- "No blood for oil!" antiwar activists cried
worldwide in the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in
March, 2003. Their pleas fell mainly on deaf ears, dismissed by various
government officials and media pundits who assured Americans that in the
wake of 9-11, U.S. foreign policy had become far too complex to sum up
in such a simple, outdated slogan. "No blood for oil!" the activists
doggedly insisted, drowned out by the technological thunder of shock and
awe.
-
- That might have been the last the general public heard
of the phrase if not for an unexpected turn of events that began not long
after President George W. Bush crowed "mission accomplished"
on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln one year ago: the price of oil began
rising, and gasoline followed suit. Heading into Memorial Day weekend this
year--the second-largest driving holiday of the year in the United States--the
average price for a gallon of regular grade gasoline in had climbed 58
cents to $2.05 per gallon, the highest in two decades.
-
- What a difference half a buck per gallon makes! Oil was
back in the news. The financial community panicked. Supply shortages and
reduced refinery capacity were pushing prices up; analysts warned that
any long-term rise in prices would threaten the global economy's fledgling
recovery. Saudi Arabia, already pumping millions of gallons per day beyond
its quota, promised to pump even more to increase supply, but the price
still gushed to nearly $40 per barrel. That didn't deter a record number
of Americans, including an estimated 4 million Californians, from hitting
the road for the holiday weekend.
-
- As travelers settled down to family barbecues, terrorists
linked to al Qaida attacked an oil-industry compound in Saudi Arabia, murdering
22 Western employees housed at the facility and casting doubt on the security
of Saudi oil fields. No production facilities were damaged, but by the
end of the first trading day after the attack, oil had jumped a record
$2.45 during the session, reaching $42.33 per barrel and showing no signs
of slowing its ascent.
-
- Suddenly, after the terrorist attack, "No blood
for oil!" didn't sound quite so silly. Almost overnight, mainstream
media discovered a global oil shortage. The media have yet to state a direct
connection between the shortage and the blood that's currently being spilled
in Iraq, but it's getting warmer.
-
- In recent weeks, major outlets including CNN, the New
York Times and National Geographic have run prominent features on "peak
oil theory," until recently a little-known concept outside the circles
of petroleum-industry geologists and hardcore conservationists. The theory's
implications are literally nothing short of apocalyptic, which makes its
recent dissemination by such mainstream sources even more worrisome. No
blood for oil? If the peak oil theorists are correct, we are about to enter
an age that makes that price seem like a bargain.
-
- In fact, this age may already be upon us.
-
- The Party's Over
-
- When Santa Rosa author Richard Heinberg first encountered
peak oil theory in the late 1990s, he had a revelation. Somehow, he'd previously
managed to write A New Covenant with Nature: Notes on the End of Civilization
and the Renewal of Culture without listing "oil" or "energy"
in the index--he'd hardly touched upon the subjects in the book. His revelation
was that when it comes to the end of civilization as we now know it, oil
and energy are the primary areas of concern.
-
- Sitting in a meeting room at Santa Rosa's New College
of California campus, where he teaches courses such as "Energy and
Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community,"
Heinberg, one of the nation's leading experts on the ramifications of peak
oil theory, humbly explains how just a few short years ago, he knew very
little about it.
-
- A self-described generalist who now drives a biodiesel
Mercedes Benz, he immediately set out to learn everything he could about
the subject. He studied peak oil theory, attended many obscure energy conferences
and eventually published The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial
Societies in 2003. Peak oil theory, originated by the late geophysicist
M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, figures prominently in the book, which begins
on an exceedingly ominous note:
-
- "The world is changing before our eyes--dramatically,
inevitably and irreversibly. The change we are seeing is affecting more
people, and more profoundly, than any that human beings have ever witnessed.
I am not referring to a war or terrorist incident, a stock market crash,
or global warming, but to a more fundamental reality that is driving terrorism,
war, economic swings, climate change and more: the discovery and exhaustion
of fossil fuel resources."
-
- Simply stated, peak oil theory holds that total annual
global oil production over time, from the oil industry's beginning in the
mid-1800s to its predicted end sometime within our own century, conforms
to the familiar bell-shaped distribution curve when graphed. Production
rises steadily until reaching the graph's peak, at which point half of
the world's total oil supply will have been used up. Once the peak is reached,
annual oil production begins steadily declining, unable to keep up with
rising global demand, and the price skyrockets, leading to widespread financial
instability.
-
- Could we be peaking now?
-
- "The short answer is that no one knows," Heinberg
says, adding that the peak can't officially be declared until global demand
exceeds production, which hasn't occurred yet. While one group of scientists
predicts the peak could occur anytime between now and 2008, the current
consensus is sometime between 2006 and 2016. Heinberg has seen government
estimates as high as 2035, which he says is extremely optimistic. "Those
of us who study it think it will be sooner rather than later," he
said. "It's starting to look like 2007."
-
- >From the point at which the peak occurs, the competition
for the remaining half of the world's oil will grow more intense. Depending
on how it's managed, there could be anywhere from 20 to 50 years' worth
of oil left in the ground. Heinberg firmly believes that how we manage
this oil during the coming decades will determine, for better or worse,
the fate of humanity.
-
- The problem, as Heinberg sees it, is that oil has been
too good to us. Since petroleum helped spark the industrial revolution,
the global population has exploded, from less than 2 billion people in
post-industrial times to more than 6 billion today, stretching the planet's
natural carrying capacity. Without oil fueling machines and factories and
farms, such large numbers cannot be sustained. When the oil peak hits and
the shortages begin, civilization will be faced with the delicate task
of determining who survives. It's hard to get any closer to trading blood
for oil than that.
-
- "The entire economy runs on oil," Heinberg
says. "The adjustments are not going to be easy."
-
- Indeed, the worst case scenarios are terrifying: genocide
on a scale never before seen, as control of the remaining oil divides along
racial, ethnic and national boundaries. Even the best-case scenarios, all
of which require unprecedented levels of international cooperation, political
courage and public participation, offer grim life-and-death choices. There's
simply no readily available source of energy that can replace oil as it
steadily declines over the coming decades. Alternative sources such as
wind, solar and tidal power, if applied on a massive scale, will help,
but they won't fill the energy gap.
-
- Nuclear power may be part of the solution, but it can't
be the only solution: the uranium supply is expected to peak by 2100. In
fact, all of these measures put together won't be able to make up for the
energy lost through oil depletion. Civilization appears to be on a nonstop
collision course with a second Dark Age.
-
- Nevertheless, Heinberg manages to end The Party's Over
on a positive note, present-ing an ambitious "complete redesign of
the human project," an immediate about-face "from the larger,
faster and more centralized to the smaller, slower and more locally based;
from competition to cooperation; from boundless growth to self-limitation."
-
- "If such recommendations were taken seriously,"
he insists, "they could lead to a world a century from now with fewer
people using less energy per capita, all of it from renewable sources,
while enjoying a quality of life that the typical industrial urbanite of
today would perhaps envy."
-
- Sounds kind of like west Sonoma County on a Friday night.
Of course, it was written a couple of years ago, before the invasion of
Iraq, before oil pushed past $40 a barrel, before Heinberg gained a fuller
under-standing of the complex interconnections between money, oil, food,
water, population growth and pollution. People who study the oil peak have
a saying: The more you learn, the worse it gets.
-
- That's true in Heinberg's experience. His latest book,
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, due out this month,
presents civilization with four possible paths to the future. Foreshadowing
the black humor sure to be found in the dark days ahead, only one of the
paths leads to anything remotely resembling civilization as we know it,
and as it turns out, the United States is already a long way down the wrong
path.
-
- Oil Gets in Your Blood
-
- Peak oil theory is one of those subjects that just gets
into certain people's blood. When someone with a willingness to test the
truth of his own convictions tackles the subject, obsession often ensues.
Santa Rosa resident Mark Savinar is a case in point.
-
- A year ago Savinar, 25, had just completed law school
and was waiting for the results of his bar exam. While researching on the
Internet the role of drug money in the global economy, he ran across a
reference to peak oil theory. Intrigued, he studied more and suddenly everything
fell into place: the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the invasion of Iraq, the
whole war on terrorism. "Oil made it all make sense," he says
over orange juice at a downtown Santa Rosa cafe.
-
- Savinar gathered some of the research he'd collected
and posted it on his website, expecting to get maybe 10 hits from likeminded
visitors. He got 800 visits the first week and a $250 donation. "This
is what I should be doing," he said to himself. He passed the bar,
but he'd already found a new calling: preaching the peak oil gospel on
the Internet. Instead of entering law practice, he built up his website,
and now www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net is the top linked peak oil site on
Google.
-
- "I wasn't going to hitch my wagon to something that
wasn't going to be around," Savinar says, underscoring just how seriously
he believes the oil crash is coming--there will be no need for lawyers
after civilization collapses. His mission is to prepare as many people
as he can for the catastrophe to come.
-
- Savinar doesn't ask readers to take just his word for
it. In addition to providing links to reputable peak oil research, he includes
quotes from members of the Bush administration who fully acknowledge that
the crisis is coming, if it's not here already.
-
- "The situation is desperate," Bush energy advisor
Matthew Simmons said in an interview with online magazine From the Wilderness
in August 2003. "This is the world's biggest serious question."
Asked if it was time to include peak oil in public policy debates, Simmons
said, "It is past time. As I have said, the experts and politicians
have no Plan B to fall back on." Is there any solution to the crisis?
"I don't think there is one," Simmons said. "The solution
is to pray."
-
- In 1999, before he was elected vice president and was
still CEO of Halliburton, one of the world's largest providers of products
and services to the oil industry, Dick Cheney slipped a little peak oil
theory into his own economic projections at a petroleum conference in London.
-
- "By some estimates, there will be an average of
2 percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along
with, conservatively, a 3 percent natural decline in production from existing
reserves," Cheney said. "That means by 2010 we will need on the
order of an additional 50 million barrels a day."
-
- As Savinar points out, that's six times the amount currently
pumped daily by Saudi Arabia, one of the few countries still possessing
excess capacity. Where does Cheney think we're going to get the extra oil?
Does the Bush administration even have a plan?
-
- They haven't announced it publicly, but with a little
creative connecting of the dots, it's not too hard to decipher how the
Bush administration plans to deal with the crisis. One of the first things
Cheney did after taking office, besides meeting in secret with energy industry
leaders, was to make "energy security" a national priority. Even
before 9-11, Cheney strongly advocated invading Iraq, ostensibly to rid
the world of an evil tyrant, but no doubt with an eye on the Iraqi oil
fields, the second largest reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia's.
Indeed, detailed maps of the Iraqi oil fields are among the few items that
have been publicly released from his secret energy meetings.
-
- After 9-11, it was immediately clear to intelligence
officials that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had not played a role in the terrorist
attack. Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pushed for the
invasion anyway, and thanks to some trumped-up intelligence on Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction, the administration was able to cajole Congress into
approving Bush's "preventive war" doctrine; by March, 2003 the
invasion was on.
-
- More than a year into the conflict, no WMDs or connections
to the 9-11 terrorists have been found; the Iraqis have welcomed their
"liberators" with bullets and rocket-propelled grenades instead
of open arms; widely disseminated photographs of American prison guards
torturing Iraqi detainees have shamed the United States in front of the
world; and more than 800 American soldiers have died, not to mention some
10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.
-
- That doesn't sound like much of a plan, as the Bush administration's
detractors have increasingly pointed out. But as Savinar says, oil makes
it all make sense. Another dot to connect: Cheney is now being investigated
for allegedly participating in secret dealings that granted his former
company, Halliburton, the contract to rebuild Iraq's oil industry. Suppose
the goal all along was to seize control of Iraq's oil reserves?
-
- "The reason we don't have an exit strategy is that
we don't plan to leave," says Savinar. There's an estimated 20- to
30-year supply of oil in Iraq's reserves, and the longer it stays in the
ground, the more valuable it becomes. Heinberg is inclined to agree that
the United States has no intention of leaving Iraq, pointing to 14 permanent
military bases that have been built there since the war started. These
bases complete a line of military outposts stretching through Afghanistan,
all situated near areas where large reserves of oil are known to exist.
-
- Heinberg says this is the wrong path we have chosen,
the path of cutthroat competition that treats blood and oil as commodities
to be freely traded, as if neither had its own intrinsic value. As far
as Heinberg is concerned, it is the road to ruin for us all.
-
- Last One Standing
-
- Sitting in the New College meeting room, Richard Heinberg
hardly looks like a prophet of doom. Thin, with a sparse beard and impish
face, he enjoys playing violin with his wife in their energy-efficient
home. He grows much of his own food and doesn't mind that his car's exhaust
smells like French fries. Once, he thought individuals living in this manner
might be the solution to the impending oil shortage. But the more you read
peak oil theory, the worse it gets.
-
- "We can reduce personal energy usage, live closer
to work, grow our own food, reduce our consumption," Heinberg says.
"Beyond that, there are limits to what individuals can do. Ultimately,
there is no personal survival without community survival."
-
- In Powerdown, the path to community survival is similar
to the suggestions presented in The Party's Over. There's more of an emphasis
on population control, both to reduce energy demand and the pain and suffering
of starvation caused by declining global food production. The United States
can and should immediately begin developing large-scale alternative-energy
systems using wind and solar power.
-
- Nations need to begin cooperating with one another instead
of competing for scarce resources. Wealthy countries like the United States
must be willing to share resources with more needy nations. Collectively,
we all have to "powerdown," reducing energy consumption to the
bare minimum, perhaps as much as 80 percent in the long run.
-
- It's been done before, albeit on a smaller scale. After
the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba, which imported almost all
of its oil from the U.S.S.R., suddenly faced an annual energy shortage
of 25 percent. Fidel Castro's communist government immediately went to
work, breaking up the country's large factory farms into small plots of
land, encouraging city dwellers to move to the country and become organic
farmers. Millions of bicycles were imported from China; cars were banned
from certain roadways. The reforms worked, and by the end of the 1990s,
Cuba had pulled itself out of what could have been a major depression.
-
- Such a plan might work on the global level, Heinberg
believes, but there are major obstacles, the primary one for the United
States being that some of the methods will smack of communism. "It
would require a command-and-control economy and a WW IIlevel of effort,"
Heinberg says.
-
- He's not too optimistic that's going to happen. Even
communist countries like China have become addicted to industrialization.
The very same brand of bicycles Cuba imported used to pack the streets
of Beijing. Just last month, the Chinese government banned bicycles from
the city to make more room for cars, the fruits of its rapidly expanding
economy. India likewise is enjoying an economic boom, and the recent industrialization
of both countries is putting enormous new demands on the global oil supply.
The world seems inevitably drawn toward the wrong path, the one Heinberg
calls "last one standing."
-
- "If the leadership of the United States continues
with current policies, the next decades will be filled with war, economic
crises and environmental catastrophe," he writes in Powerdown. "Resource
depletion and population pressure are about to catch up with us, and no
one is prepared. The political elites, especially in the United States,
are incapable of dealing with the situation."
-
- Some, of course, will find all this doom and gloom overwhelming
and choose to ignore it, traveling down Heinberg's third path, which he
dubs "waiting for the magic elixir." He writes, "Most of
us would like to see still another possibility--a painless transition in
which market forces come to the rescue, making government intervention
in the economy unnecessary."
-
- Sorry, that just ain't gonna happen, at least according
to peak oil theorists. Heinberg additionally doesn't hold out much hope
that the United States will be able to turn from the "last one standing"
path anytime soon, and he admits that it may already be too late anyway.
His plan to "powerdown" will take decades to enact, and the world
may not have that much time left. However, when the collapse truly appears
imminent, there's one last path to follow.
-
- "This fourth and final option begins with the assumption
that industrial civilization cannot be salvaged in anything like its present
form, and that we are now living through the early stages of disintegration.
If this is so, it makes sense for at least some of us to devote our energies
toward preserving the most worthwhile cultural achievements of the past
few centuries."
-
- He calls that path merely "building lifeboats,"
and if it creates a sinking feeling in the pits of readers' stomachs, perhaps
it's intended.
-
- In a world that continues to trade blood for oil, this
may be the only avenue of escape left.
-
- Copyright © Metro Publishing Inc. http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/06.09.04/oil-0424.html
-
-
-
-
- Comment
- From Leslie Bell
- 6-12-4
-
- Some of us out here on the fringe believe that our own
military has advanced technology gleaned from downed spacecraft and gained
from treaties with "extraterrestrials" (whether we believe or
not they are aliens or fallen angels doesn't matter.) The point is, are
our military's flying saucers and "invisible" triangle airships
powered by oil? If not, are they then flying things they don't understand
exactly how they work? That is possible, but if you don't know how something
works, then you wouldn't know how to fuel it, would you? Unless the fuel
source seemed to be inexhaustible.
-
- What I'm intimating is this: that certain black ops within
our own military already have access to a non-oil, possibly non-polluting,
virtually inexhaustible fuel source, and so do their real masters, the
corporate tycoon industrialist contractors. So what is the plan, to bring
the entire planet to the very brink of global warfare, to make money off
investments in oil companies and oil profits until gas is $50 a gallon
or the planet almost blows up, whichever comes first? Are they willing
to completely crash the world economy to do so, or will that be yet another
unforseen accident?
-
- If these bastards have the answer and they're witholding
it to fund further black ops, it will backfire miserably and there will
be hell to pay. Because while they think they're being prudent, what they're
really doing is setting the stage for the "extraterrestrials"
to give it to the world directly, when they invade "to bring peace."
|
