ASPO : Peak Oil, Peak Food,Peak People
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THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF PEAK OIL AND GAS
"ASPO"
NEWSLETTER No. 77 – MAY 2007
ASPO started as a network of scientists and others, having an interest in determining the date and impact of the peak and decline of the world’s production of oil and gas, due to resource constraints. Now, independent national associates are in existence or formation in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States.
Missions:
1. To evaluate the world’s endowment and definition of oil and gas;
2. To study depletion, taking due account of economics, demand, technology and politics;
3.
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. Peak Oil, Peak Food and Peak People
There is a growing list of books and articles addressing the consequences of Peak Oil, some moving on to discuss the positive responses that could be adopted. Attention is drawn to four outstanding and very well written accounts:
a) The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler (ISBN 987654621) b) Energy and the Environment by Paul Robbins in the Austin Environmental Directory (http://environmentaldirectory.info)
c) The Last Oil Shock by David Strahan (ISBN 978-0-7195-6423-9) (www.lastoilshock.com) d) The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon (ISBN 13-978-1-59726-064-0)
The first two items look at Peak Oil from a historical perspective, which does indeed deliver key insight; while the third is by an investigative journalist seeking to penetrate the corporate and political reactions to Peak Oil; and the fourth provides an excellent evaluation of the wider aspects of the oil age, seeing parallels with the rise and fall of empires.
It seems that the famous species, H. Sapiens, started on his path to the peak when he gave up hunting and gathering berries in the forests to turn to settled agriculture some 10 000 years ago. He became the first species ever to use external sources of energy, relying on oxen to plough his field, slaves to do his work, and mercenaries to defend the farm. Even a superficial glance at history everywhere seems to tell the same underlying story of conflict based ultimately on food supply. At first, it was a simple conflict between landlord and peasant, but it became ever more sophisticated as the energy supply increased first from coal and then from oil and gas, and as money supply replaced simple barter. Peasants became industrial workers and landlords became shareholders. Empires were built ultimately to build wealth and control food supply to meet the needs of expanding populations, and Empires crashed when they failed to do so. Were the Viking naturally predisposed to rape and pillage? Or was it rather that their numbers exceeded what their northern climes could support, leaving them with no other option but to set sail for somewhere else. The massive emigration from Europe to the New World in the 19th Century was less about an enterprising spirit, and more about raw necessity as the fields at home could no longer support the excessive numbers, despite efforts to lift soil fertility by importing bird excrement from South America in sailing ships (see Item 820). The records in countries as diverse as Chile or Albania, Germany or Russia all seem to tell the same story. The underdog would try from time to time to improve his lot with appeals to democracy, whereby his voice might be heard and interests respected, but such moves would in due time prompt an authoritarian reaction to maintain control wealth and power. A good example in the Labour Party in Britain that once represented the interests of the Trade Unions. The democratic process itself tended to lose its high ideals as political parties sought and exploited power, backed by financial interests to be duly rewarded. The financiers themselves moved in subtle hidden ways, beyond the ken of mortals, as they lent more than they had on deposit and succeeded in subjugating the poor with debt. This itself was imperial in nature as wealthy countries impoverished the rest, who found themselves exporting resources, product and profit, being ever more burdened by foreign debt, with their own elite being part of the process. Tax too played its part in indirect ways, with the allowances against it being in fact a form of subsidy. The managerial elite of to-day pay themselves magnificent wages, but such are treated as operating expenses deductible from taxable income. So who eventually pays them? and what is the purpose of their wealth ? They cannot eat more cornflakes, so the money moves back into the financial system in effect creating more out of thin air. The market rules supreme with the quest for bargain motivating almost everyone as profiteering, once deemed sinful, becomes a laudable aspiration. That said, the system has more or less worked over the past Century, which saw the population grow ten-fold in parallel with growing energy supply, led by oil and gas, as the oil-fired tractor replaced the plough-horse, and genetic engineering created new prolific crops dependent on synthetic nutrients and irrigation. It was however accompanied by two world wars of unparalleled intensity, in which some 50 million people lost their lives. But now we face of the decline of the prime energy supplies. It speaks of contraction, as there are no longer new continents to populate, and it may mean resource wars, tribal wars and migrations, as desperate people try to find somewhere capable of supporting them. Already some 600 000 innocent citizens have been killed in Iraq, while teenagers of foreign origins are stabbed in the streets of London, and Polish beggars knock on the doors of Irish villages. The French are building a new centre in Calais to house immigrants desiring to illegally enter Britain by hiding in the back of a truck or clinging to the axle of a passing train on its way to the tunnel to England. Difficult and dangerous as that may be, it evidently has the edge over living in Etheopia. 4 These may be signs of the times heralding the onset of the Second Half of the Age of Oil. It is all a bit odd and difficult to grasp: but logic suggests that radical change is on the way in what Kunstler calls the Long Emergency.
Writing in this vein sounds like the crazed raving of a doomsayer: yet, the notion of Peak Oil becomes widely accepted, with a proliferation of websites and articles in many places. A google-search turns up hundreds of references. Climate Change, too, is now accepted by the scientific establishment, and many governments begin to pay at least lip service to it. Whether we admit to it or not, both reflect changes of almost unparalleled magnitude in the Age of Man, as Nature reveals who is ultimately in command.
The following article by Jay Hanson tells the same message
POSITIVE FEEDBACKS AND THE OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM
By Jay Hanson April 9, 2007
ABSTRACT The fact that global oil production is peaking now, in and of itself, is not a problem. The problem will arise in the behaviour of Americans who can not get enough resources to feed their families. In other words, our peak oil problem is really our overpopulation problem (too many people chasing too few resources). Moreover, since American government was specifically designed to mitigate social problems by increasing economic activity – and all economic activity reduces available energy – all measures that our government take to mitigate our overpopulation problem will make our overpopulation problem even worse. SAME GENES, DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Human behaviour is determined by genes and environment.[1]. Genetically, we are still the same as we were in the 16th century.[2] What HAS changed since the 16th century is our environment. Given our present environment, the overwhelming majority of Americans decide that fitness is best served by cooperation instead of confrontation. This is because cooperation (working at a job for a pay check) works better than violence in our present environment. When the day comes that most Americans can't feed their families by cooperation (as in post WW1 Germany), then they will decide to use violence and take resources from others by force. We know that this day is coming to the America for two fundamental reasons: Ever-falling per-capita available natural resources.[3] . . .Sooner-or-later Americans will not be able to afford the fuel to drive to work. Sooner-or-later America's electrical grid will fail and our life-support system will collapse along with it (e.g., Katrina).[4]· Our Founders, for excellent reasons, didn't trust government, so they founded a government that was controlled by the rich via lobbyists. It's based on a few core assumptions: The best way to increase economic growth is to simply ask people who are good at it for advice. That's why lobbyists are absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without lobbyists, our corruptible-but-otherwise-unqualified elected officials and their appointed cronies would have absolutely no idea what to do. In other words, elected officials are forced (by design) to ask the factory owner what government can do to increase his profit, so he will build more factories, provide more jobs, and then individuals can make themselves better off. Elected officials are to keep giving the rich people (factory owners) a greater fraction of the economic pie so they will keep increasing the size of the pie. That's how our Founders designed it, and that's how public policy is made today! Since our country was specifically-designed to solve social problems via economic growth, the only remedy our government can offer for social problems is even MORE economic growth. Thus, everything our government does to mitigate the problem (stimulate economic growth) will make our overpopulation problem even worse because all economic activity reduces our dwindling natural resources. THE NEW/OLD ENVIRONMENT Thermodynamic laws inform us that sooner-or-later an environment which favors violence will re-emerge and Americans will become, once again, red in tooth and claw". As per-capita available energy continues to decline, more-and-more Americans will decide to feed their families via violence. In the new/old environment, it will just make good economic sense to murder your neighbor, take his resources, and then invent a great excuse (hire an economist) to evade social responsibility for your actions. References: [1] "Environment" in this paper is everything that is not a gene. [2] http://www.warsocialism.com/ahistoryofviolence.htm 5 [3] Not only does all economic activity reduce available energy, all manufacturing activity also reduces available minerals: We must emphasize that every Cadillac or every Zim – let alone any instrument of war – means fewer plough shares for some future generations, and implicitly, fewer future human beings, too –Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen http://www.dieoff.com/page148.htm [4] http://www.warsocialism.com/
Kunstler too summarises his views as follows
THE ENERGY PREDICAMENT
by James Howard Kunstler
Oil ended 2006 roughly where it began, at just over $60 a barrel. This reassured the public that all talk about Peak Oil was hysterical blather from a lunatic fringe. It was reinforced by the publication of the mendacious Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) report issued this fall - a tragic document put out by a giant public relations firm representing the oil industry - with the mission of staving off windfall profits taxes and other regulatory moves that a true resource emergency might recommend.
But beyond this debate, in the background, another ominous trend can account for the stalling of oil prices in 2006 - totally unrecognized by the public and ignored by the news media: Prices on the oil futures market levelled off because the Third World has effectively dropped out of bidding for it - and using it. They cannot afford it at $60 a barrel.
The Third World has entered an era of energy destitution and it is manifesting itself in symptoms like local resource wars, genocides, falling life expectancies, and in many places a near-total unravelling of the socio-political order. American mall-walkers and theme park visitors are oblivious to this tragic process, but it is perhaps the major reason why we are not now suffering from $100 a barrel (or greater) oil prices (with the consequent unravelling of our socio-political and economic order).
The major trend on the oil scene for the past 12 months has been the apparent inability of the world to lift total production above 85 million barrels a day - with demand now rising above that line. It is unclear how much more demand destruction will come out of the Third World before bidding intensifies between the developed nations.
One commentator in particular, Dallas geologist Jeffrey Brown - a frequent contributor on the web’s best oil debate site, TheOilDrum.com - is advancing the idea that we are entering an oil export crisis that will presage a more general permanent world-wide oil emergency. Brown holds that the major oil exporting nations are using so much of their own product, because of rising populations, that their net exports are falling at an alarming rate, perhaps as much as 9% annually. This trend combines with general depletion rates now said to be around 3% a year.
The question of total oil reserves around the world remains somewhat murky, but Brown, Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton, and others using a straightforward mathematical model, have stated that the world is roughly at the same point in all-time production as the lower-48 United States was in 1970, when America passed its all-time production peak. We know for certain that three of the four super giant oil fields (Daqing in China; Cantarell in Mexico; Burgan in Kuwait) are past peak and there is plenty of evidence that the greatest of them all, 50-year-old Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, is not only past peak but perhaps "crashing" into a super-steep decline.
Discovery of new oil to replace the production from declining fields remains paltry. Chevron announced it’s "Jack" discovery in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico with great fanfare this year, but neither conclusively demonstrated that all the wished-for oil was down there (between 3 and 15 billion barrels, Chevron said) nor that they could get it out of there in a way that made sense economically, since the oil was extraordinarily deep and difficult to lift up.
Meanwhile, companies developing tar sand production in Alberta announced that their costs of production were rising substantially, while a reckoning lay ahead as to how much of Canada’s fast-disappearing natural gas reserves will be squandered in melting tar. The oil shale project is going nowhere. American corporate farmers have entered into a racket with Congress to subsidize ethanol production from corn and biodiesel fuel from soybeans.
But the American public remains ignorant of the tragic futility of this project, which depends on oil-and-gas "inputs" to keep the crop yields up and ultimately is a net energy "loser." As the world crosses into the uncharted territory of "The Long Emergency," Americans will find themselves having to choose between eating food and making fuel to keep the car engines running.
The signal failure of public debate in this country is embodied in our obsession with this particular theme - how to keep the cars running by other means at all costs. Everybody from the greenest enviros to the hoariest neo-liberal free market pimps believe that this is the only thing we need to worry about or talk about. The truth, of course, is that we have to make other arrangements for virtually all the major activities of everyday life - farming, commerce, transport, settlement patterns - but we are so over-invested in our suburban infrastructure that we cannot face this reality.
The bottom line for oil in 2007: Expect the bidding on the futures markets to regain intensity between the United States, China, Europe, and Japan. A contracting U.S. economy could take some demand out of the picture, but the sad truth is that we burn up most of the oil we use in cars, and American life is now so
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hopelessly based on incessant motoring that citizens cannot even go down to the unemployment office without driving. Geopolitical events can only make the oil supply situation worse and probably will.
We are probably also in the early stages of a natural gas crisis in the United States. Over the next decade, the gap between U.S. demand for natural gas and dwindling supply may amount to one-and-a-half times the current equivalent of our oil imports. This is a staggering deficit. Natural gas is used for heating in more than half the houses in the United States and accounts for just under 20 percent of our total electricity production. Domestic supply is crashing. We are drilling as fast as we can, with more and more rigs each year, just to keep up.
And to make matters worse, the means of gas delivery - through a vast web of pipeline networks around the nation - makes "just-in-time" delivery the norm and, tragically, also makes "just-in-time" pricing normal, too. Thus, gas prices are responding only to the shortest-term signals - for instance, unusually mild winter weather - rather than to the catastrophic long-term reserve picture.
Finally, we are unlikely to solve our natural gas problems with imports for technical reasons having to do with the cost and difficulty of moving the stuff by means other than pipelines and for geopolitical reasons, namely that most of the remaining gas in the world is in Asia.
Despite the mounting acceptance of the inevitable nature of Peak Oil, the flat-earth community continues its rearguard action in ever more shrill terms, speaking dismissively of Peak Oil as if it were a Theory, not a fact imposed by nature as readily observable in some fifty countries, which are producing less oil today than at some point in the past. The fact that the dollar devalues and inflation returns to Britain are signs of change widely attributed to high oil prices.