Still Wondering: Where Are We Going?

“[B]y 2050 another 130 million people are projected to be living in the United States; by 2100 the Census Bureau’s high estimate is more than 1 billion. Providing infrastructure and transportation for this expanding population will generate a long list of required equipment and materials….”[1]

That’s a lot of energy demand and usage under the best of supply conditions! When many other nations are dealing with similar population growths, how on earth (literally) are we going to provide?

That question is troubling enough. How do we provide when the supply of oil that has so far supported our rising populations and ever-increasing demand is no longer as plentiful, inexpensive, or easily obtainable?

World oil production has been flat at best since the middle part of this decade. Even when oil was zooming up to nearly $150.00 per barrel just a few short years ago, oil production didn’t increase. As yourself: why? Why wouldn’t nations allegedly up to their eyeballs in plentiful reserves not ramp up production so as to generate untold billions and billions in additional income? Hello! Just having those plentiful reserves isn’t enough. If they are too difficult or too costly to extract, or if the quality is poor, we could have a gazillion barrels of oil in reserves and not a drop of it would help. Those are the present-day facts about a good deal of our oil supplies. It’s not going to get any better.

“[C]onventional oil reserves are being depleted throughout the world at twice the rate of their replacement, historically slow annual capacity declines from major oil fields are being replaced by rapid declines from significantly smaller new developments, and finally marginal new reserves such as arctic and deep water oil accumulations require inordinate new technology advancements and massive funding in order to be brought on-stream in adequate volumes as affordable costs.” [2]

It’s true that the possibility exists that the tipping point when oil production begins its unavoidable decline may yet be many years away, [see this for a good summary of the current state of oil production] but are we really willing to wager that something will come along to save the day when it’s time to deal with those challenges on a day-to-day basis? Are we willing to even place bets on exactly when that might be? Doing nothing seems like a monumental—and monumentally foolish—strategy.

“’We are confronted with a society built on high-quality energy, dense forms of energy, fossil fuels especially,’” says [Boston University] ecological economist Cutler Cleveland. ‘Could you have the same standard of living with renewables? I don’t think we really know. Things might have to change very fundamentally….’
“[R]enewables’ handicaps do not bode well for speeding up the next energy transition. Fossil fuels ‘were phenomenally attractive,’ yet it still took 50 to 70 years to bring them into widespread use, says [systems analyst Arnulf Grübler of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)]. That’s because, no matter how attractive a fuel might be, it takes time to create the infrastructure for extracting and transporting the resource, converting it into a usable form, and conveying it to the end user. It also takes time for inventors to develop enduse technologies—such as steam engines, internal combustion engines, and gas turbines—and for consumers to adopt them and create demand. Renewables ‘will be slower because they’re less attractive,” says Grübler. “They don’t offer new services; they just cost more.’” [3]

Not exactly an ideal solution, especially when we consider how little research funding we currently provide (which will likely become less as a shortsighted Congress is already suggesting). It’s estimated that fossil fuels (oil in particular) plays a role in the production of more than 90% of all industrial goods, and a similar percentage in supplying fuel for all forms of transportation. There is no denying that our economic way of life is supported by what has long been a ready supply of oil. That’s going to change. Pretending it won’t is just dumb.

Doing nothing, or waiting for some “better” time to deal with that problem will result in one certain outcome: we’ll have fewer options available to actually deal with the problems of decreasing supply.

“Until we get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession, government is the only remaining booster rocket. If anything, we need more government spending and lower taxes on the middle class. This means bigger deficits, at least for the time being. Even worse, budget-deficit mania will slow future growth if it forces government to cut the things that fuel growth  – education,  basic R&D, child health, improved infrastructure.
“No smart family would choose to balance the family budget over borrowing money to send the kids to college. The same logic holds for the nation as a whole. If certain government spending generates higher future productivity, we’d be nuts not to make the investment just to avoid a larger deficit.” [4]

With so much of our individual and commercial livelihood dependent on a vital and finite resource on the verge of an irreversible decline (at least in terms of affordable prices and in sufficient quantities to meet ever-increasing demand), we’ve got a big problem ahead of us. Global warming won’t help (despite the Right’s intentional unwillingness to recognize that problem—a purely political calculation that is destined to lead to unimaginable difficulties), and an economy already straining to remain upright both serve to create a convergence of challenges about which we are at present woefully uninformed and ill-prepared for. Toss declining supplies of affordable oil into that pot and we’re brewing some kind of nasty future for ourselves.

Exactly how quickly does our leadership think it’s going to take to transition away from fossil fuels? How long do most of us think that will take?

For those narrow-minded and shortsighted public personalities denouncing Big Government in all its facets, they’re creating an environment in which government will be the only entity left standing and capable of managing what will surely be an upheaval of historic proportions … with no guarantees that it will succeed. (When media personalities on the Right are denouncing Republicans for not being conservative enough because they supported legislation eliminating incandescent light bulbs as one means to conserve energy [5], it’s a demonstration of narrow-minded ignorance about our energy future that’s difficult to fathom. Are these people incapable of understanding anything about the future? Is there some genetic defect that prevents them from considering consequences beyond the end of the month?}

Acting on an oddly-based belief that all of this evidence (facts are so damned annoying at times!) leads to some happy outcome completely divorced from reality is a mind-numbingly dangerous strategy to follow at the expense of hundreds of millions of people.

We need to be better.

That admonition applies not just to the media and political personalities too many of us depend on for guidance. If we don’t step up and start recognizing how much of our everyday lives depend in small or large part on having oil and gas at the ready 24/7, and then considering how much of that 24/7 is going to be altered when those same supplies either become exorbitantly more expensive and/or (likely both) not as readily available any longer, then we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves. Is that a roll of the dice we should be considering?

Take a moment to reflect on how many products you own in your own home that were produced either directly from fossil fuels or were transported or otherwise supplied using fossil fuels in the distribution process. Is there anything not attributable to oil? How long and how much effort and how many changes and how much of our production facilities and how much of our infrastructure and how much of our transportation services are going to have to be adapted to a world where oil is no longer at the ready as it has been for more than 100 years? How do implement the new facilities, which will themselves no doubt demand a considerable amount of energy in their creation and distribution, when there’s even less efficient, inexpensive, and available fossil fuels to power all of that?

Even in the midst of the hardships and burdens the vast majority of us are being obliged to endure daily as our economy stumbles along—which surely cloud our abilities to take on even more burdens—we need to become better educated about the challenges that loom in the much-too-soon future, and we need to become at least a bit smarter about the contributions we make to solving the problems. The evidence from recent polling seems quite clear that a too-large percentage of Americans have their facts completely wrong about President Obama’s legislative accomplishments (here, here, and here), and that lack of understanding will be of no help to any of us as we undertake the massive challenge of revising … well, just about everything!

If we either remain uninformed or mislead by the facts and the options we’ll have to rely on, or if we make decisions based not on reason and consideration of the realities confronting us (daunting as they will be), then we should expect very little in the way of solutions or success.

“Is America ready for the 21st century? The answer is no.” [6]

We need to find a better answer, and we should start working on that right about now.

Peak Oil Matters