, there are limitsto what individuals can do. Ultimately, there is no personal survivalwithout community survival."In Powerdown, the path to community survival is similar to the suggestionspresented in The Party's Over. There's more of an emphasis on populationcontrol, both to reduce energy demand and the pain and suffering ofstarvation caused by declining global food production. The United States canand should immediately begin developing large-scale alternative-energysystems using wind and solar power.Nations need to begin cooperating with one another instead of competing forscarce resources. Wealthy countries like the United States must be willingto share resources with more needy nations. Collectively, we all have to"powerdown," reducing energy consumption to the bare minimum, perhaps asmuch as 80 percent in the long run.It's been done before, albeit on a smaller scale. After the collapse of theSoviet Union in 1989, Cuba, which imported almost all of its oil from theU.S.S.R., suddenly faced an annual energy shortage of 25 percent. FidelCastro's communist government immediately went to work, breaking up thecountry's large factory farms into small plots of land, encouraging citydwellers to move to the country and become organic farmers. Millions ofbicycles were imported from China; cars were banned from certain roadways.The reforms worked, and by the end of the 1990s, Cuba had pulled itself outof what could have been a major depression.Such a plan might work on the global level, Heinberg believes, but there aremajor obstacles, the primary one for the United States being that some ofthe methods will smack of communism. "It would require a command-and-controleconomy and a WW II­level of effort," Heinberg says.He's not too optimistic that's going to happen. Even communist countrieslike China have become addicted to industrialization. The very same brand ofbicycles Cuba imported used to pack the streets of Beijing. Just last month,the Chinese government banned bicycles from the city to make more room forcars, the fruits of its rapidly expanding economy. India likewise isenjoying an economic boom, and the recent industrialization of bothcountries is putting enormous new demands on the global oil supply. Theworld seems inevitably drawn toward the wrong path, the one Heinberg calls"last one standing.""If the leadership of the United States continues with current policies, thenext decades will be filled with war, economic crises and environmentalcatastrophe," he writes in Powerdown. "Resource depletion and populationpressure are about to catch up with us, and no one is prepared. Thepolitical elites, especially in the United States, are incapable of dealingwith the situation."Some, of course, will find all this doom and gloom overwhelming and chooseto ignore it, traveling down Heinberg's third path, which he dubs "waitingfor the magic elixir." He writes, "Most of us would like to see stillanother possibility--a painless transition in which market forces come tothe rescue, making government intervention in the economy unnecessary."Sorry, that just ain't gonna happen, at least according to peak oiltheorists. Heinberg additionally doesn't hold out much hope that the UnitedStates will be able to turn from the "last one standing" path anytime soon,and he admits that it may already be too late anyway. His plan to"powerdown" will take decades to enact, and the world may not have that muchtime left. However, when the collapse truly appears imminent, there's onelast path to follow."This fourth and final option begins with the assumption that industrialcivilization cannot be salvaged in anything like its present form, and thatwe are now living through the early stages of disintegration. If this is so,it makes sense for at least some of us to devote our energies towardpreserving the most worthwhile cultural achievements of the past fewcenturies."He calls that path merely "building lifeboats," and if it creates a sinkingfeeling in the pits of readers' stomachs, perhaps it's intended.In a world that continues to trade blood for oil, this may be the onlyavenue of escape left.Richard Heinberg appears in discussion after the documentary, 'The End ofSuburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream,' onWednesday, June 16, at 7:30pm. New College of California, 99 Sixth St.,Santa Rosa. Free; donations requested. 707.568.3093.>From the June 9-15, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian. Metro Publishing Inc. Maintained by Boulevards New Media.