Peak Oil is You
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Page added on January 9, 2014
Peak Oil as an Epochalist Illusion
“Peak oil theory, as you probably know, starts with the obvious observation that oil is a finite resource. The process which produces oil takes place over geological time scales and so once we have used up what?s in the ground now, it is effectively gone. The peak comes when the rate of extraction can no longer increase and we have to adjust ourselves to declining supplies of fossil fuels. Now, our civilization?s use of petroleum as our primary source of energy really has produced an epochal change. It changed nearly everything about how we feed ourselves, how we occupy the landscape and how we organize our society. It has changed the definition of the family and allowed for a centralization of power that exceeds any previous empire. Fossil fuel energy replaced human and animal muscle power and thereby transformed nations of farmers and artisans first into industrial workers and eventually into service and knowledge workers in the post-industrial information economies of the First World. All this from fossil fuel energy.
Not only has petroleum replaced human and animal muscles for doing mechanical work but we also use it to make fertilizers, detergents, solvents, adhesives and most plastics. Imagine modern life without plastic. Fossil fuels, particularly coal, are still the primary energy source for our electrical grid, which runs the server farms that give all of our amazing little electronic gizmos something to connect to.
The implication of peak oil is that all of this energy allowed for dramatically increased complexity in our society. In 1700 you didn’t have any automotive mechanics or refrigerator repairmen because those devices did not exist. In 1986 when I graduated from high school and was supposed to be thinking about a career path, there was no World Wide Web, and no podcasts. The more complex your society becomes the more distinct job roles there are and, ideally, the better your chance of finding the job that best fits your temperament, your aptitudes and your desires. In my own case, there were no podcasters in the late 80s to serve as role models, so while podcasting is the occupational role that fits me better than any other I?ve ever tried, it?s not anything I could have aspired to before the rise of the web, RSS feeds, .mp3 players and personal computers powerful enough to handle big media files. The society I inhabit today is much more complex and has more unique professions in it than the world I grew up in, and I?d be hard pressed to claim that that is an entirely bad thing.
The long-term implication of peak oil is that when oil production peaks and begins to decline all of this increased societal complexity that comes from replacing human and animal muscle power with fossil fuel energy will have to move back in the direction of our pre-petroleum living arrangements. We will not be able to sustain the level of societal complexity that exists now.
The US Department of energy in 2005 issued the Hirsch report which stated, “The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.”
Now, people who are very alarmed about peak oil say that we don’t have ten years; that conventional oil production peaked in 2005, and that far from having a decade in which to prepare, if we started today we be starting nearly a decade late. The Hirsch report concludes, “without timely mitigation, world supply/demand balance will be achieved through massive demand destruction (shortages), accompanied by huge oil price increases, both of which would create a long period of significant economic hardship worldwide.”
I don’t believe there’s any reason to discount that conclusion, and I do agree with Jim Kunstler that suburbia is a living arrangement that is not viable for a post-petroleum future, but what I do not expect the current viability of suburbia to crash into the far future complete non-viability of suburbia overnight. The peak oil fast collapse scenario is equivalent to industrial civilization running into a brick wall or over a cliff at full speed. Lurid predictions of this sort of crash include a massive internal refugee population, people stranded because they cannot afford fuel for their cars, the sudden imposition of martial law, the breakdown of civil order, banditry, and even cannibalism.
I agree with John Michael Greer that we are living through what he calls a catabolic collapse, which is to say that society is slowly eating itself as it goes through a stair step progression of collapse, partial recovery and reorganization, and that this process takes place over a couple of centuries. It has been happening for most of my lifetime, and it will continue through the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren. This view doesn’t mean that we won’t encounter hardships, shocks and discontinuities. I certainly believe that we will, but I don’t think that we are headed for a Mad Max world in which people who once made their livings selling insurance or working at Walmart turn to living as medieval serfs, or roving bandits.
I want to be perfectly clear about the fact really terrible things and really marvelous and unprecedented things have happened in the past and that they will continue to happen in the future. The way that we inhabit the landscape and the way we organize our societies has changed dramatically over time, and it will continue to change, but the types of sweeping overnight changes that Singularitarians expect or that people who anticipate that any day now the US federal government is going to announce that we have been in contact with extraterrestrials for decades and that the ETs are about to share their technology with us or that we are about to experience an epochal change in human consciousness due to cosmic alignments and the transition to the age of Aquarius; these are not the sorts of changes that we can reasonably expect to see in the near future.
While I take the implications of peak oil seriously, I?m starting to consider the fast collapse from peak oil to be yet another version of the unrealistic epochal change that sweeps away the current reality in an instant and delivers us into a fully furnished new world. If we remain fixated on visions of epochal changes like the ones I just mentioned, then we?re likely to completely miss the actual trends that really do create extreme disruption on the time scale of an individual human lifetime.
While I think that a lot of people, myself included, have squandered a lot of time and psychic energy obsessing over developments that are unlikely to come to fruition in our own lifetimes, I?m not saying that our current civilization is sustainable or we have arrived at anything resembling a stable developmental plateau. As a species, we have endured a series of catastrophic events some of which could have marked the end or our line. There have been die offs, mega-scale natural disasters, disastrous shifts in the climate and episodes of mass slaughter.
Around 70,000 years ago, as a result of climate change from the mount Toba supervolcanic eruption in Indonesia, the global population of Homo Sapiens was reduced to around 10,000 individuals. That is a hair?s breadth from extinction. The Black Death in medieval Europe killed between a third and half of the population. Six million Jews died during the Holocaust, and even in my own lifetime there have been episodes of mass slaughter in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Balkans, and Rwanda. Those were surely apocalyptic events for the people who lived through them, and they were the end of the world for the people who died in them. Still, as events that shaped the development of global industrial and post-industrial civilization, they were but blips.
And make no mistake, in spite of the fact that I have helped propagate some improbable worst-case scenario thinking about peak oil, in the future we will be using less energy, and we will be consuming fewer material resources. I think that the people in the Transition Network, and other people who understand the implications of peak oil and are not scaremongering to grab attention, understand that we have inherited an extravagant and wasteful lifestyle and that material consumption, beyond the level that satisfies our physical needs, does not create happiness. We can simultaneously decrease our material consumption and increase our quality of life. That I fully believe. I’ve done it myself.”
14 Comments on "Peak Oil as an Epochalist Illusion"
ascepticaleconomist on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 1:10 pm
amen.
Davy, Hermann, Mo on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 2:33 pm
I learned about Peak oil and Hubert in 1987 in Geology class in College. For a few years after that I was really thinking about the whole idea. Even before that I wondered what would happen when oil was gone since it was a possibility. Stuff coming out of the ground tend to be finite. I eventually gave up on the idea when all the oil production from the 80’s and 90’s came on line.
In 2003 I again took up the peak oil subject. At this time I also realized the systematic risk involved to all the other areas of humanity. My mistake was believing in an immediate outcome with no possibility of recovery. Preparations become a priority and I invested time, money, and attitude in the immediate collapse. I might add it almost happened in 2008.
Yet, my experience with 2008 and the recovery, the advent of new sources liquid fuel, and societies built up capital has made me feel a Kunstler’s long emergency is likely.
I will not write off a significant collapse to a much lower economic activity and carrying capacity that Korowics speaks of in his important articles on the subject. His study of systematic risk found in complex societies is a must read and quite valid.
I think the finance sector is now the clear and present danger. The energy trap is the backstop issue 9 years down the road. Fukushima is the wild card. I feel there is no hope to the paradigm of growth. If the 2012 prophesy means anything then it is the end of growth. System theory is again probably valid with this described cycle.
Now, luck is an important issue now. Collapse duration and degree will be a big variable if we can stair step down. Let us hope we can at least reboot our life support as a global society initially in the first step down. If we cannot reboot at a global level initially then I am worried we may not make it as a species. We need only look a Fukushima and multiply that by 100’s and realize we will not be able to contain industrial society’s deadly poisons.
We need a plan C but may have to settle for a buffet of mitigation ideas, adjustment actions, and good crisis reactions. We should also accept the possibility that managed de-growth will not be possible. If this is the case then do we want a society wide education on these issues or do take this society wide lack of understanding to prepare at least dispersed lifeboat communities. We must then hope for the best with the poisons that could kill us all.
Davey
Hermann, MO
ronpatterson on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 2:45 pm
The debate goes on, fast crash or slow crash. But most peak oilers agree that there will be a crash. After all crude oil will peak, then natural gas will peak, then if civilization is still intact, coal will peak. And they all will decline. How fast they decline is an open question.
I am a fast crash person, but I could be wrong. I believe that the world economy is already very fragile. And violence in many oil exporting nations is on the increase. In 2013 well over two million barrels per day were offline due to violence or political problems, about twice what it was in 2012. This trend will get worse, not better.
Many exporting nations, Russia for example, will start to hoard their oil once peak oil becomes an established fact. This, and world violence, will lead to a much faster decline that would otherwise happen.
I cannot see anything “gradually happening” in this type of scenario.
J-Gav on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 4:32 pm
Ron – There may be a third possibility, i.e. not just fast or slow but a combination of the two. That is to say, what I call ‘major jolts’ followed by relatively flat plateau periods of undetermined length. The overall trend is downward but, depending on where a particular society is in the cycle, perceptions may be different as to the seriousness of the situation. Whatever the case, preparing now for a ‘different’ future would seem to be a wise thing to do.
Jimmy on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 5:03 pm
Peak oil is not a theory.
It’s an observation.
Dave Thompson on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 7:03 pm
I am convinced that the catastrophe to be reckoned with is climate change. The oceans are rapidly changing through carbon and heat absorption. Toss in the destructive world fishing industry and agricultural run off dead zones. Lest we forget the problems of oil spills the gulf being the latest. Melting ice caps opening the way for the self reinforcing feedback loops of heating the oceans/earth (Guy McPherson). We get 1/2 the planets oxygen from the fast dispersing phytoplankton (down 40%). Top that off with the continued destruction of industrialized deforestation the other 1/2 of oxygen production. Even if there is sustainable fossil fuels for the next 200 years. Mother earth will soon in the coming years/decades, start anew as she did when mammals got a toehold start 65 million years ago. We humans have put ourselves in a place I hope might be fixed, but……..
Arthur on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 7:27 pm
Peak oil would be only relevant if there was no alternative, but there is an alternative. The earlier we embrace the alternative, the softer the fossil fuel crash is going to, if any.
PapaSmurf on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 8:09 pm
There are already plenty of alternatives to oil. They are even approaching the point of being cost competitive.
Oil is approaching the point that it is optional.
Since I got my Nissan Leaf I have not been to a gas station in over a year. Try it. It is a great feeling.
Approximately 2/3 of oil consumption is gasoline consumed by daily driving.
Get over it. Gasoline is option and becoming more so every year as more options become available.
PapaSmurf on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 9:29 pm
My Nissan Leaf is at approximately 14,000 miles so far in the past 13 months.
Alternatives are working. Gasoline is optional. Our regional electric grid is solar, wind, hydro and natural gas.
Peak Oil is likely going to be a non-event if 2/3 of our oil demand can be substituted so easily.
poaecdotcom on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 11:43 pm
Over 95% of the transport of our goods is OIL.
Our economy is trade based (read oil based) and must GROW.
Absent GROWTH we cannot service the existing debt in the economy.
The marginal barrel of oil (tar sands etc.) has an EROI that is insufficient (<10) to support a complex enough society to ENABLE its extraction.
Ergo, My prediction is a very fast collapse.
GregT on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 12:18 am
I’m going with a combination of J-Gavs ‘major jolts’ theory, followed by a fast crash. We already saw a major jolt in 08, and we are still in ‘recovery’ (supposedly ) some five years later. The only thing holding the economy together now is massive amounts of debt. The next oil price shock could be caused by a geopolitical event, a war, a natural disaster, or even a falling out of national relations. If the next price shock doesn’t finish off our already crumbling economies, eventually one will.
There is as much of a possibility of a world full of Nissan Leafs, solar panels, and windmills, as there is unicorns, leprechauns, and fairy dust. There are simply not enough resources available, not to mention the fact that all three require massive ongoing inputs from oil. Natural gas is not an option either, even if we did have 100 years worth at present rates of consumption, which we do not, if we use ten time as much, it runs out ten times as fast. This isn’t exactly rocket science.
So I do see a fast collapse, but not until we have gone through at least one more ‘major jolt’.
Davy, Hermann, Mo on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 1:26 am
We may see a general collapse with many smaller regional ones emanating out of the global crisis. The regional ones could range from complete to partial in degree. Regions with mega cities and in difficult climates will be very dangerous places to be in.
The big worry for me is the maintenance of all the nuclear plants around the globe. We now see how dangerous all this spent fuel is. The worry used to be the reactors themselves but now we see the real dangers are much worse.
If we see a strong collapse in the critical nodes of the global economy and the reboot takes too long we may find ourselves beyond help as a modern people.
I don’t think people realize just how bad it can get. Those who are looking forward to it I think will be mistaken. If these collapse junkies think we will see a rebirth or something. It may happen a few hundred years down the road after the dust settles but not in this lifetime.
I hope for a long emergency. A major jolt may end us as a people.
GregT on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 1:46 am
Davy,
I don’t think that you will find anyone here, looking forward to what is coming. I also don’t think that a major jolt will end us a people.
What does have the potential to put an end to us, however, is if we DON’T stop burning fossil fuels…………
Davy, Hermann, Mo on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 11:15 am
.GregT, I don’t think many here look fwd to it but I know out there in la la world there are those who would welcome it thinking it an opportunity to right all the wrongs. People here know better. Rarely have revolutions/collapses/invasions succeeded in improving the world in which they happen.
I am concern if we have a big jolt and we cannot reboot our industrial society quick enough or effectively enough we could find our ability to manage and maintain the numerous very dangerous industrial substances problematic. The most worrying is Fukushima type accidents. The spent fuel situation worldwide is much worse then was ever realized by most people. Fuel ponds are pack way past design because there is no place to put it. There has been much talk of Yucca mountain type depositories but nowhere I know of is there a safe effective storage for this waste en mass.
It will be difficult to maintain cooling in these spent fuel containments. I imagine many other dangerous industrial materials in danger of release if not managed and maintained.
If, a severe collapse occurs I doubt we will have the coordination of even the army to maintain these things. Just look to Iraq after the liberation. Looting and mayhem while the soldiers watched on.