by Colorado-Valley » Mon 13 Feb 2006, 16:17:58
I wrote this column the other day for our local magazine:
My Mad Max Friend By Don Olsen Valley Chronicle
I have a friend — I’ll call him Max — who’s completely convinced that the world’s love affair with cars and petroleum is about to take it down the road to apocalyptic ruin.
“We’re toast,” he says matter-of-factly one morning over coffee, “we’re going 60 miles per hour and the brick wall is right in front of our windshield.”
As you can imagine, Max really brings a cheery note to the coffee-shop conversation. But truth be told, he’s a thoughtful and amusing guy who just happens to study the world energy markets a lot. If you want to know the technical production prospects for say, the giant Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, this guy’s your perfect techno-nerd. “When the Ghawar goes into depletion, so does the world,” he says. And he believes that day’s not too far off.
Max grew up on a fruit ranch in western Colorado, and like most people raised on farms or ranches, he’s always paid attention to resources and where they come from. To a city dweller, a drought might mean less lawn watering. To a farmer, it’s a life-changing situation. Six-dollar-a-gallon diesel is not a good thing if you’re trying to feed Ameica’s suburbs.
Seeing that the government has had no interest since the days of Jimmy Carter in preparing for the end of oil, Max has spent the past five years making a plan for himself and his family. He just finished a huge root cellar that can double as a fortified hide-out, and if you ask him about what kind of weapons he has, he just smiles as says, “ask me which ones I don’t have.”
Max, whose political beliefs would be considered liberal, environmentalist and Democrat, never the less hopes that the Bush administration will quickly declare martial law and seal off western cities if the country enters an oil crisis. That way, he figures, people who live out on farms and ranches who’ve prepared for the worst won’t be overrun by starving masses looking for food.
As I said, conversations with Max are always cheerful.
I talk till I’m blue in the face about how alternative energy can be used to replace oil, but Max calmly shoots down every scenario — since he’s studied them all and says there’s simply no way to feed six and a half billion people and still have all the cars and machines that drive the industrial economy in continuous, exponential growth. Solar and wind? Too little energy, too intermittent. Nuclear? Plants take years to build and are expensive and dangerous. Hydrogen? It’s a joke, he laughs. It’s not even an energy source, it’s only a storage battery, with no infrastructure to distribute it and no cars that can run on it. Oil shale, tar sands, biodiesel, ethanol? “They’re hard to scale, but they might work if you don’t mind paying $10 a gallon to fuel your Ford Explorer,” he says.
I later do some research, and conventional wisdom is that peak oil is still 10 to 20 years away. But some experts, like Matthew Simmons, a Houston oil-services investor, believe we’re already on the cusp of Hubbert’s Peak, and the rest of the century is going to be all downhill.
So are Max and his doomer friends mad? I have no idea. But after talking to him, I decided to pull out my old .22 and do some target practice. If nothing else I can shoot a few rabbits and make a nice stew as the world slowly collapses back into the 19th Century. Maybe I’ll even raise a few extra potatos and carrots, too, just to be on the safe side.