by Jim Miles

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

This is one of the more difficult articles/reviews I have worked on. I have been well aware of Peak Oil for a while, but never did I gather so much information in one sitting that simply spelled out doom and gloom.

I live surrounded both by the incredible amazing flexibility and beauty of nature and the ever-present artifacts and contrived superficialities of humanity, crafted on the basis of ample and cheap fossil fuels (as well as its benefits of agricultural wealth and medical advancement). Since the 1960s environmentalists have been sending out warnings about the future of our environment if we do not care for it. They have been mostly ignored until now, when global warming concerns have proved a direct threat to individual lives as well as possible future lifestyles. At the same time, the industrial era based on cheap fossil fuels that created the climate change is rapidly drawing to a close—in what form humanity survives that closure is open to debate, but debate is not what is needed.

What is needed is action, not the action of the Washington consensus and the free marketers who have chosen to act through their global war on terror as a pretext to harvest and protect the last remaining years of oil production, thereby maintaining their position under the mantra that “the American way of life is not negotiable.” What is needed is action that moves us towards new energy sources as quickly as possible, away from oil, towards an economy based on renewable energy and—choke on this all you industrialists and corporatists—an economy that does not grow. This world is finite.

The end of cheap oil is happening now. The economy is already suffering for it, and unlike the Great Depression, recovery will not be a simple matter of putting people back to work. The Great Resource War is already underway, mainly in the Middle East, but also in smaller skirmishes scattered areas around the world, disguised to many as the Global War on Terror (or drugs as in the case of Colombia).

Depressing? Yes. Optimism? There is some room for it, but only if we recognize that the paradigm shift is already underway and that action to a more positive, minimalist lifestyle needs to start, before nature demands it of us in more dramatic fashion.

The End of Cheap Oil

Are all these signs of the coming collapse of western civilization as we know it? According to several new books, the answer is yes. The reason for that answer in all the books is that human energy consumption of all kinds is now entering a phase in which demand is increasing while resources are decreasing, and like the climate now postulated to have a tipping point into a new climate paradigm, energy resources are reaching a tipping point, (a “cliff” designation on some graphs) forcing huge changes on our society in as little as ten years, the early signs of which are already visible. At the base of all this—climate and weather changes, political antagonisms, corporate sponsored consumptive lifestyle, military engagements, species loss, environmental degradation—is the era of cheap energy through cheap oil. That era has ended.

The main idea expressed in all the more critical works is of the wonders of cheap oil (and its influence on the coal based industrial revolution that it superceded) and how it lubricated an economic and technological expansion that allowed for huge population increases, a consumer oriented lifestyle, a presumption that the cheap easily mobile life would be the norm forever, and ignored the environmental and societal consequences of all these activities. That applies most stringently to ‘western’ civilization, North America and Europe in particular, but with India and China now ‘rising’ in imitation of that lifestyle, it becomes a truly global problem of maintaining or developing an expected lifestyle based on a declining resource. All considered, oil has not been cheap as it has extracted its price on the environment, has been sustained by the military, and has effectively been subsidized by government and corporations in order to keep the profits and wealth rolling in as the orgy of consumption continues.

Short-term, soft landing

Michael Klare’s latest work, Rising Powers Shrinking Planet is the ‘softest’ of the various books, using academic-political-corporate lenses to examine the situation. As such, it is a well written but dry interpretation of recent current events with a focus on the geopolitical manipulations that are ongoing or need to be considered in order to avoid the great crash. It is not a strident or scary work, readily acceptable to academia and the political or corporate world, and sees a solution that, in my estimation, does not match the problem. It does not touch on the life of the consumer or on the changes that will be forced upon the economy and personal lifestyles by expensive oil and the changing climate. The solution for Klare is pretty much the status quo: the United States remains dominant militarily and politically, and the economy will continue its consumer based ways and continue to grow. It has much too much of a Disneyesque happy ending to be realistic.

That solution arises from Klare’s examination and postulation of how the United States does and should interact particularly with China, but also with India and Russia. Klare does recognize that natural resources of all kinds, but in particular oil, are limited, but his only strongly worded warning is quite modest:
To sum up, if global energy behavior continues along its current trajectory, the risk of crisis, economic trauma, and conflict on a staggering scale will increase….Averting catastrophe requires efforts to demilitarize energy procurement policies and radically speed the development of climate-friendly alternatives
.
That sounds quite serious, but he does not develop the ideas much further than that, and in a sense is somewhat contradictory of himself.

Along with the possibility of a new Cold War, or even a new hot one (bigger or expanding if Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iran are considered in the equation), Klare foresees “a global expansion of the power of the state…to the detriment of democracy; severe economic trauma; and the acceleration of global climate change with its attendant disasters.” Democracy is already being severely limited in many areas, including the changes to power by the neocon Bush executive that is unlikely to change under the next government, and the revival of Russian power under Alexander Putin. Global climate disasters are underway and severe economic trauma appears to also be underway (it has certainly been underway for the majority of the world as the wealth of western society is strongly based on the extraction of resources from other areas).

Klare’s main fear is the destruction of globalization, and the decrease in American supremacy. He talks of swinging “the balance of power back in their [energy-poor states—e.g. the U.S.] favor.” Globalization in his terms means the survival of the corporation in its current form as a means of extracting wealth. That extraction, in the Thomas Friedman School of Economic thought, is protected by the ‘hidden fist’ of the military.

He is afraid “the adoption of statist measures…will occur at the expense of both corporate and societal autonomy.” To many, that would be the good news: corporate autonomy is what has brought us to this state in the first place and corporations and their superstructures (the WTO, World Bank, OECD, IMF) are far from democratic; and societal autonomy could be considered a euphemism to allow the continued willful ignoring of humanity’s responsibilities to other humans through social services (medical care, worker protection, retirement benefits, women’s rights, education) and to the environment in which they live.

Most catastrophic to his argument (while speaking about catastrophes) is his final answer that, incredibly, continues to argue for growth. Michael, if you have not noticed yet for all your academic arguments and intelligence, we live on a finite world with finite resources and far too many people wanting to use them. Klare sees the “process of collaboration” with China as “spurring long-term economic growth.” He had better get started on that immediately as China is currently allowing the U.S. a soft economic landing as it learns how to deal with all the American debt it owns. He continues with the idea of a “new industrial paradigm” that somehow will “consume fewer resources while stimulating economic growth.” Changing industry is one thing, but that new paradigm seems to ignore the actual economic pattern of the U.S., that of debt laden consumption. It will not be possible to keep the “Chinese and American economies humming” as you wish.

The Long Emergency

The other books that provided my summer holiday entertainment (as in reading the script of a horror movie) are much more strident, much more hard-hitting, much more pessimistic than Klare’s Pollyannish work. Their central theme, reiterated frequently, emphasizes how serious this change could be if positive action is not started now. Cheap fuel is over and we had better become used to a more minimalist agrarian style of existence without the luxuries of today’s consumptive super-fest.

The hardest and most direct of the works is James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. His statements on the seriousness of our future are very direct:
•The long emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race.
•…a lot is at stake and the prospects are rather dark…the Long Emergency will be well under way and the United States itself may be in a state of political turmoil.
•It ought to be pretty obvious that the social systems, subsystems, and institutions necessary to run advanced societies would be weakened, perhaps beyond repair, by the multiple calamities of the Long Emergency.
•The moment that the world recognizes the passing of the oil production peak as a reality, globalism will be dead both in theory and practice. [if Kunstler means Washington consensus globalism, then, hey, there is some good news among all this]

The cause of all this is of course the loss of cheap oil, the energy source that has fuelled everything that we take for granted today as being the normal course of life, life as it should be, life as it will always be—at least in its opulent, every increasing wealth, superficial lifestyle sense. Much is being said of alternate sources of energy, but Kunstler develops two main ideas that limit their ability to replace the era of cheap oil. First is that to build the infrastructures for all or any of these alternates will take more time than we have until the effects of expensive/limited/no oil are already considerable. Concurrent with that idea is that the methods available to make all those alternates happen—manufacturing, transport, maintenance—are all based on the declining oil economy.

That dependence on the oil economy is an overall feature of any alternate energy sources. The infrastructure required to build the windmills, the batteries, the coal plant, the water generator, the solar panels are all currently dependent on oil based manufacturing processes, from the acquisition of raw materials through to the delivery of the final product. Essentially our whole lifestyle is dependent on oil, “Everything characteristic about the condition we call modern life has been a direct result of our access to abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuels. The age of fossil fuels is about to end. There is no replacement for them at hand.”

The problems with large-scale alternate energies are well presented by Kunstler. It is not that they will not be available, but that they will be difficult to construct and operate, and even if fully successful, will not replace the mass transportation and mass agricultural production that cheap oil has built. As an example of his arguments, the idea of a hydrogen based fuel economy is filled with problems. First, the procedure for using hydrogen as a basis for synthesizing fuel would “take more energy than the resulting compound would produce.”

Pure hydrogen continues other problems. Because hydrogen is a low-density fuel it requires much greater storage capacity to contain the same level of energy as oil. In order to make that space smaller it would have to be stored under ultrahigh pressure, which could self ignite if leakage occurred (the heat of decompression—see your own air conditioner for the reality of this idea).

The future viewed by Kunstler is not pretty. Lifestyles will be of a more rural, small town, agrarian existence. Cities will fall into disrepair, suburbs will be vacated, and “industrial farming, dependent on massive oil and gas ‘inputs’ at gigantic scales of operation, can no longer be carried economically.” Economic growth will not even be a consideration. Life spans will become shorter. A grim picture without recourse.

SHIPS OF STATE—RUNNING ON EMPTY

Peak Everything

Similar warnings as Kunstler’s, just as forcefully stated, just as strident, are found in Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything:
•…the recent fossil fuel era has seen so much growth of population and consumption that there is an overwhelming likelihood of a crash of titanic proportions. This should be glaringly obvious to everyone.
•Realistically I think we can expect to see some of the worst excesses of human history….
•The next few decades will be traumatic. The slow squeeze of economic contraction will probably be punctuated by dramatic weather-related catastrophes, resource wars, and regional instances of social collapse.
• [For global warming and carbon equilibrium in the atmosphere] if that [carbon reduction] translated to a 60 per cent reduction in energy consumption, it could mean nothing but economic ruin for the world.

There is an underlying voice that says we can survive this, if we act now, if we are prepared to make a paradigm change. Unfortunately he sees that happening only if there is a mass mobilization of thought “based on empirically verifiable, survival-based necessity”, otherwise it would amount to “crass manipulation worthy of a Karl Rove or an Edward Bernays.” He believes that “we can shift behaviors in a matter of months or years” but with a large caveat in the idea that “such an effort would require an enthusiastic participation of the advertising, public relations, and entertainment industries, as well as organized religions and all major political parties.” Oh great.

Agriculture, Malthus and Trauma

In all these works, except Klare’s more politically correct interpretation of events, the idea of civilizational trauma and catastrophe are frequent. The concerns around peak oil contain a system of worries—rising demand, lowering production, war, pollution and environmental changes, increasing population, a “non-negotiable lifestyle,” and above all agriculture. Without oil based fertilizers and transportation and storage, how are earth’s six billion plus inhabitants going to feed themselves?

In simplest terms there are too many people and there is not enough energy to support them, particularly in a manner that sustains a growth oriented capitalist society.

Malthus re-enters the picture two centuries after his “Essay on Population” postulated that food supply would be the check on population with famine being the means of affecting that. Heinberg’s excellent summary of Malthus’ position concludes that:
taking into account the inevitable, now-commencing winding down of that brief incomparably opulent fossil-fuel fest, it may be better to say that Malthus wasn’t wrong, he was just ahead of his time.

Even within that “opulent” era, humanity’s problems of population, energy, and food were evident in many areas that suffered from regional famines, diseases, and wars. The era ahead of us is certainly bringing in a new era of globalization—an era of resource wars and energy wars—of trauma—that will see no winner.

SOLUTIONS ARE NOT EASY

Answers, as seen above, are limited. There is no easy way out of an easy energy source that is rapidly coming to its end. If the American way of life is truly non-negotiable as indicated by Bush and Cheney, then “it most certainly is on life-support and now being sustained by cruelty, brute force, and lies.” If the American way of life, and ‘western’ civilization are negotiable, then immediate action needs to be taken in order to prevent the worst of the trauma of transition to a new paradigm.

For years conservationists have been advocating many personal level responses and actions that could help the environment. More recently, corporations are greening their image by supporting those ideas and other ideas that appear to help the environment, but are still heavily dependent on consumption and oil energy. Neither will be sufficient as we move into an oil-free energy era.

Responses need to be twofold, at the level of the individual ‘consumer’ and at the broader societal level. But will corporations stop advertising for consumption? Will consumers willingly submit to a minimalist existence (forget Christmas shopping, holiday trips to the tropics)? There are many considerations about what could be done which I will not get into here. It is painfully obvious that we need to negotiate and then act our way into a more minimalist life style, while somehow maintaining a decent transportation and agricultural system based on new technology that can also serve to decrease the global population level to a sustainable level in a humanitarian way (birth control), a comfort level and not at a survival-starvation level.

CONCLUSION

The reader may be now as thoroughly negative about the situation as I am. I would be exceedingly happy if all these predictions were in error and none of this would happen. It would be a cause for celebration if someone did find the techno-fix for the loss of oil that everyone seems to talk and marvel about without producing any concrete results. Unfortunately, there is too much valid information to deny the end of oil.

But the end of civilization? I would similarly be exceedingly happy if somehow, someone in a powerful enough position was able to look at what is happening and say enough is enough, instead of putting our last valuable resources into a bitter harvest without a solution, let’s turn those last resources—intellectual, scientific, humanitarian, religious—into an immediate search for an alternate society, one that is humanitarian, compassionate, existing within the bounds of the ecological limits of our finite planet, existing within a harmony that sustains life and culture without destroying the environment. We need to use our knowledge and resources to deconstruct our current society and create something that will sustain humanity, before not only the technology but the knowledge as well, disappears.

Parts of the world will survive, those areas still isolated enough that the oil based technological society that gives the minority of us such wealth at the expense of others has not fully intruded upon—the meek shall indeed inherit the earth. Perhaps they deserve it more than the rest of us.

*****
Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles’ work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.
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References:
•Heinberg, Richard. Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C. 2007.
•Klare, Michael T. Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. Metropolitan Books, •Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2008.
•Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Grove Press, New York, 2005.