The End of the Road?

America will soon face its biggest crisis ever. Of such complex magnitude, no amount of financial or scientific commitment may be enough to prevent it from ending our industrial civilization.

The crisis is oil depletion.

Napa Register

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The end of the road? Friday, January 7, 2005

By JIM LYDECKER

America will soon face its biggest crisis ever. Of such complex magnitude, no amount of financial or scientific commitment may be enough to prevent it from ending our industrial civilization.

The crisis is oil depletion.

No longer a problem for future generations, the truth is sobering. Dividing the world’s proven reserves by our present rate of consumption gives us 38 years before the spigot runs dry, but the situation is far worse.

The problem is not ‘running out,’ but when the world’s demands can no longer be met.

Global demand for oil — 80 million barrels per day and climbing — is closer than ever to exceeding the world’s production capacity. Less than a 3 percent shortfall between demand and supply brought gas rationing in the ’70s; 10-15 percent is enough to bring an oil dependent economy to its knees.

The decline of world oil production will affect people in more ways than any other event in human history.

Hubbert’s Curve, named after the Shell geologist who refined it, is a mathematical statistic formed by combining many producing fields into a single trend. Including things like increased demand and future discoveries makes it an accurate tool.

Increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, oil becomes increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. Half of the oil is depleted at the top of Hubbert’s Curve. This is known as Peak Oil.

In 1956 Hubbert accurately predicted production in the U.S. would peak in 1970. World Peak Oil, his curve showed, would take place in 1995, but he was unable to foresee disruptions due to war or politics.

Make those adjustments and Peak Oil will arrive no later than Thanksgiving 2005. Half of Earth’s oil will be gone; demand will continue to rise; production will steadily decline and the price of oil will skyrocket. The slip down the slope will be much faster than the trip up.

What happens at Peak Oil is reminiscent of how the experts divided themselves initially with global warming.

* Optimists see the world becoming aware overnight. Governments enact conservation laws and prevent resource grabbing wars while de-population strategies are implemented to eventually stabilize world population at less than 2 billion. Lifestyles will change drastically to stave off something worse.

* Pessimists expect the world to continue on its blind ways. Nations try to secure remaining oil for themselves, policies of which we are seeing today. Resource wars/occupations begin (Iraq), economies are shattered and disease, famines, droughts, social strife and mass migrations reduce the world population to less than 1 billion existing in a medieval society at best.

A century from now all that man has progressed to may be a thing of the past. The moon landing may be our great pyramid, an accomplishment never to be equaled.

No substance has been more interwoven into life as oil. Without it civilization could unravel. While 20-30 percent of oil is refined for gasoline, the majority is used for drugs and pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electricity generation and everything plastic.

Oil made it possible for humans to exploit resources basic to civilization in volumes never before seen. We’ve already depleted the Earth of its surface found, high grade resources. Those that remain need oil and high technology to be mined.

In agriculture, oil has allowed relatively few farmers to produce an abundance of food necessary for the population explosion of the 20th century. Overpopulation is driving oil and resource demand.

Knowing people see and hear what they want, politicians and economists insist we have alternatives and will “invent our way out of this mess.” Little of the scientific community’s warnings is covered by mainstream media keeping the awful reality out of sight until too late.

The reality facing us is that there is nothing coming down the pike that comes close to supplying the net-energy needed to run our economic industrial infrastructure. The same energy in a barrel of oil at $50 would cost $250-$500 derived from alternative sources not including the trillions necessary to retrofit the infrastructure. Our economy will be long shattered before the financial incentive is there.

No economy is more at risk to oil depletion than ours. Without growth we no longer can make due on the interest on our national debt.

Oil depletion means economic anarchy is on the way.

The government has been long aware of oil depletion, Peak Oil and the problems brought on by overpopulation. A secret report done for defense secretary Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1977, concluded that Earth’s population needed to be about 400-500 million by Peak Oil to ensure a “continued, comfortable standard of living.”

Instead of leading the world in conservation and population control, we got the Carter Doctrine which states the “U.S. is willing to go to war to ensure our energy supply.”

It remains in place today.

(Lydecker lives in Napa.)