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Page added on March 3, 2015
Modern Life Is Probably Screwed by Peak Oil, But It’s Not Too Late to Avoid Mass Starvation
The challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.
By George Monbiot
I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into freefall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Mr Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.
If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise; if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistleblowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.
Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester onto nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.
According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.
Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I’ve been bellyaching about the British government’s refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I’m beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.
The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to “approach a plateau” towards the end of this period, but there’s no hint of the graver warning that the IEA’s chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: “we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau … I think time is not on our side here.” Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, “even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.”
The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world’s new and undiscovered oil fields would have to be developed at a rate “never before seen in history.” As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that “the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now.”
Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the USA were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn’t seem very likely.
Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift. So the assumption in the IEA’s new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen “to around one-half by 2030” looks unsafe. The UKERC review finds that just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020.” Unconventional oil won’t save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only 5m barrels a day by 2030.
As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems, which don’t need much labour or energy. There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out.
The challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.
33 Comments on "Modern Life Is Probably Screwed by Peak Oil, But It’s Not Too Late to Avoid Mass Starvation"
Plantagenet on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 1:51 pm
George Monbiot is exactly right. The incompetence of the people in charge of the US government and other governments around the world is stunning. This current oil glut provides a huge opportunity to begin to transition to a post-carbon economy…..but obama and other world leaders are too busy trying to flood the US with illegal immigrants, give Iran the bomb and encourage the Shia va. Sunni religious wars,
ShEEEESH!
penury on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 2:02 pm
To predict the end of the age of oil is to be labeled a doomer and ignored. Most people prefer to believe that BAU will continue or really things will only get better. Most Americans and Europeans have never experienced true downturns in the standard of living, Until it happens denial will be their only action.I only disagree with the statement that the challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people… well I don’t think that will ever be a problem as resources will run out before then.
keith on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 2:08 pm
everything is supply chain driven today. If the chain breaks, we will then see how far the fall will be.
Dredd on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 2:12 pm
There is no political “solution” to madness.
If your shrink ever advises you to join a political party as a cure for a psychological problem, have him or her committed.
nemteck on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 2:15 pm
“The challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.”
Don’t believe in this fear mongering. All will be well since shortonoil of the Hill group assured us that oil in 2030 will cost 0.00 Dollar.
shortonoil on Sun, 26th Oct 2014 8:10 am: ”We hate to inform these analysts [that] the price of oil is falling toward $0.00/barrel. That will occur sometime in the 2030-2035 time frame.”
On its way done, the oil price will already be as low as $26.90 in 2019.
shortonoil on Fri, 7th Nov 2014 8:16 am
Northwest Resident on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 2:20 pm
“According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel.”
Don’t worry. marmico — one of our resident trolls posing as a know-it-all oil expert — will soon be along to repeat his claim that farm production requires very little fossil fuel, and to quote some statistic which proves that he is smarter than a bunch of farm scientists at Cornell University. Nothing to worry about, right marmico?
apneaman on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 2:22 pm
It is blasphemy for any Alternet article NOT to end on a feel good, there is still hope, we will all change and pull together, note. This is how lefty greens do denial. In psychology they call it displacement.
shortonoil on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 3:05 pm
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/depletion2_022.htm
Oil prices are going down over the next five years, and the oil age is going with it. $50 oil is now low enough to eventually put a third of the world’s production permanently off line. Watch the graph above, and in a couple years you will know. 2018 projection – $41/ barrel.
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/
Richard Ralph Roehl on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 3:11 pm
100 Earth years from now… this argument will be a moot point. Survivors won’t give a damn.
MSN Fanboy on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 3:46 pm
I actually agree with little Planter…
Funny article, oxymoronic really.
Modern life is screwed, goes on to argue how much oil is used in agriculture as part of modern life. Then separates modern life from agriculture. So we don’t starve.
Rodster on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 3:55 pm
TPTB are taking this global bullet train straight into a mountain. Either they kill us all or we kill them and they are fully aware of both outcomes. So they are hellbent on being the last man standing.
So expect BAU and NOTHING getting done other than just saying they’ll do something.
Aaron on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 4:34 pm
This article is from 2009. Monbiot has since repudiated peak oil theory.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/peak-oil-we-we-wrong
Nigel on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 4:40 pm
Still, nice to see Pembrokeshire get a mention…
Energy Investor on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 4:44 pm
Aaron,
You are right about the date. But I expect Monbiot to change his mind again when shale production goes into a tailspin.
Even journos have a short time frame these days.
Perk Earl on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 5:27 pm
TPTB, particularly for those non-whistleblowers at the IEA, simply frame things to meet necessary expectations. Any evidence to the contrary is obfuscated by conjuring up phantom projections.
The example given of the farmer that did everything he could to reduce FF usage but in the end only reduced it 25%, is all we need to know what will happen to world population once things fully go awry.
Cloud9 on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 6:19 pm
You gotta realize that there is some young colonel somewhere that has figured this all out, written a report and presented it to people who matter. They have gamed it. They have a pretty good idea where the tipping points are and how the collapse is going down. Why do you think a 240,000 man security force was created out of nothing? Most people think they are gaming the zombie apocalypse as a joke. Why do you think they bought all those bullets? Guys, we are the zombies. Those bullets are for us. It is a big club and we are not in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0
Perk Earl on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 6:40 pm
“Those bullets are for us. It is a big club and we are not in it.”
That’s right. Some are guaranteed a spot post bottleneck, but the rest of us better behave ourselves (in spite of hunger) post collapse or we’ll be targeted. Meanwhile the meme presented is everything is going to all right people, just relax.
Makati1 on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 6:42 pm
RRR, that is , IF there are any survivors 100 years from now. I would not like to bet my life on it at this point, but no one alive now will be there to see if you are correct.
As for oil for crops, the amount of hydrocarbons necessary to grow food in quantity is minimal compared to that used for personal vehicles and making plastics. I suspect that, if there is time, oil will be allocated to survival systems and cars/plastics will become extinct.
After all, outside of the west, how much farming is actually done with huge equipment and processing factories? I would bet it is a small percentage. Factory farms will not last long when they cannot ship their produce around the world. Ditto for plastic junk.
If you believe ANY government source of information, you deserve your future.
Perk Earl on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 6:57 pm
“As for oil for crops, the amount of hydrocarbons necessary to grow food in quantity is minimal compared to that used for personal vehicles and making plastics. I suspect that, if there is time, oil will be allocated to survival systems and cars/plastics will become extinct.”
Your first point is true, Mak, but how much money will consumers have in an economy without most of the stuff that is sold via massive FF usage? What would we do to make enough to buy food and other needed supplies?
Davy on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 6:59 pm
Mak, you should avoid comments on farming it is obvious you lack depth on the subject and instead draw conclusions based on your anti-western agenda. Your statement about farming equipment use outside the west is just not true. Go do some googling and get back to me.
Makati1 on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 9:34 pm
Perk, we will do as we did when there wasn’t the financial system of today. Barter, trade labor for food, Make our own necessities. You do not need a ‘job’ to survive. All you need are skills and intelligence. I’m sure you have both. You will just learn to live with less.
You need a ‘job’ to participate in the banksters cartel. To be a slave to the ‘system’. After the SHTF, many areas of the world will go back to the ways they lived for hundreds and thousands of years. Many never left that world.
Sure life spans will shrink to maybe 50 years, but if you live 70+ years and you must give 50 of them to the banksters to have a part in their ‘system’, who is ahead?
How much of the ‘stuff’ you bought when you were ’employed’ those 50 years do you still have? You may say land and a home paid for. Then you have gold or some valuable resource tucked away to pay the government taxes on that home for the rest of your life? If not, you do NOT own it, they do. You are renting it until you cannot pay the taxes or they decide to claim it as government property.
Just saying, I see many happy, healthy families living here in the Ps on less than one lower class American spends on himself per year. Maybe $1,000 per person per year here. And they are happy and educated and live at least as long as an average American.
Our caretaker family is like that. Five of them and the oldest is going to college under my patronage. It costs me all of $300 per year or P12,000 for her tuition and books.
The youngest is brain damaged and almost blind, but they manage. And he laughs and giggles like any 6 year old and plays Dominoes with his family. He can feel the dots as they are dimpled on the set I gave him. Not slow, just handicapped. His older brother is learning farming with us and will be our main helper when he graduates in a few years and we live there permanently.
I have no ice storms to drive through or no car to worry about crashing or paying local, state, or federal taxes, insurance, car maintenance, etc. walk down to the road and take a jeepney or walk. Town is only 3 miles, on a level road, from the farm. The Pacific beach is 5 miles. The river for swimming, 1/4 mile.
Life is good when you get unshackled from Western habits and ‘needs’.
http://www.living-in-the-philippines.com/retirement-visa-philippines-srrv.shtml
Perk Earl on Tue, 3rd Mar 2015 10:28 pm
Thanks for an insider’s look into a simpler lifestyle, Mak. All the stuff does keep us running, paying the banksters, replacing the damaged and obsolete, pressing ahead to try and stay even or get ahead. One of the things learned over the years is relationships and time to something other than work that matters, not stuff, so good for you for finding a simpler life, surrounding yourself with good people and helping out where you can.
I remember working on the offshore rigs off of Aberdeen, Scotland in 78-79, and one of the things I liked was they weren’t as preoccupied with material possessions as we are in the West, US. That relentless drive for stuff just wasn’t there. I actually thought about staying, but they were prejudiced against Americans, so it was a mixed bag. I was always hearing, “You know you’re not bad for an American.”
But back here in CA, I actually got lucky and married a woman that became very successful during our marriage in the Arts, so I can’t complain cause life is pretty easy and interesting meeting new people in different locale’s and cultures. Just always keeping an eye out though because I know things are going to change drastically in the years to come.
verstapp on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 1:35 am
I see ddeeaadd ppeeooppllee… Billions of them.
Makati1 on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 3:23 am
verstapp. I do also, and most of them will be in the Western countries and their wannabees.
MSN fanboy on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 6:13 am
Isn’t the Philippines pushing the same growth meme as…. Everyone else Mak. Everyone is a wannabee. How many countries are volunteers in poverty Mak? Why do you think your paying for this girls education Mak? So she can be plugged into the system Mak, the very system you decry. Funny Really
Davy on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 6:15 am
Mak said – verstapp. I do also, and most of them will be in the Western countries and their wannabees.
Mak I read your morning dribble. I must say it started out normal and respectable but you can’t remain that way. You degenerate into your agenda of how your Asian overshoot is peachy and will turn out so well. You talk about as usual how bad the west is and how wonderful the P’s are. You talk about how the western peoples are slaves and your P’s people are not. Then you end that distorted fantasy agenda with your vision of the dead in the West.
Mak, your P’s is a mess. It is ranked 170 on an environmental index of 172. You have 100MIL people in the space of Arizona. The Philippine’s is considered near the top of places that will be adversely affected by AGW. The rest of your Asia is in a vast overshoot worse even than the P’s. You will have a whole mega populated areas implode and disperse into the country side like locust.
Your have Asia is killing the world with pollution from its export driven production of cheap plastic shit and unneeded textiles of every type. Electronic gadgets of every type unneeded and just earth poisons. I don’t care if they go to the west they are produced in your dirty factories. Be grown-ups and say no to this willful killing of the earth. Instead you blame the west like slave would their masters. These export driven economies have destroyed your water and soils. You have covered your best farm land with either vast high-rises of people or ugly dirty factories.
What a crock of shit Makster I hear out of you and your 1000 year Asian Reich that will rise from the ashes of a destroyed west. Asia is the number one killer of the earth now having pull past the west in high gear in the last decade. Asia is in both consumption overshoot and population overshoot. At least Africa is just entering population overshoot not the twin evil of both.
Asia is in the number one worst position of survive a dying BAU. You have 4BIL people in a space smaller than Russia with no way to feed yourselves. You have a significant portion of your population in mega-urban cities. You yourself live in one of the worst. Metro Manila has 25MIL in a space of 246 square miles or IOW a sprawling megopolis of unsustainability. You claim you have a refuge a few hours from this. What a joke.
You are the worst of the anti-Americans here because you are pure agenda and good at it. Some people like you here mainly anti-Americans. Birds of a feather flock together. I guarantee the silent majority that come on PO to read issues of PO do not like or agree with your filth of lies and distortion. Like I said I started reading your comments this morning thinking you would be nice and what do I get but your usual slap in the face cat piss. You are a dreg Mak. Please move to your jungle hang and talk to your pet monkeys you will eat eventually in desperation.
Mamma Gina on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 6:31 am
Davy, don’t argue with Mak. He’s disgruntled because he’s meager US welfare check only allows him to live in a high density apartment in the cheap side of Manila. He must now spend his days trying to convince himself how bad to US is and how great his chosen home. Not easy.
Davy on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 6:50 am
I Know Mam, I shouldn’t it is just this morning he talked about all those western bodies he look fwd to seeing so that includes me. I am trying to show restraint. I actually felt Mak started the morning out right then wham and he smacked me in the face.
Revi on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 7:16 am
Regardless of whether it’s next year or the year after, we need to do something. Nobody wants to deal with reality at this point. Better to plan something yourself, or in your community. It could make a huge difference in your survival chances, and the people you love.
Newfie on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 3:27 pm
That was 6 years ago !!!
Monbiot changed his mind.
He now thinks we have enough oil left to fry the planet to a blackened crisp.
Makati1 on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 6:59 pm
Mamma, are you jealous? I am free and how ‘meager’ is an income that allows me to live a happy life and NOT be a bankster slave?
I could live in the Us on the same income, and did for a few years, but why live in a Fascist Police State when I can live in a still-free country? When my 89 y.o. mom passes, I will never go back to the States for anything. There is nothing there that I want. My family can join me here if they want. If not, it is their choice.
You have no idea of my TOTAL resources and I wold be a fool to talk about them on the NSA direct line called the internet, wouldn’t I? You only say and post stuff here you want the world to know and access. Would you put up signs to your post SHTF cache/farm? “This way to safety, food, shelter!”
Momma didn’t raise no fools.
Makati1 on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 7:08 pm
MSN, jealous? It seems so. Maybe tyhe Ps is a bit of a Western wannabee, but it is still in a great financial position relative to the West. 6% growth this year. Low inflation. And their major climate problem is an old one, typhoons.
Who will hurt most when the SHTF? A country that need two gallons of oil per person per day or one that needs a pint of oil per person per day?
47,000,000+ on food stamps means that half the population of the Ps would have to be on welfare to be equal to the US in poverty. Actual Ps poverty numbers are around 15% to 20%. What will the numbers be in the US when the safety nets collapse? 80% or more. Less than 20% will be able to continue their lives on a Western level after TSHTF.
Those who live in fragile glass houses should not throw stones…
Davy on Wed, 4th Mar 2015 7:23 pm
Mak, are you feeling on the defensive all of the sudden? Mak, is it becoming more obvious people are tiring of the cat piss you spew daily? Why don’t you go apply for a job at the office of Philippines tourism? I am trying to figure out why you are promoting the P’s all the time. Could it be you are trying to make yourself feel better for the stupid move you made? Most of us here have heard you boring travel agent pitch multiple times. It really gets old. It reminds me of a drunk or a senile old man repeating the same thing over and over. With you I imagine both a drunk and senile. Surely there are Philippine travel blogs you could be a part of instead of bothering us here. Give it a break Mak and contribute something that matters to us in relation to PO, FF, or BAU. Otherwise Mak, please leave us alone.