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peristaltorRead enough of these peristaltic entries and you should get a sense that I subscribe to the Peak Oil theory. Essentially, this Shell geologist named M. King Hubbert gave a speech to his oil industry peers in 1956 showing his calculations. In that speech, he predicted oil production in the United States -- at that time the most productive region in the world -- would peak in 1971. He was laughed at. He was scoffed.
But he was right. In fact, his prediction was only off by six months, not to shabby for someone working without computers.
So what is peak? It refers to peak production, not peak supply. That is, Hubbert realized that any worthy business seeks, finds and extracts the easiest supply of oil to seek, find and extract before moving on to the less easy supplies to seek, find and extract. At each increase in extraction difficulty, the company needs to invest more technology and more energy to bring the oil to the surface. As technology increases in efficacy, however, the ability to supply petroleum rises with the demand for the petroleum . . . up to a point.
That point Hubbert called the Peak. Once the Peak is reached, the market demand will outstrip the available production, no matter how much technology -- and energy -- is applied.
That's exactly what happened in 1970. No matter how many new wells the US oil companies drilled, no matter how much fancy (and expensive) technology in their toolkit they applied to the existing wells, they could not increase their rate of crude extraction. From that point on, for the US energy economy to grow, it had to import foreign crude.
Hubbert made other predictions. He predicted the world peak production would be reached in 2000. He could not have predicted, however, the OPEC embargo, a political decision that lowered production rates below market demand. This temporary decrease in production delayed Hubbert's world-wide peak arrival.
With knowledge of Hubbert's Peak coming, one would think policy makers would have been on the ball, making preparations for its arrival. How individual policy makers prepared, however, betrays how they viewed this planet.
The solar thermal panels that once warmed water at the White House,
now doing the same over a cafeteria at Unity College.
President Jimmy Carter was probably the one president people remember when they think about conservation. He installed solar thermal panels on the White House roof and famously turned down the thermostat in the White House itself, forcing the man from sunny Plains, Georgia to wear a sweater in the winter. He implored Americans to make lifestyle changes that reduced the amount of energy they use in their everyday lives.
He didn't mention the coming global peak per se; but he had another crisis in the OPEC restrictions that he could point to for impetus. That crisis was very real. People could see the sheiks getting rich on "their" money. Denying them this money seemed like a very good idea indeed.
But what did President Carter get for his environmental awareness, his conservation? Voted out of office, thanks largely to the treason I mentioned in Part I . . . a treason seemingly orchestrated by, among others, the Texas oil millionaire and former CIA director George H. W. Bush.
(A parenthetical fun fact: Bush, as Director of Central Intelligence, briefed candidate Carter on strategic issues. Carter requested these briefings so as not to develop campaign pledges that would undermine the current president or prove unworkable should Carter become president. Once he was elected, Bush offered to stay on as DCI. The CIA, though, was going through a rough period at this time. Charges of politicization were rampant. Carter felt Bush's former position as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, though, would be seen as too political a connection for the DCI to have had (duh). In this CIA archive of declassified documents, Carter noted in retrospect, "If I had agreed to that (Bush) never would have become president. His career would have gone off on a whole different track!"
(I doubt it would have mattered; but that's a topic for another entry. Back to the Peak story.)
I'm going to set aside the politics for a while and focus instead on how one's world experience affects one's worldview. The twentieth century saw the rise of creature comforts and a corresponding rise in population. Both increases were brought to us by coal and later oil, carboniferous fuel sources that allowed fossilized fuel to do the work of keeping our butts alive and prosperous. We can grow food in one remote corner of the world and move it to our hungry mouth at another corner, moving it again not with our legs but with fuel and machines. We can sow our seeds with machines, fertilize them with machines, harvest the crops with machines. For a great proportion of our food, we in the western world almost never soil our hands with farming today, choosing instead to relegate that unpleasant task to machines.
Meat is no exception. We used to run down our prey. (Some scientists think that's why we evolved to walk upright and have little hair. An upright posture allows us to move fast over good distances with very little energy; relative hairlessness allows us to shed the heat generated in such long hunting runs faster than our hairy prey.) A few thousand years ago, we managed to tame and domesticate some the animals we eat, and instead as nomads follow them on their quest for forage. Now, we grow that silage at one farm and truck it -- with fuel -- to the penned and caged livestock. When adequately fattened, these animals are trucked to the slaughterhouse and then trucked to market, fuel driving each trip. Heck, we no longer have to run down game for food; we can hop on a motorcycle, an ATV or even a helicopter and let the game tire as we burn calories not in our legs but through our exhaust. We have that option.
The fuel driving all of this movement is nothing more than concentrated sunlight, the remains of plants trapped underground and mutated through pressure, heat and time. The bulk of our coal, for example, comes from one long plant growing period, The Carboniferous, almost 70 million years of plant growing time seemingly undiminished by the bacteria that today digest dead plants. It may simply be that this period flourished before these bacteria evolved.
Lucky us.
If it weren't for those geologic periods of plenty, we would today have only the sun's total output to sustain us. This excellent article by Richard Manning sums up this situation:
In his article, Manning describes how all the cereal grains we grow as staples evolved to take advantage of catastrophe, mainly flooding. These grains, especially wheat, invest most of their caloric budget into their seeds. When floods strip the annuals from the soil, the seeds flourish, using the dead roots left behind as fertilizer. Plowing a field replicates this natural destruction. "Settlers' accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress."
Once this natural prairie grassland was depleted, we developed fertilizers which we now must add to our crops to attain the necessary yields. Most of these fertilizers come from . . . oil and natural gas. Essentially, after we robbed the virgin prairies of their natural stored energy, we went back much further in time and robbed energy cached away millions of years ago.
So, folks, never mind our impending loss of the simple automated mobility that literally drives our economy. When Hubbert's Peak arrives, we can expect food prices to skyrocket as well as fuel, just as they did during the OPEC years.
We aren't completely ignorant of what could happen. We can look to isolated countries that faced their own fuel crisis as examples of what to expect. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, food and fuel subsidies to Cuba all but ended, forcing a localization of food production.
Until this highly complicated and difficultly coordinated project was able to return production to "normal," though, times were lean. One podcast I recently heard notes that the average Cuban lost 40 pounds during this artificial famine.
Cuba, though, had a lot of advantages over the US. One big one, from the linked article, was brains: "While Cuba has only two percent of the population of Latin America, it has almost 11 percent of the scientists." It also has lots of subtropical sunlight, meaning longer and more intense growing seasons.
When I consider the rocky harshness of the Dakotas and the midwest's near-constant winter snowfall, and combine that with the fact that science education is pretty dismal in these United States . . . I shudder.
Is it any wonder that current inflation indexes remove food and fuel in their calculations? It's as if regulators and politicians wanted to deliberately not focus on those prices.
In fact, many studies have been done to predict the severity of the coming Peak. One of the more famous was The Hirsch Report. From the report's introduction:
"Without timely mitigation." Meaning unless we plan for the coming supply shortages, very bad things might happen. The US Department of Energy requested this report, and received it in February, 2005. I've read it. You should, too, in either hyper text or pdf format. The government paid for the report. It belongs to the people.
Why, then, was it stuffed only at a California high school web site and not really mentioned by anyone? It's out in the public now, yes; but it's not available through government sources, and not being discussed as widely as it should.
Why would the government not be planning for the coming Peak? Except for the eight Clinton years and the few months of the current administration, oil and energy professionals have dominated our executive branch since 1980. They know what's coming. They witnessed it first-hand during the 1970 US production peak.
And here I'd like to return to my mention of worldview.
Those oilmen hailed from an era marked by US domination. From the Manning article once again, we learn of a memo written by George Kennan in 1948:
The Hirsch Report focuses on reducing our oil dependence in a timely manner, so as not to hasten and be caught short by the Peak. We should start living less energy intensive lives with permanent conservation (do without) and develop new, less fuel thirsty technology (at our expense). Remember Carter's sweater and solar panels?
Those all sound like fairly "altruistic" acts, don't they?
With all this energy focused on the "luxury of altruism," how can we focus on maintaining our privileged "position of disparity?"
Let me here declare that I believe there was a plan to deal with the known coming Peak the minute these oil/national intelligence professionals realized it was necessary. This plan had nothing to do with self-sacrifice, however. Treason was called for, used to unseat our most visibly altruistic president in recent memory. Once the power grab was accomplished, Carter's altruistic foreign and energy policies were abandoned as fast as the White House solar panels.
Once in power, the national debt soared to finance the largest peace-time military expansion ever seen in human history. Built ostensibly to defend the country from the Soviet Union, this collection of portable guns and ammo would come in handy . . . later.
All they needed was a good excuse to use them.
But he was right. In fact, his prediction was only off by six months, not to shabby for someone working without computers.
So what is peak? It refers to peak production, not peak supply. That is, Hubbert realized that any worthy business seeks, finds and extracts the easiest supply of oil to seek, find and extract before moving on to the less easy supplies to seek, find and extract. At each increase in extraction difficulty, the company needs to invest more technology and more energy to bring the oil to the surface. As technology increases in efficacy, however, the ability to supply petroleum rises with the demand for the petroleum . . . up to a point.
That point Hubbert called the Peak. Once the Peak is reached, the market demand will outstrip the available production, no matter how much technology -- and energy -- is applied.
That's exactly what happened in 1970. No matter how many new wells the US oil companies drilled, no matter how much fancy (and expensive) technology in their toolkit they applied to the existing wells, they could not increase their rate of crude extraction. From that point on, for the US energy economy to grow, it had to import foreign crude.
Hubbert made other predictions. He predicted the world peak production would be reached in 2000. He could not have predicted, however, the OPEC embargo, a political decision that lowered production rates below market demand. This temporary decrease in production delayed Hubbert's world-wide peak arrival.
With knowledge of Hubbert's Peak coming, one would think policy makers would have been on the ball, making preparations for its arrival. How individual policy makers prepared, however, betrays how they viewed this planet.
The solar thermal panels that once warmed water at the White House,
now doing the same over a cafeteria at Unity College.
President Jimmy Carter was probably the one president people remember when they think about conservation. He installed solar thermal panels on the White House roof and famously turned down the thermostat in the White House itself, forcing the man from sunny Plains, Georgia to wear a sweater in the winter. He implored Americans to make lifestyle changes that reduced the amount of energy they use in their everyday lives.
He didn't mention the coming global peak per se; but he had another crisis in the OPEC restrictions that he could point to for impetus. That crisis was very real. People could see the sheiks getting rich on "their" money. Denying them this money seemed like a very good idea indeed.
But what did President Carter get for his environmental awareness, his conservation? Voted out of office, thanks largely to the treason I mentioned in Part I . . . a treason seemingly orchestrated by, among others, the Texas oil millionaire and former CIA director George H. W. Bush.
(A parenthetical fun fact: Bush, as Director of Central Intelligence, briefed candidate Carter on strategic issues. Carter requested these briefings so as not to develop campaign pledges that would undermine the current president or prove unworkable should Carter become president. Once he was elected, Bush offered to stay on as DCI. The CIA, though, was going through a rough period at this time. Charges of politicization were rampant. Carter felt Bush's former position as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, though, would be seen as too political a connection for the DCI to have had (duh). In this CIA archive of declassified documents, Carter noted in retrospect, "If I had agreed to that (Bush) never would have become president. His career would have gone off on a whole different track!"
(I doubt it would have mattered; but that's a topic for another entry. Back to the Peak story.)
I'm going to set aside the politics for a while and focus instead on how one's world experience affects one's worldview. The twentieth century saw the rise of creature comforts and a corresponding rise in population. Both increases were brought to us by coal and later oil, carboniferous fuel sources that allowed fossilized fuel to do the work of keeping our butts alive and prosperous. We can grow food in one remote corner of the world and move it to our hungry mouth at another corner, moving it again not with our legs but with fuel and machines. We can sow our seeds with machines, fertilize them with machines, harvest the crops with machines. For a great proportion of our food, we in the western world almost never soil our hands with farming today, choosing instead to relegate that unpleasant task to machines.
Meat is no exception. We used to run down our prey. (Some scientists think that's why we evolved to walk upright and have little hair. An upright posture allows us to move fast over good distances with very little energy; relative hairlessness allows us to shed the heat generated in such long hunting runs faster than our hairy prey.) A few thousand years ago, we managed to tame and domesticate some the animals we eat, and instead as nomads follow them on their quest for forage. Now, we grow that silage at one farm and truck it -- with fuel -- to the penned and caged livestock. When adequately fattened, these animals are trucked to the slaughterhouse and then trucked to market, fuel driving each trip. Heck, we no longer have to run down game for food; we can hop on a motorcycle, an ATV or even a helicopter and let the game tire as we burn calories not in our legs but through our exhaust. We have that option.
The fuel driving all of this movement is nothing more than concentrated sunlight, the remains of plants trapped underground and mutated through pressure, heat and time. The bulk of our coal, for example, comes from one long plant growing period, The Carboniferous, almost 70 million years of plant growing time seemingly undiminished by the bacteria that today digest dead plants. It may simply be that this period flourished before these bacteria evolved.
Lucky us.
If it weren't for those geologic periods of plenty, we would today have only the sun's total output to sustain us. This excellent article by Richard Manning sums up this situation:
Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.
Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated.
In his article, Manning describes how all the cereal grains we grow as staples evolved to take advantage of catastrophe, mainly flooding. These grains, especially wheat, invest most of their caloric budget into their seeds. When floods strip the annuals from the soil, the seeds flourish, using the dead roots left behind as fertilizer. Plowing a field replicates this natural destruction. "Settlers' accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress."
When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists.
Once this natural prairie grassland was depleted, we developed fertilizers which we now must add to our crops to attain the necessary yields. Most of these fertilizers come from . . . oil and natural gas. Essentially, after we robbed the virgin prairies of their natural stored energy, we went back much further in time and robbed energy cached away millions of years ago.
On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land -- in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else.
So, folks, never mind our impending loss of the simple automated mobility that literally drives our economy. When Hubbert's Peak arrives, we can expect food prices to skyrocket as well as fuel, just as they did during the OPEC years.
We aren't completely ignorant of what could happen. We can look to isolated countries that faced their own fuel crisis as examples of what to expect. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, food and fuel subsidies to Cuba all but ended, forcing a localization of food production.
When trade relations with the Soviet Bloc crumbled in late 1989 and 1990, and the US tightened the trade embargo, Cuba was plunged into economic crisis. . . . Imports of wheat and other grains for human consumption dropped by more than 50 percent, while other foodstuffs declined even more. Cuban agriculture was faced with an initial drop of about 70 percent in the availability of fertilizers and pesticides, and more than 50 percent in fuel and other energy sources produced by petroleum (Rosset and Benjamin 1994).
Suddenly, a country with an agricultural sector technologically similar to California’s found itself almost without chemical inputs, with sharply reduced access to fuel and irrigation, and with a collapse in food imports. In the early 1990s average daily caloric and protein intake by the Cuban population may have been as much as 30 percent below levels in the 1980s. (Emphasis mine.)
Until this highly complicated and difficultly coordinated project was able to return production to "normal," though, times were lean. One podcast I recently heard notes that the average Cuban lost 40 pounds during this artificial famine.
Cuba, though, had a lot of advantages over the US. One big one, from the linked article, was brains: "While Cuba has only two percent of the population of Latin America, it has almost 11 percent of the scientists." It also has lots of subtropical sunlight, meaning longer and more intense growing seasons.
When I consider the rocky harshness of the Dakotas and the midwest's near-constant winter snowfall, and combine that with the fact that science education is pretty dismal in these United States . . . I shudder.
Is it any wonder that current inflation indexes remove food and fuel in their calculations? It's as if regulators and politicians wanted to deliberately not focus on those prices.
In fact, many studies have been done to predict the severity of the coming Peak. One of the more famous was The Hirsch Report. From the report's introduction:
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. (Emphasis, once again, all mine.)
"Without timely mitigation." Meaning unless we plan for the coming supply shortages, very bad things might happen. The US Department of Energy requested this report, and received it in February, 2005. I've read it. You should, too, in either hyper text or pdf format. The government paid for the report. It belongs to the people.
Why, then, was it stuffed only at a California high school web site and not really mentioned by anyone? It's out in the public now, yes; but it's not available through government sources, and not being discussed as widely as it should.
Why would the government not be planning for the coming Peak? Except for the eight Clinton years and the few months of the current administration, oil and energy professionals have dominated our executive branch since 1980. They know what's coming. They witnessed it first-hand during the 1970 US production peak.
And here I'd like to return to my mention of worldview.
Those oilmen hailed from an era marked by US domination. From the Manning article once again, we learn of a memo written by George Kennan in 1948:
“We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.” “The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.” (Wow, more of my emphasis.)
The Hirsch Report focuses on reducing our oil dependence in a timely manner, so as not to hasten and be caught short by the Peak. We should start living less energy intensive lives with permanent conservation (do without) and develop new, less fuel thirsty technology (at our expense). Remember Carter's sweater and solar panels?
Those all sound like fairly "altruistic" acts, don't they?
With all this energy focused on the "luxury of altruism," how can we focus on maintaining our privileged "position of disparity?"
Let me here declare that I believe there was a plan to deal with the known coming Peak the minute these oil/national intelligence professionals realized it was necessary. This plan had nothing to do with self-sacrifice, however. Treason was called for, used to unseat our most visibly altruistic president in recent memory. Once the power grab was accomplished, Carter's altruistic foreign and energy policies were abandoned as fast as the White House solar panels.
Once in power, the national debt soared to finance the largest peace-time military expansion ever seen in human history. Built ostensibly to defend the country from the Soviet Union, this collection of portable guns and ammo would come in handy . . . later.
All they needed was a good excuse to use them.