An Unintended Irony

Throughout the Winter Olympics, energy companies have been busy selling themselves to viewers. From the sheer volume of the advertising, one might think the United States was about to abandon fossil fuels entirely and that oil, gas, and coal were fighting a rearguard action.

Some of the ads, like those praising "clean coal" and linking it to national security, are simply misleading. "Clean coal" sounds good, but there is really no such thing. There are proposals to sequester the carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants and keep them out of the atmosphere, but none of these has been tried on a large scale, and there are real questions whether they would work at all.

My personal favorite among the ads is the one that touts America's Oil and Natural Gas and its many benefits. These are said to include jobs, transportation, food supply, electricity, warm houses—everything that makes America great. The spokeswoman who presents the ad is attractive and well-spoken; the graphics are engaging; and the message appears to be that we really need to keep drilling for oil. I say "appears to be" because nowhere in the ad is this stated explicitly. Nor does the ad talk about where we might find the magic fuels. That might be embarrassing because the U.S. has very small oil reserves, though it does have large natural gas reserves. It is, after all, an ad, not a strategic assessment.

Watching this ad while reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan's excellent natural history of four meals, I realized that, with a few changes in wording, the ad could actually present a very good case against continued dependence on fossil fuels. Pollan's first meal is a fast food lunch bought at MacDonald's. He traces in fascinating detail how the beef and chicken for the lunch are produced—using fossil fuels to make fertilizer to grow the corn to feed the animals, truck the animals from pasture to feedlot, and truck the meat from slaughterhouse to processing plant and then from processing plant to the various fast food restaurants where it is sold. In the end, he concludes that when we eat a fast food hamburger, we are indirectly consuming large amounts of oil. Most of the food that most Americans eat depends on fossil fuels. Our food system as now constituted would be in serious trouble without them.

So, and more directly, with the other benefits of American Oil and Natural Gas. Our transportation sector uses fossil fuels. Commerce depends on fossil fuels. Electricity depends on fossil fuels, though that is slowly changing. And so on.

The problem is that the supply of oil and natural gas is finite, and our dependence on oil in particular pollutes and warms the globe and makes us vulnerable to changes in the politics of the oil-rich countries. The fact that our food system would be in trouble without fossil fuels says more about the food system than it does about the virtues of oil. A politically-motivated rise in oil prices—even the threat of such a rise—sends shock waves throughout the world economy. (It did, though this is barely remembered now, in the early 1970s.)

The writers of the ad clearly did not intend to bring us up short and make us realize how precarious our position really is. And few will understand the implications of the ad in this way. But by showing how important fossil fuels are in our lives, this ad almost performs a public service—because it also shows how dependent we are on an expensive and ultimately dangerous energy source.

A Broader View of Conservation

The latest post in Andrew Revkin's New York Times blog, Dot Earth, reports on a new manifesto from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a network of conservation groups. The book, Transition to Sustainability: Towards a Humane and Diverse World,

says wildlife groups need to help encourage communities to shift mindsets, not just park boundaries. One goal should be helping to build understanding of the hidden costs of excess consumption, the book says. Another is working to move the world away from energy choices that add to Earth’s accumulating blanket of greenhouse gases. The book crosses boundaries rarely tested by conservation groups, concluding that alleviation of poverty and global equity are vital if remaining areas of intact forests and other species-rich ecosystems are to have a chance.

The book is available free in pdf format. Its central premise is that

In the 1970s, environmentalists feared that the earth was running out of resources. This proved not to be the critical problem. It is true that some resources are getting scarce and expensive to extract – in particular the era of cheap oil appears to be over. But it turns out that the most immediate limit to boundless human aspirations on a finite planet is not a shortage of things to dig up, but a lack of places to put the garbage.

Both Revkin's brief report and the book itself are well worth a look.

Oil, Peaking?

The peak oil theory, which argues that at some point—either now or in the future, depending on whom you consult—oil reserves will reach peak production and then decline, with potentially catastrophic effects on our civilization, is the subject of furious controversy. Few, apart from a small number of commentators who believe that the market will provide a "bottomless well" of energy, question the theory's basic premise: that oil is a finite resource which will eventually run out and leave a major gap in energy supplies. The disagreement is over geology and arithmetic. Some researchers believe peak oil has already arrived; some believe it will arrive in the near future; and others believe the future is much farther off. EnergyBulletin.net provides a good introduction to the theory and the controversy

Environmentalists like Karen Street point out, quite rightly, that many of the remedies suggested for the feared peak oil disruptions would be worse than the disease. For them, the central issue is not that we are running out of oil, much less of fossil-based energy, but that we are already burning too much of it for our own health and that of the planet. In theory we could convert coal to synthetic fuel for uses where only liquid would do, and burn coal directly for other uses, for about a thousand years. This would solve the peak oil problem, but, according to climate change experts, at a cost that is too heavy, both for us and for the earth.

The scientific consensus is that our heavy use of fossil fuels is making the planet warmer, threatening significant rises in sea levels and average temperatures that could inundate many cities and threaten many species—quite possibly including our own. We cannot solve the problem of peak oil, which will arrive at some point, by tweaking the supply side of the equation. The environmental risks are simply too great.

In a sense, the question of whether we are actually reaching peak oil is less important than the perception that we are, and the disruptions this perception could cause. The political analyst Gwynne Dyer points out in "Oil: The Party is Over" that if the markets decide we have reached peak oil—never mind what the actual situation may be—oil prices will "soar out of sight overnight." In a society designed to run on cheap oil, the disruptions would be enormous. It might even seem like the end of civilization as we know it (a favorite phrase among the more ardent peak oil theorists).

Both the environmentalists and Gwynne Dyer are right. Peak oil is a problem with only one obvious remedy: using less oil. And even the perception that it has arrived hardly bears thinking about because of the disruption it might cause.

The prospects of climate change in the long run and oil-price-induced recession in the short run are not attractive. But they do provide an opportunity to advance the argument for changes in the way we manage our civilization. If we are going to run short of oil anyway, and the substitutes for it do as much or even more damage to the environment than it does, it follows that we cannot go on as we have. One way or another, business as usual is going to end. This does not mean the situation is hopeless because business as usual, the way we have done it in the past, has been less than ideal. The end of cheap oil gives us a chance to do better—and it "concentrates the mind wonderfully," as Samuel Johnson would put it. Or it should.

Bottomless Wells

A few days ago I was in a bookstore looking for a book that I never found. At the end of one set of bookshelves, prominently displayed on a rack of featured books, was The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills. An astonishing title in a finite world governed by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Of course we will run out of energy—or, more correctly, the fuel we need to produce energy—but no one now living will see that day. We can burn coal for a thousand years, build nuclear power plants, even extract energy from silicon, according to Huber and Mills. Even if they are right, a thousand years' supply of energy, or ten thousand, is not "endless."

That, at least is what logic and history tell us. A thousand or ten thousand years is a long time in the history of civilization, but it is a minor blip in geological time. It is even a short time in the human story if you count prehistory. Homo sapiens has been here about a quarter of million years; our ancestors, for just over 2 million years before us. Modern use of energy dates back 200-500 years, depending on one's definition of "modern." Suddenly a thousand years does not seem so long, and the well seems less bottomless. Our ancestors, had they used oil and coal or even the silicon that Huber and Mills see as a practical alternative, would have used up their fuel supplies hundreds of thousands of years before we came on the scene.

Our ancestors, of course, did not even discover coal and oil. They evolved into us. And we discovered coal and oil and began burning them, not knowing until recently how badly we were damaging the environment. We could not have known; the science that allowed us to know did not exist when the industrial age began.

Even supposing that Huber and Mills are right about the world's seemingly endless energy potential, they are wrong on this key point: We do not always know the consequences of our energy use. And those consequences are not always benign. When we extract energy, we must proceed with care and use the energy wisely and carefully. If we don't, we may make our world unliveable. That is what The Bottomless Well leaves out. And by leaving it out, the theory moves from the merely flawed to the dangerously illusory.

There is a precedent that shows the danger of this kind of illusion. During the late Cold War, the discipline of "nuclear strategy" or "nuclear warfighting" had a very brief revival after being dormant through the 1960s and 1970s. Roughly, it was an attempt to project "scientifically" how many casualties a nation could sustain in a nuclear war and still "survive" as a nation. Nuclear warfighting was a delusion, pure and simple. A United States (or Soviet Union) that had lost a million citizens at a stroke, along with a major city or two, would be shattered, and the radiation released would damage generations of humans, plants and animals to come. And that, in the nuclear warfighting world, was a "small," "survivable" war.

I make this brief excursion into the netherworld of nuclear strategy because, in a quieter way, the bottomless well thesis could be just as destructive. The nuclear strategists allowed Reagan-era policymakers to think that nuclear war was winnable, not mutual suicide. The bottomless well theorists allow us to think that it's perfectly okay to go on burning fuel and driving SUVs and leaving all the lights on. But you can't fight nuclear war; you can only die in it—if you are lucky—or survive a brief time in a world that is uninhabitable. And you can't go on using energy as if the supply is never going to run out. It will, and in the meantime, we may find ourselves surviving a brief time in a world that is uninhabitable.

We have so far avoided nuclear war, although the future is not guaranteed. Whether we can avoid the consequences of our fecklessness about energy is still very much in question. We can only do so by changing our ways of living, getting from place to place, growing our food, and making the goods we need. The Bottomless Well essentially argues that our current ways are just fine, thanks. That is an argument which could kill us all.

Avoiding the Obvious

In 1972, the Club of Rome, an ad hoc group of intellectuals, published The Limits to Growth, a short work that challenged conventional ideas about economic growth. Using computer simulations, the Club of Rome economists reached two major conclusions:

• Exponential growth in population and consumption of resources was not possible for the long run and, if not stopped, would lead to severe economic problems and even collapse; and
• Collapse could be avoided by altering our use of resources and controlling population growth to create a more sustainable society.

A summary of the report is on the Club of Rome web site. In a finite world, the report's conclusions and its computer analysis seemed, to me at least, both obvious and sensible.

The reaction to the report, however, was both clamorous and enlightening. Critics accused the Club of Rome of doomsaying, bad analysis, insupportable assumptions, and a host of other sins. In fact, the report's central offense was its argument that economic growth on the current model could not continue indefinitely because the resources needed to sustain it would eventually be depleted.

In a world committed to the religion of growth, The Limits to Growth was heresy. That, not statistical or methodological failures, was its real offense. The controversy showed more about the critics than it did about the report. They were growth fundamentalists, and their reaction was more about saving the faith than about seeking the truth.

To an outsider, all this fuss seemed very peculiar. Of course there was only so much oil, iron ore, tin, aluminum, and other vital material in the world. Of course there was only so much arable land. Of course the amount of water was finite. And on and on. Why not begin to plan in the light of these realities? And why did it take so long for the experts to realize that our supplies were limited?

Now we are learning that the Club of Rome was, essentially, right. In the near future, oil supplies will not be able to keep up with demand, and our known reserves may not last out the 21st century. In the United States, we are destroying arable land that we may never replace—thus depleting an essential resource in the name of development. The rain forests of the world, which help to mitigate the effect of greenhouse gases, will be gone entirely by 2030 at the present rate of destruction. The civilization based on growth, which is the only one we in the developed world have ever known, cannot continue indefinitely, and no statistical legerdemain can make our finite world the source of infinite supplies of resources.

The Present and the Future

We know that the past affects the present. We can trace the roots of the present, see how it evolved from those roots, and even learn from history—though we often misinterpret the lessons to be found there. What we cannot do is change the past. There are no second chances in history. It is done, and its results are with us whether we will them or not.

What we often do not see is that the future also affects the present. We plan for retirement. We invest in oil futures. We make decisions based on our predictions, and those decisions turn out well or badly depending on how well or badly we predicted, and how wise or foolish our response was.

This is a series of reflections about how the future might be, how it affects us now, and how we can survive. In most ways, it is hard to see a hopeful future, though we must maintain hope somehow. If we do not, the future will surely be as bleak as our worst fears.

How, then, does the future affect our present? Here are some of the ways:

• Our future is likely to be one of limitations. In a society built on abundance, as is the United States, this is hard to envision. But in fact it is simple common sense. The planet is finite. Supplies of resources are finite. Our population and the demands it makes on resources cannot grow indefinitely. Our response to limitations—which we are already beginning to see in the case of water, and will soon see in the case of oil—will be one factor that determines whether, and how, we will survive.


• Our destruction of the environment will begin to bite back. Most obviously, we will find our lives changed, and in peril, because of global warming unless we redesign our way of life to mitigate it and prevent it insofar as we can.


• Our religious, ethical, and ideological systems will come more and more into question. The growing popularity of fundamentalist religion has so far masked the central problem of religion and philosophy: the shaking of their foundations by changes in the world and in our understanding of it. Yet each of us needs a moral and spiritual base. We cannot, and should not, abandon our search for it; but we must make that search in a different world from the one we have known.

We can respond to a perilous future in at least two ways:

• By protecting ourselves and our families: Even as we look for ways that humanity can survive the future, we have a responsibility to do this. In its extreme form, however, it becomes self-centered and potentially dangerous. At the outer reaches of individual and family survival lies the survivalist mode: shotguns, cellars full of provisions, and paranoia. These reflections reject the survivalist approach.


• By making changes that will make the future less dangerous for ourselves and for humanity. This is what I call the social design approach, for want of a better term. Social design happens whether we do it consciously or not. For example, the mass migration to the automobile-dependent suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, though not planned, was a design decision by default. One of my goals in these reflections is to look at how our design—whether conscious or unconscious—molds the future even as our prediction of that future molds our design decisions.

Not all of these reflections will deal directly with these issues. But in the end, they will be about a future that is likely to be more challenging than any we have known—one in which past approaches will not work without rethinking.