September 12, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
End of the Binge
The exhaustion of our energy supply may end affluence as we know it.
by James Howard Kunstler
Among the strange delusions and hallucinations gripping the body politic these days is the idea that the so-called global economy is a permanent fixture of the human condition. The seemingly unanimous embrace of this idea in the power circles of America is a marvelous illustration of the madness of crowds, for nothing could be farther from the truth.
The global economy is, in fact, nothing more than a transient set of trade and financial relations based on a particular set of transient, special sociopolitical conditions, namely a few decades of relative world peace between the great powers along with substantial, reliable supplies of predictably cheap fossil fuels. The result, as far as America is concerned, has been an extended fiesta based on suburban comfort, easy motoring, fried food in abundance, universal air conditioning, and bargain-priced imported merchandise acquired on promises to pay later—a way of life described by Vice President Cheney as “non-negotiable.”
Of particular concern ought to be the 12,000-mile-long merchandise supply lines from Asia that American retailers such as Wal-Mart depend on and from which American “consumers” (as opposed to citizens, i.e., people with duties, obligations, and responsibilities) get most of their household goods these days. Wal-Mart now gets 70 percent of its products from China.
This fragile calculus plays out against a background of rapidly escalating and increasingly desperate strategic maneuvering around the global oil-production peak and its implications. Peak oil, for short, would unseat the relative peace and cheap-energy basis of our current global arrangements. It is already beginning to happen. Yet most of the discussion about the boon of globalism, especially the virtual cheerleading of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, is occurring in complete disregard of the gathering peak-oil crisis. The Left and Right are both equally guilty of epic cluelessness.
Even among those who have heard the term, peak oil is generally misunderstood. It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about the remorseless decline in production following the all-time worldwide peak and a desperate competition to control the remaining supplies, which happen to be inequitably distributed in a few select regions of the world. The U.S. happens to be one of them, but we are into the twilight of our own supplies. We began production back in 1859, ramped up over many decades to a peak of over 10 million barrels a day in 1970, and have now fallen off to under 5 million barrels a day of conventional crude—with the numbers headed yet more steeply down. We have 28 billion barrels of conventional crude left, and we burn through more than 20 million barrels a day or 7 billion barrels a year. Of that, we import nearly three quarters of the total. The math isn’t very reassuring.
Commentators such as Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize, a history of the oil industry, and now head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a PR firm serving the major oil companies, like to point to North America’s substantial supplies of tar sands (they’re up in Canada) and oil shale (it isn’t really oil but a hydrocarbon precursor called kerogen). The main catch is that these unconventional sources will yield oil only at high prices, while the procedures for getting them impose additional severe environmental costs including massive water pollution. (In the case of the Rocky Mountain oil shales, the water necessary for processing them in marketable quantities isn’t even available.)
Two other linked delusions also tend to queer the public discussion. One is that technology will rescue us from energy scarcity, which is based on the idea that technology can be substituted for energy, that they are virtually interchangeable. This is just a plain misunderstanding of reality. Technology and energy are not the same thing. One does not run without the other. Linked to this is the notion that alternative energy sources—coal, natural gas, solar and wind power, hydrogen, nuclear fission and fusion, bio-fuels, and even some long shots like zero-point energy (ZPE) —will bail us out.
The truth is that there is not going to be a hydrogen economy because hydrogen requires more energy to produce than you get back. That’s why you haven’t heard any more about it since President Bush’s premature tub-thumping in the 2002 State of the Union address. We have less coal than many people believe, of lower quality, and using it comes with enormous costs related to climate change. Our natural gas supplies are arguably more at risk of depletion than our oil supplies. Wind and solar energy will never produce more than a fraction of what we are currently using, nor can these things do what oil does in transportation. We probably will have to resort to more nuclear-powered electric generation if we want to keep the lights on after 2025, but we’re not going to run the interstate highway system on electricity alone nor fly jet planes on U-235. Fusion is still the same energy of the future that it was in 1970. ZPE is a mere hypothesis.
Make no mistake, we will be using many of these things, but they will not replace the benefits we have derived from cheap oil, and they will not in themselves be cheap or plentiful. The bottom line is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for running them will allow us to run the non-negotiable American Dream the way we are currently running it—or even a substantial portion of it. We are going to have to make other arrangements, and the process will probably include an interval of hardship and discontinuity.
* * *
The U.S. oil production peak in 1970 was what led to the OPEC disturbances of that decade, as other nations with younger oil industries discovered that world pricing power had suddenly shifted to them and took advantage of the situation. America went through a harrowing decade of “stagflation” and related economic woes: high unemployment, inflation, skyrocketing interest rates, tanking industries, asset deflation, gas lines. In response to that trauma, the U.S. and its Western allies desperately brought into production the last great discoveries of the oil age, the North Sea and the arctic region of Alaska. While these developments afforded us some leverage against OPEC and bought us some time, they also led to an unfortunate intermezzo of complacency from the mid-1980s into the 2000s during which a world glut of oil briefly materialized, sending prices down as low as $10 a barrel, in turn leading the American public to fall asleep over energy issues after deciding that the crises of the 1970s had been a shuck-and-jive by greedy oil companies colluding with Arab sheiks. In short, we tragically squandered the opportunity to remake the American Dream along less oil-addicted lines.
Instead, we shifted into party-hearty suburban turbo-development overdrive and elaborated with greater recklessness than ever on a hyper car-dependent living arrangement that was profitable to construct but which has exceedingly poor prospects as an armature for daily life in the decades to come. To make matters worse, we surrendered the bulk of our manufacturing economy to other nations with cheaper labor and fewer environmental scruples and actually made the doomed suburban expansion project, and all its ancillary activities such as mortgage-lending, real-estate sales, strip-mall commerce, and easy motoring, the new basis of our economy. This was the dirty secret of our economy from Reagan on: the creation of ever more suburban sprawl and its accessories was mostly what we did in America. Subtract it from everything else and there was little left but haircutting and open-heart surgery. The economy wasn’t about “information” or buying and selling things on the Internet. It was about bulldozing 200 acres of red clay 38 miles outside Atlanta, plunking McHouses down on half-acre lots, tilting up a programmed set of national chain retail outlets on the nearest “collector” highway, granting no-money-down interest-only mortgages to anyone with a pulse regardless of creditworthiness (or lack of), and then flipping those mortgages into yet more abstract tradable securitized debt instruments.
Thus, when the Tom Friedmans and David Brookses of the world beat the drum for the global economy, it is not clear whether they are really talking about international trade relations or the sleazy and destructive rackets that have insidiously replaced the formerly productive activity of the United States —especially insofar as the suburban project can be categorized as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world precisely because it will be so valueless in the future.
It must be obvious, by the way, that this ominous shift from value-based economic activity to the short-term luxury lifestyle racket was supported by both major political parties. Bill Clinton was as much a booster for a suburban-development-based economy as Ronald Reagan or both Bushes—and in some ways, Clinton was more the pure product of a Wal-Mart society than the Republicans ever could be. Nor did Clinton’s successors as Democratic presidential candidates deviate from the program. Neither Al Gore nor John Kerry dared stand up against the destructive activities of the suburban “homebuilders” or the idea that America might be imperiling its future by making such massive misinvestments in automobile dependency. Clinton, Gore, and Kerry were equal enthusiasts for the permanent offshoring of industry—in effect, the continued dismantling of America’s manufacturing base. (I write as a registered Democrat, incidentally.) None of them paid the slightest attention to the one task that might actually make a difference in America’s profligate oil consumption: rebuilding the passenger railroad system to something above its current Third World level of service.
* * *
Readers may be justifiably eager to know just when exactly the global oil production peak might occur. There is some disagreement about this across the spectrum, but even that may be insignificant. Authorities such as the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration and the reporting service for the global oil industry, the International Energy Association, both considered shills for their sponsors, put peak way out around 2030. By any practical policy measure, that is not very far off—though it offers some false consolation for those who would like to avoid thinking about it now. More independent authorities, such as the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, led by eminent geologists such as Colin J. Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes, retired from the oil “majors” and free to speak their minds, allege that we are at or near peak now. If indeed we are there, we will not know for sure until the production data dribble in and are parsed a year or so down the road.
One unimpeachable authority, Matthew Simmons, the leading U.S. investment banker to the drilling industry, published a book this summer, Twilight in the Desert, saying that evidence indicates Saudi Arabia may have peaked. Saudi reserve figures—an estimate of what remains underground—have been considered state secrets for 30 years, since the Saud family nationalized Aramco. A telling symptom of trouble is the failure of Saudi Arabia to increase production to keep the price from ratcheting upward since 2004, despite repeated promises to do so. It would tend to mean there is absolutely no spare oil capacity left in the world that has been seeing stupendous industrial growth.
All this is why the hyper-optimistic view of the global economy as a permanent institution, as something we ought just to embrace and get used to, begins to seem so utterly preposterous. The global energy predicament has powerful implications. For instance, if the supply of oil cannot grow, then industrial economies based on oil (and with no ready substitutes) will not continue to grow. If industrial economies do not grow, then financial instruments generated to represent the expectation of growth—stocks, bonds, derivatives, and currencies— will lose credibility and thus value. Economies now functioning on less-than-reality-based expectations, such as America’s suburban housing bubble racket, modeled on supernatural credit creation and Ponzi-style multilayered debt fob-offs, will find themselves in a bewildering new world of default, loss, and ruin.
The geopolitical implications ought to be daunting too, and rather obvious. For instance, how do we suppose that China and the U.S. will continue to enjoy cozy trade relations at the same time they become desperate rivals contesting for control of the regions that possess the world’s dwindling oil supplies? One hardly need point out that the military struggle has already commenced, with the U.S. desperately running its Middle East police station in Iraq, not to mention the Central Asian annexes in Afghanistan and several former Soviet Republics. (Both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have agitated for America to remove its bases, while China and Russia egg them on in the background.)
So far, China has stopped short of military adventuring, but they have sent agents scurrying around the world to secure oil-supply contracts with many of America’s leading suppliers, including Canada and Venezuela, and they are pursuing civil-engineering works all over Africa to forge happy future energy supply relations. China could walk into the oil-rich regions east of the Caspian if they were desperate enough. Would we oppose them? A land war with the Chinese army there would not be a project that America could feel confident about.
And that’s just China. Japan and India will have to import virtually all of their energy 10 years from now even to continue their current levels of industrial activity. Perhaps they will just stop. Despite a couple of terror bombings, Europe has pretty much had a free ride on geopolitics since 9/11, enjoying the benefit of America’s military exertions to stabilize the Middle East without having to make much more than a token contribution while reveling in a sense of moral superiority, even as they continue to enjoy regular tanker shipments of crucial oil via the Suez Canal. Europeans may seem effete and sclerotic in Beltway strategizing circles, but they are an economic force equal to the U.S., at least, and have the potential both to mobilize and to join in a lot of international military mischief if their survival is threatened.
* * *
The peak oil situation implies that we will probably not be able to continue industrial-style agriculture based on enormous inputs of oil and gas-based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, and all the fossil fuel associated with such varied tasks as large-scale irrigation and long-range transport. In short, we are going to have to grow a lot more of our food closer to home, on a smaller scale than that now practiced by Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and other contributors to the Cheez Doodle and Pepsi-Cola supply. The affluent (those who remain) will be eating far fewer Chilean grapes and tiger shrimp from Thailand.
It’s my view that food production and the value-added activities associated with it will come closer to the center of the U.S. economy than they have in memory and at a far smaller and more local scale. Re-allocating land for food production is hardly as automatic or straightforward a process as it may seem. Right now, most of the best land proximate to towns and cities is either already paved over and built upon or valued solely for future suburban development. There will be furious resistance to rethinking that, a kind of cognitive dissonance overhang, as landowners, realtors, builders, and retail-store chains lie back awaiting the return of business as usual.
By the time Americans perceive that the energy problem and the associated food crisis is permanent, there may be desperate cries for the government to “do something.” Like all mega-scaled enterprises, the federal government is apt to find itself underfunded and disabled by the sequence of difficulties entailed by the global energy predicament. My guess is that only local government will be effective and that its quality and character will vary from place to place.
Some regions of the country will not even be eligible for a transition from our current mode of life to something more consistent with reality. There is not going to be much local food production in Phoenix and Las Vegas, on top of the problems they will have with non-cheap air-conditioning, non-easy motoring, and unavailable water. These places may be substantially depopulated 20 years from now. Even if eventually contested by a flow of desperate migrants from Mexico, these metroplexes will not support equivalent populations of any ethnic allegiance years from now.
Small-scale local agriculture will require more physical labor and animal traction in the decades ahead. This has large implications, in turn, for how our society is fundamentally organized or how turbulent it may become. Even the small minority thinking about these things cannot conjure a really credible outcome for the gigantic liability of existing suburbia. Some speculate that the denizens of suburban hot-spots like Cherokee County, Georgia, or northern New Jersey will just live off the gardens on their half-acre lots. Visions like this tend to overlook the other potential failures of suburbia, such as the lack of civic cohesion, the prospects for disorder, and the sheer physical template of sprawl, which turns any two-mile walk into the Bataan Death March.
The permanent global energy crisis will create a large new class of economic losers in the U.S.—the former middle class. A lot of vocational niches are going to disappear and will not come back. Incomes will be lost forever. Members of the former middle class will be angry, resentful, and bewildered by the loss of their entitlements to the American Dream and are apt to chafe at the prospect of becoming agricultural workers. It is impossible to predict what kind of maniacs they may vote for or what their relations might be like with those who manage to continue owning land, except to say that Americans are not so exceptional that they are immune to the social upheavals that typically occur when the mainstream of any society is placed under unprecedented stress.
These issues aren’t even on our charts. Our lack of seriousness is impressive.
* * *
The shocking conclusion to all this is that we are in for an epochal period of contraction and strife around the world. Industrial economies are likely to wither in the aftermath of peak oil. Scams and rackets that are allowing us to get by now—the extraordinary credit binge of American consumers, the alchemical generation of sub-prime mortgages, and the casino-like operation of hedge funds—will cease to work their magic in a world faced with reality-based hardship and scarcity. The meta-trend in the post-peak-oil world will be the desperate re-localizing and downsizing of all our activities. All things organized at the greatest scale, including global corporations, giant universities, centralized governments, will be weakened, in many cases fatally. Wal-Mart, with its “warehouse on wheels,” will expire quickly.
We will be challenged to rebuild complex local networks of economic interdependency, and it will not be easy. The destruction of local communities already wreaked by the big chains has been so comprehensive that it may take decades even to pick up the pieces. There will be far fewer things to buy, and shopping will fade into the background of life. The airline industry as we know it will cease to exist and cars will be, at the least, a much-diminished presence in our lives. Those who believe that life will continue to be an international blue-light special of perpetual bargain shopping are going to be disappointed. The world is about to become a larger place again. _______________________________________________
James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press..
September 12, 2005 Issue
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_09_12/cover.html
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/curmud..._Auto_Show.html
No Problemo!
Delusions run deep in the eash-motoring economy
James Howard Kunstler
If the Devil himself wanted to design a perfect trap for attracting morons, he couldn't have done better than this season's New York International Auto Show at the Jacob Javits Center. While I am known to be judgmental by disposition, I honestly did not set out with this notion preconceived. I arrived at it only after interacting with some of the attendees, many of whom might have passed superficially for average Americans.
Perusing the various exhibits was like being in the world's largest auto dealership, nothing more -- which is to say, it was a surprisingly dull environment. It is, after all, just a trade show. Each brand of car had its little area with half a dozen models on view. Many of them had giant wall-sized plasma TV screens that played what amounted to extended TV commercials of the kind with which we have been so constantly bombarded over the decades that they barely register anymore. But it is interesting to actually pay attention, because they uniformly send a bizarre message: You are all alone in your car in a beautiful environment.
The cars on screen are generally depicted as swooshing along gorgeous winding rural roads, with no others in sight -- just you and the open road! This is obviously an old and alluring archetypal dream, and it is also obviously at odds with the more common reality of creeping down Route 17 in Hackensack, or some ghastly highway like it, with traffic backed up at the frequent stoplights and vistas of the entropic horror of American hyper-retail amid wastelands of free parking at every compass point.
The big news here was that there was so little news from the automakers themselves. Judging from the cars on display, they apparently aim to stick with the program of the now-ubiquitous low-mileage SUV war wagons as far ahead as anyone can see -- along with the still-popular gas-hogging pickup trucks based on the same chassis as the SUVs -- and the familiar cast of luxury sedans with jazzily updated electronics. There was remarkably little recognition that the civilized world -- the motoring world -- stands at the threshold of a new era characterized by the end of cheap fuel.
I hasten to add that there were nods to the notion that perhaps other fuels might come into play. There were several "hybrid" vehicles on display, and there was one cross-sectioned specimen of a hydrogen fuel cell car, which might have fooled most of the attendees but seemed to me an obvious hoax -- the fuel tank was misleadingly tiny, given hydrogen's peculiar characteristics. And there was no hint of cost. (The current Mercedes-Benz F-Cell prototype has a recently reported price tag of $1.4 million. If they got the price down by ninety percent, it would still be a problem for the average motorist). But these displays were little more than transparent public relations efforts intended to put across the message: No problemo!
This huge annual car event happened to be going on during a week in which the price of crude oil jumped above $55-a-barrel for the first time since the late summer of 2004.You'd think that this would be a signal to the American public that it was time to...uh...re-think our national obsession with easy motoring? Not so. At least not among the people I spoke with at random. Their delusions were strikingly florid, in fact, the most common and basic one being that America possesses a bountiful supply of oil -- if only the sundry enviro-freaks and corporate chiselers would let us at it.
The facts, sadly, belie that notion. United States oil reserves stand at about 28 billion barrels (if you include natural gas condensates). I am not speaking here of the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is a tiny fraction of this, but of the total amount of crude oil left underground anywhere in the fifty states: 28 billion barrels. Now, Americans use more than 20 million barrels of oil a day. That's 100 million every five days. That's a billion (1,000 million) every fifty days. That's -- give or take -- seven billion barrels of oil a year. If for some reason our oil imports were cut off and we had to depend solely on our own oil, our total reserves would last four measly years. Actually a bit less if you figure that a portion of that oil will never be pumped out for practical and economic reasons.
It so happens that we currently import more than two thirds of the 20 million barrels a day we use. Of that, about a quarter comes from our good friends in the Persian Gulf nations. More than ten percent comes from Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, despises America because we have tried to overthrow and kill him more than once. Another hefty percentage comes from West African nations so sclerotic in governance that the work of the oil companies can barely get done amid the political and social chaos. It's not a pretty picture.
My own bias, which might as well be revealed succinctly if you haven't already guessed it, is that the global oil peak problem (2006) will change everything about how and where we live, how we allocate and value land, what our economy will be about in the decades ahead, and especially how our social and political relations will sort out. Above all, apropos of the subject at hand, it will lead to a severely diminished presence of cars in our daily lives. And so it was exceedingly strange to find myself circulating around a massive show based on the assumption that the motoring life will continue uninterrupted forever. After two laps around the exhibits, I began buttonholing attendees and asking for their views on the oil situation.
"The car companies know they can get seventy-five miles per gallon but the gas companies won't allow that because their stock might drop," said Jimmy Koutsoubis of Clinton, New Jersey. "We have all this excess oil -- we're just not using it."
Ed Picerno of Staten Island said, "The oil companies manipulate the price. There's plenty of supply in the world if we'd just start drilling in Alaska and elsewhere."
Dead (White) Men Walking?
Detroit Remains Resolutely Clueless; Bush Stumped
"The Donald" himself was recruited to introduce GM's new Cadillac sports car, the 440-horsepower, V-8 XLR-V at the New York International Auto Show in March. The latest in the long line of Cadillac's compulsive gasaholics, the XLR-V will set you back just $85,000 or so.
General Motors Vice-Chairman Robert A. Lutz, who was on hand for the unveiling, commented offhandedly to reporters that GM will focus less on cars in coming years and more on higher profit SUVs. Lutz, according to The Wall Street Journal, has "direct authority for all vehicle development world-wide -- including much of GM's roughly $8 billion capital investment budget."
A week later, in a climate of Escalade-ing gas prices, the Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal reported that Moody's Investor Services, the debt-rating agency, had downgraded GM's automotive sector debt to Baa3 -- one notch above junk bonds. Go figure.
And speaking at a town-hall style meeting in Florida that same day, on a stump to defund Social Security (at taxpayer expense), even President Bush admitted to the crowd that we may be in trouble soon. "Unfortunately, energy prices are going up," the president lamented. "And I know you're concerned about it. And I'm concerned about it too."
It's hard work being president.
I asked one middle-aged gentleman, who didn't want to give his name, what he thought about America's dependence on foreign oil. "It's not because we're relying on imports," he said, "except it's cheaper to get from other nations, like buying pineapples from Costa Rica."
(If the reader is detecting a hallucinatory trend here, be assured your perceptions are functioning.)
Another anonymous middle-aged attendee -- they were overwhelmingly male -- said of the oil situation, "I'll leave it to the scientists. I can't see sticking a corn-cob in my carburetor... The oil companies are slowing the development of alternatives."
A life-long GM customer from Easton, Pa, Dan Belinski, said it would be ten years before we had any trouble with mass motoring and by that time it would be a matter of the highways being "overcrowded with too many foreigners." He thinks the solution is to "double-deck the expressways and get rid of the toll booths."
Peter Yannacci, from Plainview, Long Island, said, "I like the hybrids, but that's far off. I don't believe global oil is short. Not within my lifetime. We have oil we could get. We have all this oil in reserve -- hey, how many dinosaurs were there? [The recent oil price volatility] is all man-made like in the seventies. It gets fuel prices up there where they want them. There's gasohol. There's plenty of corn. We've been doing it for years."
Mark Hayes of Staten Island said, "I guess alternative fuels are good but I don't know if you can get the auto industry to go for it." Any troubles with America's oil supply, he said, "Depends on who is president. If we get enough Arab countries mad at us, they'd cut off our oil and we'd have to resort to our own supplies."
Eric Wittlinger, a tall, handsome recent graduate of dental school, looking forward to a substantially increased income stream from a new practice in orthodontics, had been driving a vulgar old Mitsubishi Montero and was hoping to upgrade now to his dream car, a Mercedes-Benz SL-500. He was unperturbed by any suggestion that there was a problem with the world's oil supply. "Hybrids are nice. They get you thinking of alternatives -- if only they could make more variety."
Rafael Piotrowski of Astoria, Queens, a young man who had come to America from Poland as a child was not troubled about America"s energy future. "We have a lot of time. Maybe our children will have to worry."
A character of particular interest was one Peter Hull of Kettering, Northampshire, England, a traffic engineer who travels frequently to the U.S. on business, and is a lover of SUVs. Hull himself commutes 140 miles a day by car from his home to London on British freeways -- which is extraordinary for a European. He said it costs him the equivalent of a thousand dollars a month for gas. Of the global oil situation he said, "There's a lot going on behind the scenes. The oil companies are limiting the use of alternative fuels and hybrids." I mentioned to him that England had just come off a twenty-year-long jamboree of cheap oil from its own North Sea fields, which were now in depletion, making England once again a net oil importer. To say he was mystically confident is no exaggeration: "We'll be getting oil in the future from Canada and Russia," he said, "and the prices will go down." I asked him what kind of plans his country had for the future vis-à-vis automobile use. "We've got to improve the roads."
It became painfully clear that the attendees of the New York Auto Show were a self-selecting group of people who were all reasonably comfortable with the belief that America's car culture has a big future. I didn't try to debate them; but I did wonder what the quality of their disappointment might be like later this year when the "summer driving season" gets underway and gasoline prices penetrate the three-dollar-a-gallon floor. They will blame the oil companies, the government, the Arabs -- they will blame everybody but themselves.
On the way out, my attention was drawn to an amazingly novel P.R. innovation: Volvo's new "partial zero emission vehicle." They even touted the not-exactly euphonious acronym: PZEV.
Next year, I suppose, they'll be showing a "partial infinite-miles-per-gallon" vehicle. You can drive forever -- up to a point.
Full Version: Thread on peak oil and natural resources
man i live in ga and gas right now is $2.99. the cheapest i've seen. -esther-
i live in toronto, and this year is the highest i've ever seen...
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/09/12_baer.html
September 12, 2003
INTERVIEW ARCHIVES
Robert Baer, Former CIA Case Officer and Author of "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude."
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Think About This: Whenever You Buy a Tank of Saudi Arabian Gas, You are Helping to Finance Terrorism.
Regular BuzzFlash readers know that we have regularly run articles, commentaries and editorials arguing that, in part, the invasion of Iraq was a Bush administration effort to divert attention from the primary financiers of terrorism -- and the source of much of the al-Qaeda leadership -- Saudi Arabia. Of course, there were other motivating factors for the Bush military action against Iraq, which we have detailed (see, as examples, The Perfect War and Endgame).
But a recent poll indicates that the American public still believes Iraq was behind 9/11, even though bin Laden received Saudi, not Iraq financing, and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. The Bush administration kept -- and keeps -- insinuating that Iraq was involved deeply in 9/11, while trying to sweep under the carpet much, much stronger indications of key Saudi involvement in the financing, strategy and implementation of 9/11. As a result, they have successfully misled Americans about who was really responsible for 9/11.
It is within this context that we interviewed Robert Baer, a case officer for the Directorate of Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1997. He worked out of the Middle East.
You may, like BuzzFlash, not agree with all of Baer's remedies, but his insights are invaluable. And, like BuzzFlash, he believes that the Bush administration is letting the country that is the largest financial and religious sect supporter of terrorism get away with it, while attacking Iraq, which only had the most tangential involvement with terrorism.
His book, "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude," adds to a growing list of evidence that the Bush administration is conducting a war on terror that is politically calculated.
(You can purchase "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude" Here)
* * *
BUZZFLASH: Let me begin by asking you, just to establish your background, you wrote a book called See No Evil, in which you talked about your career with the CIA. Can you explain a little bit more about what your background and areas of responsibility were with the CIA?
ROBERT BAER: I spent 21 years in the CIA as what’s called a case officer. That means that I went overseas and served overseas almost all the years I spent with the CIA, meeting with what we call agents. Those are foreigners who spy for the CIA. And you write up their reports and send them back to Washington. So I was a field officer, in short.
BUZZFLASH: In what area? You did serve in Iraq, if I recall, in reading your book.
BAER: I served in Iraq for awhile. A couple times I was there on a temporary basis. I was mostly in the Middle East – Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Bosnia as well as a couple of other countries.
BUZZFLASH: So you have extensive experience with the Middle East.
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: As a gatherer of what is called "human intelligence."
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: Now in reading through the book we’re going to discuss, Sleeping With the Devil, I noticed there are many thick black bars through it that I assumed were censored by the CIA. Is that correct?
BAER: Yes. They get the manuscript in advance of publishing.
BUZZFLASH: So the CIA basically vets it and approves it, minus whatever they feel is necessary to black out or censor.
BAER: Yes, they don’t mess with the content. They just say: Listen, this is our stuff. You can’t publish it.
BUZZFLASH: The book’s full title is Sleeping With the Devil – How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, and you cover several administrations. The claims you make here seem to apply, for the most part, whether they’re Democrat or Republican. And you, of course, focus on Saudi Arabia. What compelled you to write the book?
BAER: I’d always been fascinated by Saudi Arabia. And I’d always noticed that on general intelligence reports that are sent around in the field, and in Washington, there’s virtually nothing said about Saudi Arabia. Every Arab that I talked to – and I know a lot of them – kept on talking about the disputes in the royal family, huge contracts, the Wahhabi's funding Lebanese politics. It became clear to me, even though I wasn’t seeing much in the CIA traffic, or State Department, or anywhere else, that this was a key country.
So when I got back to Washington in ’95 – and I stayed there until I resigned from the CIA – I said, all right, I don’t know a whole lot about Saudi Arabia. What about Saudi Arabia? And I got onto the computer and I took a look around, and there just wasn’t anything useful. I mean, you, as a journalist, would have looked at this and said: It’s junk. There’s nothing here. And especially nothing that goes deep into the problems in Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, I started running into these assessments of the oil industry, and just how much damage you could do to the processing facilities, not the pipelines, if you were a terrorist and wanted to bring the Saudis down. And then 9/11 came along, and the 15 Saudis that caused it. So I took notes about everything that I’d ever learned about Saudi Arabia and the government. And I said, this would make a book. I asked myself: Why don’t we know more about a country that’s so vital to the United States? And this is my effort at explaining that. You’d get a different perspective if you asked James Baker about it or an academic. But this is the continuation of my memoir, my gut reaction.
BUZZFLASH: We were told, after the Afghanistan war, that indulging in drugs is supporting terrorism. But you also make the claim: Every time we buy a gallon of gasoline, if the petrol came from Saudi Arabia, the oil was used for the gasoline. So we’re also supporting terrorism.
BAER: Well, it is. In the first Gulf war, if Saudi Arabia hadn’t been there to pump the extra gasoline, and if we had let oil hit $80 or $90 a barrel for a long period of time, people wouldn’t have been buying all these SUVs in the ‘90s. I mean, Saudi Arabia really does balance the market out. I’m in California right now, and we use a lot of gasoline. As you drive around this town, it’s amazing all the SUVs and four-wheel drives that you see.
In any case, we just use a lot of gasoline, and we depend upon it, just as we depend upon cheap imports from East Asia, from China. All these cheap imports and cheap gasoline, and wood from Brazil, it becomes a dependency. These aren’t my ideas. I talk to a lot of people about the drug problem, and they say, well, with dependency, your perceptions change. And I think the best I can tell is that’s what has happened. It's as if Saudi Arabia is our boss and is paying us a good salary. It would be difficult to find another job, so we're not going to really worry about focusing on what our boss is really doing. We're too dependent.
BUZZFLASH: So that’s the basis of your claim that through our dependence on Saudi oil, we’re, in essence, financing terrorism – because you do say in your book that, over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has transferred half a billion dollars to Al-Qaeda, and at least a hundred million dollars to the Taliban.
BAER: Exactly. And it’s obviously not intentional on the part of consumers; there’s no conspiracy in this on this side of the ocean. People in Washington didn’t sit around and say, let's finance terrorism. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s this process of what I call slow accrual.
BUZZFLASH: Why do the Saudis finance terrorism? From reading your book and elsewhere, we deduce that there are probably two reasons. One is that they’re paying protection money. You set up the scenario, as you discussed earlier, that if they didn’t buy off al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, they might be the target of a plane that’s hijacked into their oil processing plants, and that would ruin them for years. The second reason is that the Saudis practice what we would view in America as a fundamentalist branch of the Islamic faith that actually becomes a breeding ground for terrorism.
BAER: There's a lot that we really don’t know. There are a lot of people in the royal family that sympathize with bin Laden. There are people in the royal family that feel humiliated by colonialism -- call it what you want -- by the United States, by Israel. And they’re humiliated that they are citizens or subjects of a country that has never fought a war, and yet spends so much money on defense. They’re humiliated that they don’t take the Israelis on, because their army is worthless. And maybe they’re not humiliated but rather disenfranchised because they can never advance up the ranks of the family, and it’s a very tough culture. They sit around and they read the Koran. And they get on these Islamic websites, and they watch Al-Jazeera. And they go to the mosque, and I think they’re believers.
You've got a very fragmented Saudi society. I can only identify a couple of those princes. There’s a senior one named Salman, whom I mention in the book, who had some sort of late conversion. But there are other ones. You hear rumors about them, and I didn’t dare put them in the book, because I’m not sure of the information. Then there are the other princes who are Westernized in the sense of their tastes: They drink, they like women, they like to spend a lot of money. They have the diamond-studded Rolex watches. They just love money for the power it gives them over other subjects. And they know they have a problem with the fundamentalists. They figure, if I can make gestures toward them, they won’t bother me. And the fundamentalists haven’t, for the most part.
If I were a fundamentalist and I wanted to take Saudi Arabia over, what I would do is I’d go after the royal family. I would set off a few car bombs and kill a couple of them. Destabilize the country. But for some reason, the royal family has not been the victim of terrorism that they claim they have been. You cannot name a single case where the fundamentalists killed a Saudi prince. They claim all the time that there are all these plots afoot, and they’ve stopped them. But all the terrorism has really been against the United States and other Western countries, or Western interests in Saudi Arabia.
That ’95 National Guard barracks bombing within Saudi Arabia – we don’t really know who did that. Could have been bin Laden. And you have the ’96 Kobar barracks bombing. There are a lot of people who say that bin Laden was involved in the ’96 bombing, though there’s no proof of it.
That brings me to the State Department. You’ve got ’95, ’96, and ’98 bombings that had a bunch of Saudis. The bombings in Africa [U.S. Embassy in Kenya] and the Cole [U.S.S. Cole] had a bunch of Saudis involved. And we were hit September 2001, and we still don’t have visa interviews for these people. How can you explain that? If you’re a Syrian, you have to wait 30 days. If you’re an Iranian, you have to wait 30 days before you get your visa. In Saudi Arabia, you just send your passport to the travel agent. It comes back, without an interview, without any sort of check, and you get a visa. And that’s what disturbs me.
BUZZFLASH: And of course, 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudi.
BAER: The Saudi hijackers were spending time in these mosques paid for by the Saudi government. The clerics are essentially government employees that recruited these kids. I know why Americans don’t have time to think about the Middle East. It’s a very complicated place. I certainly don’t understand it all that well, but I’ve spent 25 years now doing nothing but trying to figure it out.
BUZZFLASH: You also mentioned how intertwined business relationships are with Saudi Arabia. Another point you bring out is that the Saudi Arabians keep possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks. So how does that factor in?
BAER: Well, Kissinger set this up in the first oil embargo. He said, listen, fine, you can raise the price of oil. You’re going to get more money for your oil. But let’s be reasonable about this. Take this money and all this profit you’re making, and invest it in the United States, which is a perfectly good policy, by the way. Buy our arms. Keep your money here. It’ll keep our economy floating. We won’t go into a recession or a depression because of high oil prices. And we’re all going to win by this. And that worked fine.
But then that goes back to the dependency. We depend so much on Saudi investments in the stock market, in Citibank and other funds. This is not just Saudi money; it’s other Arab money too. If we go into a confrontation with the Middle East, especially with oil prices so high right now, and that money is not recirculated back in the United States, it’s going to do some real damage. Or if one day, they just completely pull their money out. I mean, that’s the perfect storm: an oil embargo, the Saudis and others' pulling their money out, and having the price of oil go up to $70 - $80 a barrel. We would be hurt, badly hurt.
BUZZFLASH: Another factor in terms of the relationship that you’ve described as sleeping with the devil, and that you detail in your book, is that the Saudis have very shrewdly given jobs and consulting contracts to politicians and American government officials as they leave their government jobs.
BAER: I could have sat down and done a list of all my former colleagues from the CIA who ended up on the Saudi Arabian payroll. Some of them are known, like Ray Close. Others have gone public, but there are others that haven’t. A bunch of my colleagues went to work for a public consulting firm where the initial capital was paid for by the Saudi embassy to lobby the Hill for the Gulf countries. A former member of the National Security Council under Reagan set this up. And it’s not like it’s a secret. Even Bandar [Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi prince and U.S. ambassador] has said, according to the Washington Post, that if I take care of people coming out of office, the new ones coming in are going to be a lot friendlier to Saudi Arabia once it gets known.
BUZZFLASH: And it’s worked.
BAER: It works great. I’d be really popular in Washington if I could throw around a couple hundred million dollars every year to law firms and others. Another thing the royal family does is cultivate the press through public relations firms.
By the way, I just heard today The New York Times refused to review my book.
BUZZFLASH: Is that right? And you have no idea why?
BAER: Maybe they didn’t like my English. Maybe they didn’t like that I mentioned one of their reporters in it. I don’t know.
BUZZFLASH: What about the Wahhabi sect of Islam that’s practiced in Saudi Arabia?
BAER: It is absolutely susceptible to terrorism because its world view is so black and white and Utopian at the same time. Many Saudis are disgusted with their own lifestyles now, and they look back to the 18th Century with Abd-al-Wahhab. And they say things were better back then when we lived out in the desert. Saudis have told me, we’ll keep the oil in the ground. You can keep your weapons. We’re going to go back and we’re going to live in the desert off of camel’s milk and dates, because that’s when life was pure. In the times of Muhammad, we were honorable people, and we were warriors, and we were in control of our own destiny.
So with that kind of mentality, it’s very easy to recruit young kids, whether they’re men or women. In Saudi Arabia, it’s mainly the young boys. And when the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a violent political Islamic faction, left Egypt and set up in Saudi Arabia, they had a lot of influence on the Saudis.
This combination of a Utopian view of the world, plus the Muslim Brothers' advocacy of violence, have made people susceptible to suicide bombing. And it’s a little bit different from the Palestinians who live in refugee camps, and who have been disenfranchised completely. The Saudis are more privileged, of course. The best that I can tell, it’s just this combination that has been so lethal.
BUZZFLASH: Well, what then are we doing? Is Saudi Arabia continuing to finance Al-Qaeda?
BAER: I think they are. I think they’re going to continue to finance Hamas. Smart people in the Middle East tell me that there are a lot of Saudis heading into Iraq right now to set up cells to attack American troops. There was an article recently about it – I think it was in the Christian Science Monitor. And Bremer has even said it. What to do? I offer one solution, which is Syria, 1982, where they confronted a fundamentalist problem. And I’ve been criticized by people that say that you can’t shell cities like Asad did in ’82.
BUZZFLASH: Well, he just wiped the town out, didn’t he?
BAER: Yes. And that’s not what I’m advocating. I’m just saying that one solution is to outlaw this sort of fundamentalism at the state level, as we would. For example, a Christian sect in the United States could not go into a church and advocate and preach violence, which results in violence. That would be a conspiracy and it's against the law. If those same norms and laws were applied to these countries, we’d be a lot better off. And so I take Syria as an example of a country who had a terrible problem, and who pretty much solved it. This doesn’t address the question of Syria's support for Hesbollah – the kidnappings in the ‘80s and the terrorism that went on outside Syria. But inside Syria, I just wanted to point out that it is possible to do something about it.
We need the Saudis to get in that same position where they need to be removing these clerics from the mosque who are advocating righteous murder. We need to get the Saudis to account for the money that’s going to the charities, to make sure it’s going to orphans and widows and not weapons. And we need them as partners. And we have to hold them accountable. They have to tell us who these Saudis were that were apparently involved in September 11.
BUZZFLASH: Well, according to numerous accounts, although it’s hard to tell how extensive, the Saudis were allowed to fly members of the royal family and others out of the United States immediately after September 11th without questioning, on private Saudi jets. I believe I read one account of a security guard, a retired police officer in Florida, who was asked to accompany a member of a scion of a Saudi family who was at a university in Florida to Lexington, Kentucky, which I believe was a meeting point for many of the departing planes. [BuzzFlash Note: Since this interview was conducted in August, the issue of the Bush administration allowing bin Laden and Saudi families to leave the U.S. without questioning, within hours after 9/11 when U.S. airspace was closed, has been confirmed.]
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: One of the Florida papers, a mainstream daily, recounted this police officer's experience, and how he arrived on the tarmac in Lexington, and there was a whole fleet of Saudi jets there.
BAER: It’s crazy. There's a Syrian who's been convicted in Chicago and he has a Saudi wife. The Saudi embassy issued her a passport so was able to flee the U.S.; even though she was part of the case and shouldn’t have left. And the Saudis didn't really let us question Bayyumi [Bayyumi had showed up in San Diego with thousands of dollars and helped settle two Saudi 9/11 hijackers] But it was a controlled interrogation. You don’t get anything out of that.
BUZZFLASH: And it took awhile to arrange that.
BAER: Two years -- a guy that had met two of the hijackers and helped finance their stay!
BUZZFLASH: And wasn’t Bayyumi the guy that the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. sent money to?
BAER: The wife of the Saudi ambassador claimed that she gave the money to charities. As it turned out, the money was going into an account under a Jordanian woman's name. And the Jordanians and the Saudis despise each other. The chances of a Saudi princess sending money to a Jordanian woman without somebody's recommendation are highly improbable. But we don't know who made the recommendation, because we’re not getting the answers. We’re not holding Saudi Arabia accountable.
BUZZFLASH: Well, given that Saudi Arabia has 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves? Is that right?
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: And given that they have on deposit nearly a trillion dollars in the United States, and given all the intermingled business relationships, and the fact that they buy planes from Boeing, and the Carlyle Group is intertwined with them, what pressure could be put on them? What leverage does the United States have to actually get them to really crack down on the terrorist roots of many of the acts of terrorism?
BAER: Well, you hit the nail on the head. We don’t have a lot of pressure points because we’re so dependent on this oil. You could get rough with these people, but the problem is: Would the regime fall? As much as I despise Al Sa'ud, I wouldn’t want the regime to fall, for our benefit. It could lead to chaos. And I think that’s the problem Bush has: What do you do with these people that are clearly hiding something from 9/11, and have just said we’re not going to cooperate?
The Interior Minister said that 9/11 is a Zionist conspiracy. He said the Saudis had nothing to do with it. He stiffed Freeh [Louis Freeh, former FBI director] when he went out there in ’96 – just refused to see him. I don’t care what Freeh says now. He refused to see him, and no one did anything. The Saudis, and their arrogance, have gotten away with this for a long time because they think they have enough money to buy people off. Their attitude is: You don’t want to buy our oil, don’t buy it. We’ll sell someplace else. And what would happen if they did impose another embargo? Do we invade? I offer that possibility at the end of my book, but that’s if nothing else works. If the place is ready to go down, you have to consider it.
It wouldn't be an Iraq-like invasion with the stated goal of imposing democracy. An invasion of Saudi Arabia would be to save our economy.
BUZZFLASH: You’re very skeptical in your book on the possibility of imposing democracy in the Middle East.
BAER: I look at Iraq today. Yesterday, you had the Turkmen killing the Kurds. You had the Shi'a Muslims blowing each other up in Najef. I wouldn't even know where to begin to impose democracy on these countries. In order for a democracy to be established in a country, there has to be an intellectual tradition of democracy within the country. There needs to be some prior rule of law. For example, the Weimar Republic had a democratic rule of law in the ‘30s that laid the foundation for the post-World War II occupation. And the Russians had sort of a democracy in the early 1900's even though they’re not doing very well now.
It’s really hard to get people in countries like Iraq to understand what you’re talking about [when you talk about democracy], when they’re so tied up in religion and the rule of God. In Saudi Arabia, the rule of law is whatever the prince that comes along says; that's the system of justice. I think we can offer by example democracy in adjoining countries, but at the end of the day, we really can’t impose it.
BUZZFLASH: Also, you point out that if you offered democracy, the fundamentalists might win.
BAER: I’ve seen conversations we’ve had with the Saudi government – why they didn’t want to arrest bin Laden in ’96. They were very frank. They said: Listen, we can arrest this guy and put him in jail. There would be a national uprising in support of him.
So, I think that Iraq should find its own way to democracy. We should set the example wherever we can. If the Palestinian-Israeli thing ever gets solved – it probably never will in our lifetime – there would be a sort of working democracy with the Palestinians or the Jordanians. Democracy has to be created from within the country; they just won’t accept it from the United States.
BUZZFLASH: You mentioned Asad earlier, and what he did to the Muslim Brotherhood – just annihilated the town that was the center for the uprising against him. Asad and Saddam Hussein were similar. Both were ruthless tyrants with comparatively secular versions of Islam in their countries. The Saudis were financing people who were actually opposed to Asad. There’s a kind of irony here. We overthrew a country that despite how cruel Saddam Hussein was, he was not one to aggressively foster terrorism within Iraq. And yet you have the Saudis, who are our closest friends and who do finance terrorism, as you point out, to the tune of a billion dollars over the last decade. It seems like everything’s upside down.
BAER: Well, I think it is. I think it’s pretty clear now that Saddam was not supporting bin Laden to any degree that we can establish. And now suddenly this week, we’ve got bin Laden claiming the U.N. bombing in Iraq. So we have created a terrorist state where we didn’t have one before. Are we worse off with the terrorist state in Iraq now, or with Saddam before, who was out of his mind and could attack a country like Saudi Arabia? Who knows what he was going to do next. We’re facing two evils here. I’m frankly more scared of the fundamentalists than I was of Saddam.
BUZZFLASH: Many commentators, including yourself, say the CIA over the years started to depend less on people like you and more on electronic intelligence and technology to do the spying. And yet you were the nitty-gritty human intelligence type of operative. You got to know the Middle East pretty well. Is there black and white there, or just shades of gray?
BAER: Shades of gray. You know, on the intelligence thing, you really need it all. You need the human intelligence. You need electronic intelligence. And you need good analysis. You need people that know the area and spend their lives following it. And you need satellite photography as well. So those are the four things you need. And then you need governments. You know, that’s really even a fifth thing. It’s very important. Other governments helping you on the ground – what we really need in Iraq is a government to tell us what’s happening there, which we’re lacking.
But the problem in the United States is we don’t do well with foreign countries. So many Americans came here and they just don’t want to know about what is happening in their home countries. I’m out here in California, and national security? -- they don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to know anything about it. They want to know about the movies. They want to know about the dot-coms coming back. They want to know about the latest diet book. So when we get into a war like Iraq, I don’t really think Americans know what the potential consequences are. And it's the same in the CIA and the State Department. You get more and more Americans that don’t spend much time overseas – certainly not in the Middle East. It’s harder for them to go up the learning curve on these countries. It certainly was for me.
BUZZFLASH: You’re in a small group of people that has had much contact with the darker side of terrorism, and you’ve had personal relationships that gave you an insight. The motivations for terrorism are multi-faceted. But we’ve been constantly perplexed by what one does about suicide bombers. If you’ve got the people who participate in 9/11 or Palestinians who blow themselves up on Israeli buses, you can’t punish them. You have no leverage to say: If you do that, you’re going to lose your life, because the mission itself involves their commitment to lose their lives by their own will. How does one gain an edge on that? And is there any way psychologically to gain that? Or is it purely a military function?
BAER: I think it’s more political. I think that the sooner we stop interfering in the Middle East, the more likely we'll be able to exact a truce with terrorism.
By going into Afghanistan, that was really acceptable to most Muslims, because we’d been attacked. They understand that. But going into Iraq will certainly irritate more people and add credence to bin Laden-type ideologies and zealots. We have to get together with the Europeans and solve this Israeli-Palestinian deal. And if it’s building a wall between the Palestinians and the Israelis, fine – let’s do it. We need to identify a leadership among the Palestinians that speak for 90 percent of them, for instance, and get a settlement. Even if we need to buy it, it’s really important that we do that because they’ve got such rotten systems in the Middle East that all they’re really allowed to think about are the Palestinian problems.
They can’t complain against their own governments. They can’t overthrow them. They can’t go into elections. So the governments, whether they’re Saudi or Jordanian or Lebanese, focus on Israel as the main misery in their lives. Of course, what do Palestinians have to do with the Saudis? Nothing, other than they share a religion.
But we don’t care about the Christians in Rawanda as Christians. So it’s a little hard for Americans to understand this. And if we could remove that irritant of the Palestinian problem, that would be a start. We need to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil with alternative fuels, with conservation, with better use of our own fuels, however you do that – I’m not a specialist in that – and just get out of that system because it so corrosive.
We can’t do it with a military force. It’s really sad that our military is up against this guerilla warfare in Iraq. And if they become the subject of terrorists and car bombs, it’s unfortunate for us, because we’re going to do some damage to an institution that’s very important in the United States.
BUZZFLASH: Meaning the military.
BAER: Yes, and ultimately we can’t do it. We can’t expect some private from Indiana to be out in the streets of Baghdad collecting intelligence on who these people are, what they’re doing, or even making raids. Because they’re knocking down people’s doors, and they have no idea who they are. The information’s hard to come by in that country, and there are a lot of fabricators. And you’re asking these soldiers to be policemen, which they can’t do at the end of the day.
BUZZFLASH: Do you think the Saudi royal family and their role is in danger of imploding? Are they less secure, more secure, than they were 10 years ago? What’s the outlook for their rule?
BAER: I think they’re more insecure, and I’m basing this on anecdotal information. The Crown Prince, 10 days ago, I think it was, said that they’re in the middle of a decisive battle – and it wasn’t very clear what he meant – and that the outcome is unknown. For a Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia to acknowledge that the royal family or the government’s in a battle with its own citizens is unprecedented. It's never happened before. Even when Islamic Fundamentalists took over the Mecca mosque many years ago, it was never construed as a battle between the people and the royal family.
So for the first time, a Saudi leader has acknowledged they're having some real problems. I certainly would be reluctant to give you a timeline when they fall. There are so many factors involved. If they continue to get a lot of money for their oil, they can maintain the welfare system for a long time.
Another factor is going to be Iraq because there was a poll saying that a majority of Americans think we should get out of Iraq. If we get out of Iraq and leave a mess there, sort of like Somalia, will it spread to Saudi Arabia? It’s a big desert out there and they have a lot of weapons. Who knows? It’s the Middle East. Anything can happen there. And that’s what scares me. I wrote an editorial on Sunday for the Washington Post saying we can’t get out now. And I’m one that doesn’t particularly like foreign engagements. So I don’t know. These are worrying times.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
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September 12, 2003
INTERVIEW ARCHIVES
Robert Baer, Former CIA Case Officer and Author of "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude."
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Think About This: Whenever You Buy a Tank of Saudi Arabian Gas, You are Helping to Finance Terrorism.
Regular BuzzFlash readers know that we have regularly run articles, commentaries and editorials arguing that, in part, the invasion of Iraq was a Bush administration effort to divert attention from the primary financiers of terrorism -- and the source of much of the al-Qaeda leadership -- Saudi Arabia. Of course, there were other motivating factors for the Bush military action against Iraq, which we have detailed (see, as examples, The Perfect War and Endgame).
But a recent poll indicates that the American public still believes Iraq was behind 9/11, even though bin Laden received Saudi, not Iraq financing, and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. The Bush administration kept -- and keeps -- insinuating that Iraq was involved deeply in 9/11, while trying to sweep under the carpet much, much stronger indications of key Saudi involvement in the financing, strategy and implementation of 9/11. As a result, they have successfully misled Americans about who was really responsible for 9/11.
It is within this context that we interviewed Robert Baer, a case officer for the Directorate of Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1997. He worked out of the Middle East.
You may, like BuzzFlash, not agree with all of Baer's remedies, but his insights are invaluable. And, like BuzzFlash, he believes that the Bush administration is letting the country that is the largest financial and religious sect supporter of terrorism get away with it, while attacking Iraq, which only had the most tangential involvement with terrorism.
His book, "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude," adds to a growing list of evidence that the Bush administration is conducting a war on terror that is politically calculated.
(You can purchase "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude" Here)
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BUZZFLASH: Let me begin by asking you, just to establish your background, you wrote a book called See No Evil, in which you talked about your career with the CIA. Can you explain a little bit more about what your background and areas of responsibility were with the CIA?
ROBERT BAER: I spent 21 years in the CIA as what’s called a case officer. That means that I went overseas and served overseas almost all the years I spent with the CIA, meeting with what we call agents. Those are foreigners who spy for the CIA. And you write up their reports and send them back to Washington. So I was a field officer, in short.
BUZZFLASH: In what area? You did serve in Iraq, if I recall, in reading your book.
BAER: I served in Iraq for awhile. A couple times I was there on a temporary basis. I was mostly in the Middle East – Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Bosnia as well as a couple of other countries.
BUZZFLASH: So you have extensive experience with the Middle East.
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: As a gatherer of what is called "human intelligence."
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: Now in reading through the book we’re going to discuss, Sleeping With the Devil, I noticed there are many thick black bars through it that I assumed were censored by the CIA. Is that correct?
BAER: Yes. They get the manuscript in advance of publishing.
BUZZFLASH: So the CIA basically vets it and approves it, minus whatever they feel is necessary to black out or censor.
BAER: Yes, they don’t mess with the content. They just say: Listen, this is our stuff. You can’t publish it.
BUZZFLASH: The book’s full title is Sleeping With the Devil – How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, and you cover several administrations. The claims you make here seem to apply, for the most part, whether they’re Democrat or Republican. And you, of course, focus on Saudi Arabia. What compelled you to write the book?
BAER: I’d always been fascinated by Saudi Arabia. And I’d always noticed that on general intelligence reports that are sent around in the field, and in Washington, there’s virtually nothing said about Saudi Arabia. Every Arab that I talked to – and I know a lot of them – kept on talking about the disputes in the royal family, huge contracts, the Wahhabi's funding Lebanese politics. It became clear to me, even though I wasn’t seeing much in the CIA traffic, or State Department, or anywhere else, that this was a key country.
So when I got back to Washington in ’95 – and I stayed there until I resigned from the CIA – I said, all right, I don’t know a whole lot about Saudi Arabia. What about Saudi Arabia? And I got onto the computer and I took a look around, and there just wasn’t anything useful. I mean, you, as a journalist, would have looked at this and said: It’s junk. There’s nothing here. And especially nothing that goes deep into the problems in Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, I started running into these assessments of the oil industry, and just how much damage you could do to the processing facilities, not the pipelines, if you were a terrorist and wanted to bring the Saudis down. And then 9/11 came along, and the 15 Saudis that caused it. So I took notes about everything that I’d ever learned about Saudi Arabia and the government. And I said, this would make a book. I asked myself: Why don’t we know more about a country that’s so vital to the United States? And this is my effort at explaining that. You’d get a different perspective if you asked James Baker about it or an academic. But this is the continuation of my memoir, my gut reaction.
BUZZFLASH: We were told, after the Afghanistan war, that indulging in drugs is supporting terrorism. But you also make the claim: Every time we buy a gallon of gasoline, if the petrol came from Saudi Arabia, the oil was used for the gasoline. So we’re also supporting terrorism.
BAER: Well, it is. In the first Gulf war, if Saudi Arabia hadn’t been there to pump the extra gasoline, and if we had let oil hit $80 or $90 a barrel for a long period of time, people wouldn’t have been buying all these SUVs in the ‘90s. I mean, Saudi Arabia really does balance the market out. I’m in California right now, and we use a lot of gasoline. As you drive around this town, it’s amazing all the SUVs and four-wheel drives that you see.
In any case, we just use a lot of gasoline, and we depend upon it, just as we depend upon cheap imports from East Asia, from China. All these cheap imports and cheap gasoline, and wood from Brazil, it becomes a dependency. These aren’t my ideas. I talk to a lot of people about the drug problem, and they say, well, with dependency, your perceptions change. And I think the best I can tell is that’s what has happened. It's as if Saudi Arabia is our boss and is paying us a good salary. It would be difficult to find another job, so we're not going to really worry about focusing on what our boss is really doing. We're too dependent.
BUZZFLASH: So that’s the basis of your claim that through our dependence on Saudi oil, we’re, in essence, financing terrorism – because you do say in your book that, over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has transferred half a billion dollars to Al-Qaeda, and at least a hundred million dollars to the Taliban.
BAER: Exactly. And it’s obviously not intentional on the part of consumers; there’s no conspiracy in this on this side of the ocean. People in Washington didn’t sit around and say, let's finance terrorism. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s this process of what I call slow accrual.
BUZZFLASH: Why do the Saudis finance terrorism? From reading your book and elsewhere, we deduce that there are probably two reasons. One is that they’re paying protection money. You set up the scenario, as you discussed earlier, that if they didn’t buy off al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, they might be the target of a plane that’s hijacked into their oil processing plants, and that would ruin them for years. The second reason is that the Saudis practice what we would view in America as a fundamentalist branch of the Islamic faith that actually becomes a breeding ground for terrorism.
BAER: There's a lot that we really don’t know. There are a lot of people in the royal family that sympathize with bin Laden. There are people in the royal family that feel humiliated by colonialism -- call it what you want -- by the United States, by Israel. And they’re humiliated that they are citizens or subjects of a country that has never fought a war, and yet spends so much money on defense. They’re humiliated that they don’t take the Israelis on, because their army is worthless. And maybe they’re not humiliated but rather disenfranchised because they can never advance up the ranks of the family, and it’s a very tough culture. They sit around and they read the Koran. And they get on these Islamic websites, and they watch Al-Jazeera. And they go to the mosque, and I think they’re believers.
You've got a very fragmented Saudi society. I can only identify a couple of those princes. There’s a senior one named Salman, whom I mention in the book, who had some sort of late conversion. But there are other ones. You hear rumors about them, and I didn’t dare put them in the book, because I’m not sure of the information. Then there are the other princes who are Westernized in the sense of their tastes: They drink, they like women, they like to spend a lot of money. They have the diamond-studded Rolex watches. They just love money for the power it gives them over other subjects. And they know they have a problem with the fundamentalists. They figure, if I can make gestures toward them, they won’t bother me. And the fundamentalists haven’t, for the most part.
If I were a fundamentalist and I wanted to take Saudi Arabia over, what I would do is I’d go after the royal family. I would set off a few car bombs and kill a couple of them. Destabilize the country. But for some reason, the royal family has not been the victim of terrorism that they claim they have been. You cannot name a single case where the fundamentalists killed a Saudi prince. They claim all the time that there are all these plots afoot, and they’ve stopped them. But all the terrorism has really been against the United States and other Western countries, or Western interests in Saudi Arabia.
That ’95 National Guard barracks bombing within Saudi Arabia – we don’t really know who did that. Could have been bin Laden. And you have the ’96 Kobar barracks bombing. There are a lot of people who say that bin Laden was involved in the ’96 bombing, though there’s no proof of it.
That brings me to the State Department. You’ve got ’95, ’96, and ’98 bombings that had a bunch of Saudis. The bombings in Africa [U.S. Embassy in Kenya] and the Cole [U.S.S. Cole] had a bunch of Saudis involved. And we were hit September 2001, and we still don’t have visa interviews for these people. How can you explain that? If you’re a Syrian, you have to wait 30 days. If you’re an Iranian, you have to wait 30 days before you get your visa. In Saudi Arabia, you just send your passport to the travel agent. It comes back, without an interview, without any sort of check, and you get a visa. And that’s what disturbs me.
BUZZFLASH: And of course, 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudi.
BAER: The Saudi hijackers were spending time in these mosques paid for by the Saudi government. The clerics are essentially government employees that recruited these kids. I know why Americans don’t have time to think about the Middle East. It’s a very complicated place. I certainly don’t understand it all that well, but I’ve spent 25 years now doing nothing but trying to figure it out.
BUZZFLASH: You also mentioned how intertwined business relationships are with Saudi Arabia. Another point you bring out is that the Saudi Arabians keep possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks. So how does that factor in?
BAER: Well, Kissinger set this up in the first oil embargo. He said, listen, fine, you can raise the price of oil. You’re going to get more money for your oil. But let’s be reasonable about this. Take this money and all this profit you’re making, and invest it in the United States, which is a perfectly good policy, by the way. Buy our arms. Keep your money here. It’ll keep our economy floating. We won’t go into a recession or a depression because of high oil prices. And we’re all going to win by this. And that worked fine.
But then that goes back to the dependency. We depend so much on Saudi investments in the stock market, in Citibank and other funds. This is not just Saudi money; it’s other Arab money too. If we go into a confrontation with the Middle East, especially with oil prices so high right now, and that money is not recirculated back in the United States, it’s going to do some real damage. Or if one day, they just completely pull their money out. I mean, that’s the perfect storm: an oil embargo, the Saudis and others' pulling their money out, and having the price of oil go up to $70 - $80 a barrel. We would be hurt, badly hurt.
BUZZFLASH: Another factor in terms of the relationship that you’ve described as sleeping with the devil, and that you detail in your book, is that the Saudis have very shrewdly given jobs and consulting contracts to politicians and American government officials as they leave their government jobs.
BAER: I could have sat down and done a list of all my former colleagues from the CIA who ended up on the Saudi Arabian payroll. Some of them are known, like Ray Close. Others have gone public, but there are others that haven’t. A bunch of my colleagues went to work for a public consulting firm where the initial capital was paid for by the Saudi embassy to lobby the Hill for the Gulf countries. A former member of the National Security Council under Reagan set this up. And it’s not like it’s a secret. Even Bandar [Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi prince and U.S. ambassador] has said, according to the Washington Post, that if I take care of people coming out of office, the new ones coming in are going to be a lot friendlier to Saudi Arabia once it gets known.
BUZZFLASH: And it’s worked.
BAER: It works great. I’d be really popular in Washington if I could throw around a couple hundred million dollars every year to law firms and others. Another thing the royal family does is cultivate the press through public relations firms.
By the way, I just heard today The New York Times refused to review my book.
BUZZFLASH: Is that right? And you have no idea why?
BAER: Maybe they didn’t like my English. Maybe they didn’t like that I mentioned one of their reporters in it. I don’t know.
BUZZFLASH: What about the Wahhabi sect of Islam that’s practiced in Saudi Arabia?
BAER: It is absolutely susceptible to terrorism because its world view is so black and white and Utopian at the same time. Many Saudis are disgusted with their own lifestyles now, and they look back to the 18th Century with Abd-al-Wahhab. And they say things were better back then when we lived out in the desert. Saudis have told me, we’ll keep the oil in the ground. You can keep your weapons. We’re going to go back and we’re going to live in the desert off of camel’s milk and dates, because that’s when life was pure. In the times of Muhammad, we were honorable people, and we were warriors, and we were in control of our own destiny.
So with that kind of mentality, it’s very easy to recruit young kids, whether they’re men or women. In Saudi Arabia, it’s mainly the young boys. And when the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a violent political Islamic faction, left Egypt and set up in Saudi Arabia, they had a lot of influence on the Saudis.
This combination of a Utopian view of the world, plus the Muslim Brothers' advocacy of violence, have made people susceptible to suicide bombing. And it’s a little bit different from the Palestinians who live in refugee camps, and who have been disenfranchised completely. The Saudis are more privileged, of course. The best that I can tell, it’s just this combination that has been so lethal.
BUZZFLASH: Well, what then are we doing? Is Saudi Arabia continuing to finance Al-Qaeda?
BAER: I think they are. I think they’re going to continue to finance Hamas. Smart people in the Middle East tell me that there are a lot of Saudis heading into Iraq right now to set up cells to attack American troops. There was an article recently about it – I think it was in the Christian Science Monitor. And Bremer has even said it. What to do? I offer one solution, which is Syria, 1982, where they confronted a fundamentalist problem. And I’ve been criticized by people that say that you can’t shell cities like Asad did in ’82.
BUZZFLASH: Well, he just wiped the town out, didn’t he?
BAER: Yes. And that’s not what I’m advocating. I’m just saying that one solution is to outlaw this sort of fundamentalism at the state level, as we would. For example, a Christian sect in the United States could not go into a church and advocate and preach violence, which results in violence. That would be a conspiracy and it's against the law. If those same norms and laws were applied to these countries, we’d be a lot better off. And so I take Syria as an example of a country who had a terrible problem, and who pretty much solved it. This doesn’t address the question of Syria's support for Hesbollah – the kidnappings in the ‘80s and the terrorism that went on outside Syria. But inside Syria, I just wanted to point out that it is possible to do something about it.
We need the Saudis to get in that same position where they need to be removing these clerics from the mosque who are advocating righteous murder. We need to get the Saudis to account for the money that’s going to the charities, to make sure it’s going to orphans and widows and not weapons. And we need them as partners. And we have to hold them accountable. They have to tell us who these Saudis were that were apparently involved in September 11.
BUZZFLASH: Well, according to numerous accounts, although it’s hard to tell how extensive, the Saudis were allowed to fly members of the royal family and others out of the United States immediately after September 11th without questioning, on private Saudi jets. I believe I read one account of a security guard, a retired police officer in Florida, who was asked to accompany a member of a scion of a Saudi family who was at a university in Florida to Lexington, Kentucky, which I believe was a meeting point for many of the departing planes. [BuzzFlash Note: Since this interview was conducted in August, the issue of the Bush administration allowing bin Laden and Saudi families to leave the U.S. without questioning, within hours after 9/11 when U.S. airspace was closed, has been confirmed.]
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: One of the Florida papers, a mainstream daily, recounted this police officer's experience, and how he arrived on the tarmac in Lexington, and there was a whole fleet of Saudi jets there.
BAER: It’s crazy. There's a Syrian who's been convicted in Chicago and he has a Saudi wife. The Saudi embassy issued her a passport so was able to flee the U.S.; even though she was part of the case and shouldn’t have left. And the Saudis didn't really let us question Bayyumi [Bayyumi had showed up in San Diego with thousands of dollars and helped settle two Saudi 9/11 hijackers] But it was a controlled interrogation. You don’t get anything out of that.
BUZZFLASH: And it took awhile to arrange that.
BAER: Two years -- a guy that had met two of the hijackers and helped finance their stay!
BUZZFLASH: And wasn’t Bayyumi the guy that the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. sent money to?
BAER: The wife of the Saudi ambassador claimed that she gave the money to charities. As it turned out, the money was going into an account under a Jordanian woman's name. And the Jordanians and the Saudis despise each other. The chances of a Saudi princess sending money to a Jordanian woman without somebody's recommendation are highly improbable. But we don't know who made the recommendation, because we’re not getting the answers. We’re not holding Saudi Arabia accountable.
BUZZFLASH: Well, given that Saudi Arabia has 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves? Is that right?
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: And given that they have on deposit nearly a trillion dollars in the United States, and given all the intermingled business relationships, and the fact that they buy planes from Boeing, and the Carlyle Group is intertwined with them, what pressure could be put on them? What leverage does the United States have to actually get them to really crack down on the terrorist roots of many of the acts of terrorism?
BAER: Well, you hit the nail on the head. We don’t have a lot of pressure points because we’re so dependent on this oil. You could get rough with these people, but the problem is: Would the regime fall? As much as I despise Al Sa'ud, I wouldn’t want the regime to fall, for our benefit. It could lead to chaos. And I think that’s the problem Bush has: What do you do with these people that are clearly hiding something from 9/11, and have just said we’re not going to cooperate?
The Interior Minister said that 9/11 is a Zionist conspiracy. He said the Saudis had nothing to do with it. He stiffed Freeh [Louis Freeh, former FBI director] when he went out there in ’96 – just refused to see him. I don’t care what Freeh says now. He refused to see him, and no one did anything. The Saudis, and their arrogance, have gotten away with this for a long time because they think they have enough money to buy people off. Their attitude is: You don’t want to buy our oil, don’t buy it. We’ll sell someplace else. And what would happen if they did impose another embargo? Do we invade? I offer that possibility at the end of my book, but that’s if nothing else works. If the place is ready to go down, you have to consider it.
It wouldn't be an Iraq-like invasion with the stated goal of imposing democracy. An invasion of Saudi Arabia would be to save our economy.
BUZZFLASH: You’re very skeptical in your book on the possibility of imposing democracy in the Middle East.
BAER: I look at Iraq today. Yesterday, you had the Turkmen killing the Kurds. You had the Shi'a Muslims blowing each other up in Najef. I wouldn't even know where to begin to impose democracy on these countries. In order for a democracy to be established in a country, there has to be an intellectual tradition of democracy within the country. There needs to be some prior rule of law. For example, the Weimar Republic had a democratic rule of law in the ‘30s that laid the foundation for the post-World War II occupation. And the Russians had sort of a democracy in the early 1900's even though they’re not doing very well now.
It’s really hard to get people in countries like Iraq to understand what you’re talking about [when you talk about democracy], when they’re so tied up in religion and the rule of God. In Saudi Arabia, the rule of law is whatever the prince that comes along says; that's the system of justice. I think we can offer by example democracy in adjoining countries, but at the end of the day, we really can’t impose it.
BUZZFLASH: Also, you point out that if you offered democracy, the fundamentalists might win.
BAER: I’ve seen conversations we’ve had with the Saudi government – why they didn’t want to arrest bin Laden in ’96. They were very frank. They said: Listen, we can arrest this guy and put him in jail. There would be a national uprising in support of him.
So, I think that Iraq should find its own way to democracy. We should set the example wherever we can. If the Palestinian-Israeli thing ever gets solved – it probably never will in our lifetime – there would be a sort of working democracy with the Palestinians or the Jordanians. Democracy has to be created from within the country; they just won’t accept it from the United States.
BUZZFLASH: You mentioned Asad earlier, and what he did to the Muslim Brotherhood – just annihilated the town that was the center for the uprising against him. Asad and Saddam Hussein were similar. Both were ruthless tyrants with comparatively secular versions of Islam in their countries. The Saudis were financing people who were actually opposed to Asad. There’s a kind of irony here. We overthrew a country that despite how cruel Saddam Hussein was, he was not one to aggressively foster terrorism within Iraq. And yet you have the Saudis, who are our closest friends and who do finance terrorism, as you point out, to the tune of a billion dollars over the last decade. It seems like everything’s upside down.
BAER: Well, I think it is. I think it’s pretty clear now that Saddam was not supporting bin Laden to any degree that we can establish. And now suddenly this week, we’ve got bin Laden claiming the U.N. bombing in Iraq. So we have created a terrorist state where we didn’t have one before. Are we worse off with the terrorist state in Iraq now, or with Saddam before, who was out of his mind and could attack a country like Saudi Arabia? Who knows what he was going to do next. We’re facing two evils here. I’m frankly more scared of the fundamentalists than I was of Saddam.
BUZZFLASH: Many commentators, including yourself, say the CIA over the years started to depend less on people like you and more on electronic intelligence and technology to do the spying. And yet you were the nitty-gritty human intelligence type of operative. You got to know the Middle East pretty well. Is there black and white there, or just shades of gray?
BAER: Shades of gray. You know, on the intelligence thing, you really need it all. You need the human intelligence. You need electronic intelligence. And you need good analysis. You need people that know the area and spend their lives following it. And you need satellite photography as well. So those are the four things you need. And then you need governments. You know, that’s really even a fifth thing. It’s very important. Other governments helping you on the ground – what we really need in Iraq is a government to tell us what’s happening there, which we’re lacking.
But the problem in the United States is we don’t do well with foreign countries. So many Americans came here and they just don’t want to know about what is happening in their home countries. I’m out here in California, and national security? -- they don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to know anything about it. They want to know about the movies. They want to know about the dot-coms coming back. They want to know about the latest diet book. So when we get into a war like Iraq, I don’t really think Americans know what the potential consequences are. And it's the same in the CIA and the State Department. You get more and more Americans that don’t spend much time overseas – certainly not in the Middle East. It’s harder for them to go up the learning curve on these countries. It certainly was for me.
BUZZFLASH: You’re in a small group of people that has had much contact with the darker side of terrorism, and you’ve had personal relationships that gave you an insight. The motivations for terrorism are multi-faceted. But we’ve been constantly perplexed by what one does about suicide bombers. If you’ve got the people who participate in 9/11 or Palestinians who blow themselves up on Israeli buses, you can’t punish them. You have no leverage to say: If you do that, you’re going to lose your life, because the mission itself involves their commitment to lose their lives by their own will. How does one gain an edge on that? And is there any way psychologically to gain that? Or is it purely a military function?
BAER: I think it’s more political. I think that the sooner we stop interfering in the Middle East, the more likely we'll be able to exact a truce with terrorism.
By going into Afghanistan, that was really acceptable to most Muslims, because we’d been attacked. They understand that. But going into Iraq will certainly irritate more people and add credence to bin Laden-type ideologies and zealots. We have to get together with the Europeans and solve this Israeli-Palestinian deal. And if it’s building a wall between the Palestinians and the Israelis, fine – let’s do it. We need to identify a leadership among the Palestinians that speak for 90 percent of them, for instance, and get a settlement. Even if we need to buy it, it’s really important that we do that because they’ve got such rotten systems in the Middle East that all they’re really allowed to think about are the Palestinian problems.
They can’t complain against their own governments. They can’t overthrow them. They can’t go into elections. So the governments, whether they’re Saudi or Jordanian or Lebanese, focus on Israel as the main misery in their lives. Of course, what do Palestinians have to do with the Saudis? Nothing, other than they share a religion.
But we don’t care about the Christians in Rawanda as Christians. So it’s a little hard for Americans to understand this. And if we could remove that irritant of the Palestinian problem, that would be a start. We need to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil with alternative fuels, with conservation, with better use of our own fuels, however you do that – I’m not a specialist in that – and just get out of that system because it so corrosive.
We can’t do it with a military force. It’s really sad that our military is up against this guerilla warfare in Iraq. And if they become the subject of terrorists and car bombs, it’s unfortunate for us, because we’re going to do some damage to an institution that’s very important in the United States.
BUZZFLASH: Meaning the military.
BAER: Yes, and ultimately we can’t do it. We can’t expect some private from Indiana to be out in the streets of Baghdad collecting intelligence on who these people are, what they’re doing, or even making raids. Because they’re knocking down people’s doors, and they have no idea who they are. The information’s hard to come by in that country, and there are a lot of fabricators. And you’re asking these soldiers to be policemen, which they can’t do at the end of the day.
BUZZFLASH: Do you think the Saudi royal family and their role is in danger of imploding? Are they less secure, more secure, than they were 10 years ago? What’s the outlook for their rule?
BAER: I think they’re more insecure, and I’m basing this on anecdotal information. The Crown Prince, 10 days ago, I think it was, said that they’re in the middle of a decisive battle – and it wasn’t very clear what he meant – and that the outcome is unknown. For a Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia to acknowledge that the royal family or the government’s in a battle with its own citizens is unprecedented. It's never happened before. Even when Islamic Fundamentalists took over the Mecca mosque many years ago, it was never construed as a battle between the people and the royal family.
So for the first time, a Saudi leader has acknowledged they're having some real problems. I certainly would be reluctant to give you a timeline when they fall. There are so many factors involved. If they continue to get a lot of money for their oil, they can maintain the welfare system for a long time.
Another factor is going to be Iraq because there was a poll saying that a majority of Americans think we should get out of Iraq. If we get out of Iraq and leave a mess there, sort of like Somalia, will it spread to Saudi Arabia? It’s a big desert out there and they have a lot of weapons. Who knows? It’s the Middle East. Anything can happen there. And that’s what scares me. I wrote an editorial on Sunday for the Washington Post saying we can’t get out now. And I’m one that doesn’t particularly like foreign engagements. So I don’t know. These are worrying times.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
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http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/507
Peak Oil and Japan's Food Dependence
22 September 2005 Oil Food Security
In Brief: US invest bank Morgan Stanley claims that Japan is far less vulnerable to high oil prices than Europe or America. Furthermore, problems in the West would act as 'tripwires' to trigger action on oil prices before Japan suffered any damage.
Extract
In its September 12 edition, Morgan Stanley's online newsletter reviewed recent calculations by the Cabinet Office�s Maeda Akira. The calculations indicate that oil would have to go to US$129 per barrel before Japan suffered a shock comparable to the 1979 second oil price shock. By contrast, the US and EU were far more vulnerable, as prices would only have to go to US$81 or US$77, respectively, before they suffered damage on the scale of 1979 and afterwards. Before prices went to those latter levels, the EU and the US would presumably do their utmost to bring them down. Japan could thus count on its western allies to act as tripwires and mobilize on oil prices long before it was forced to.
�Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century, and one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over.� Chevron
Over the past year, benchmark oil prices shot up from a little over US$40 per barrel and reached just over $70 a few weeks ago. As of this writing, prices have fallen back to about $64, but that probably reflects the end of the summer driving season in the US, which somewhat reduces pressure on gasoline supplies. A lot of optimism also animates the markets, in spite of the havoc Hurricane Katrina wreaked on American oil production and refining capacity. The markets look to the International Energy Agency's (IEA) early September decision to coordinate a release of 2 million barrels of oil and oil products per day, for at least 30 days, from its 26 member countries' strategic reserves and supplies.
These developments appear to have helped the global economy avoid becoming instantly impaled on the over $100 per barrel oil "superspike" predicted by Goldman Sachs last April. Yet supplies of refined products remain tight everywhere, leading Japanese producers for example to look askance at their government's commitment to ship gasoline to the US where refineries are unlikely to be brought online again very soon. On top of that, damage from repeated hurricanes, including Ivan last year and Dennis nearly two months ago, greatly set back production in new fields in the Gulf of Mexico. An anticipated new flow of 600,000 barrels per day by 2007 has been slashed by half. Moreover, as we head towards fall and winter, current projections are that heating oil and natural gas prices are likely to climb by as much as 24 percent from their current elevated levels. These developments have led energy analysts, who last year predicted an average oil price of $39 per barrel for this year (as of mid-September the average is $54.77), to revise their estimates. For example, after looking at supply constraints and the continuing expansion of demand, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's chief economist now estimates that oil prices are likely to average $84 a barrel in 2006, $93 in 2007, and $100 in the fourth quarter of 2007.
In short, there is clearly something fundamentally wrong with the oil supply, something that allows temporary disruptions from political unrest, storm damage and the like to become increasingly serious crises. The recent damage from Hurricane Katrina, for example, will depress American oil production and refining by several percentage points of total capacity. In the past, this spare capacity would have filled the gap. Yet now, in spite of the IEA's efforts to coordinate a fix on a global scale, the shortfall in American production threatens instead to ripple around the world and generate further upward pressure on prices.
Many credible analysts and experts suggest that a large part of the problem is peak oil. The peak is from a model of oil production named after the geophysicist M King Hubbert, who worked for Shell Oil. Hubbert estimated total US reserves and calculated when output from them would be at maximum, based on the observed rate of depletion of individual oil fields. Contrary to what a lot of people - especially hyper-optimistic economists - appear to believe, oil fields are not underground lakes of petroleum, waiting to be sucked up like the contents of a milkshake. Rather, they are formations of oil-bearing rock under pressure, and without maintenance of sufficient pressure around the area where a given well is drilled there is no economically feasible way to extract the oil. Oil fields are said to be depleted when it takes an equivalent amount of energy - through injecting water, natural gas, and so on - to extract the oil as is obtained from the extracted oil itself. There is thus plenty of oil - sometimes nearly half of the initial deposit - left in depleted oil fields. Hubbert determined that the exploitation of fields followed a bell-curve shaped trajectory from the initial drilling through to depletion. After the peak of the bell-curve, there is a gradual but inexorable decline in production.
Based on his model, Hubbert predicted that American oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, approximately 40 years after the peak in US oil discoveries. He gave a paper on his theory in 1956 at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, and was regarded as crazy. But he turned out to be right, as American oil production peaked in 1971. Subsequently, about 50 oil-producing countries have reached their production peak. These countries include the former Soviet Union (which peaked in 1987), Brunei (1979), Libya (1970), Iran (1974), and Indonesia (1997). The peak in global oil discoveries occurred in 1964, and new applications of Hubbert's model suggest that global production should be reaching its maximum rather soon and then start falling. Optimistic studies suggest that 2020 will be the peak; more realistic models indicate that it will arrive later in this decade. The peak oil hypothesis is, therefore, that global oil production is at maximum output already, or shortly will be, and that oil production will subsequently decline. One expects, in this scenario, that easily recovered and cheaply processed oil is the first to peak out, followed by deposits in hard to reach areas (such as beneath the oceans) and/or with plenty of sulfur and other impurities.
Shell Canada, for example, has announced that it will increase its investment in the Alberta tar sands to $7.3 billion from $4 billion, in the hope of producing an additional 100,000 barrels a day. This is a huge capital expenditure for a relatively small increment in output. This and other examples suggested, as peak oil theorists warn, that we are at the end of an era of plentiful and inexpensive hydrocarbon-based energy, which will require a massive commitment to conservation and finding alternative energy sources.The threat of peaking oil output is made all the more serious by demand that continues to surge, driven not only by expanding US consumption, but by rapidly rising demand from China, India and other developing nations. Analysts note in particular that over 40 percent of recent increases in global demand for oil is from China, and that it is driven by the growth of income and almost insensitive to price. According to the IEA's own data, global oil demand of about 84 million barrels per day is running smack into an equivalent production capacity, leaving no spare capacity at all in the event of unforeseen problems.
There is no precedent for this situation, as previous energy crises have been the consequence of deliberate restrictions on supply. Oil - and especially cheap oil - is of course a finite resource, but for more than a century, production volumes have always matched demand. The IEA and other organizations' projections of demand and supply simply assume that increased demand will be met, mostly from the fields of Saudi Arabia. Until recently, Saudi production was even confidently expected to double over the next two decades. Yet neither the IEA nor any other non-OPEC organization has credible data on Middle Eastern reserves and output. To get a measure of how high in the sky this pie of limitless production capacity was, consider that analysts at present are reduced to guesstimating Saudi output by counting the number of tankers that leave the country's oil ports. Saudi authorities continue to promise that they will expand production to meet world consumption needs. But confidence in their ability to do so has waned sharply in recent months, as promises are one thing and performance is another. Worsening supply constraints appears to confirm skeptics� claims that the Saudis lack the production capacity to continue playing their longstanding linchpin role in global oil markets.
Peak oil theorists thus argue that with recoverable reserves of oil limited, energy costs are likely to increase. However, the serious peak oil warnings are coming from people like Matt Simmons, chairman of Simmons and Company International (www.simmonsco-intl.com), an oil investment bank and an advisor to US Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force. In other words, he's an oil industry insider. He even supports drilling in the highly fragile ecosystem of the Arctic, for example, which is anathema to most people outside of the oil industry. But he's also an intelligent and principled player in the oil markets, who began wondering a few years ago if optimistic outlooks for oil production, especially from Saudi Arabian oil fields, were realistic. Saudi Arabia, as noted above, is the only producer with the potential spare capacity to supply increasing demand. The key issue for Simmons was that 90% of Saudi production comes from just 5 big fields, about a half-century old, and there has been no credible data on production for over two decades.
We are, of course, talking about the world's most strategic resource, one used in so many products and processes - transportation, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc - that you can see dozens of examples without having to get out of your chair. Indeed, probably much of your chair is made out of oil. So ubiquitous is oil in the modern economy that sustained supply constraints can lead to price increases that flow in with the unstoppable force of a storm surge. Oil provides 40% of global energy and over 90% of transport fuel, as well as the fertilizers and pesticides and fuel that make possible the intensive, large-scale farming that feeds the roughly 6.3 billion people who live on the planet. Confronting declining production is an enormous challenge that we should be actively preparing for.
A Blind Eye to Peak Oil
Japan's mainstream media has studiously avoided addressing the issue of peak oil, even though the country has essentially no oil reserves. Searching the databases of the major Japanese newspapers yields one lone Asahi newspaper piece from last January 16. And searching google with the various Japanese translations of �peak oil� renders only a few hundred hits, whereas searching in the original English produces about 1,700,000 hits.
Indeed, there appears to surprising complacency in Japan in general concerning oil prices. Even as China scours the world in search of energy deals, Japan seems content with far less. Moreover, in negotiating energy deals with Russia, for example, the Japanese state seems as concerned to limit supplies to China as it is secure its own needs. This complacency is perhaps based on the belief that the energy price increases are temporary and are just as likely to be followed by a glut, as Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and several other analysts argue. If one believed this line of thinking, then heavy investment in expensive new supplies - as the Chinese are doing - would make little sense except as an expensive form of insurance. It could be that Japan, with the OECD's highest public debt as a ratio of GDP, is reluctant to spend money and thus very open to arguments that it really does not have to.
In addition, the Japanese are rightly proud of their proven ability to weather oil-price increases by increasing fuel efficiency. Static calculations suggest that Japan is far better equipped than the US and EU to deal with another round of price hikes. In its September 12 edition, Morgan Stanley's online newsletter reviewed recent calculations by the Cabinet Office�s Maeda Akira. The calculations indicate that oil would have to go to US$129 per barrel before Japan suffered a shock comparable to the 1979 second oil price shock. By contrast, the US and EU were far more vulnerable, as prices would only have to go to US$81 or US$77, respectively, before they suffered damage on the scale of 1979 and afterwards. Before prices went to those latter levels, the EU and the US would presumably do their utmost to bring them down. Japan could thus count on its western allies to act as tripwires and mobilize on oil prices long before it was forced to.
Yet with prices nearing those tripwire levels, much of the world is waking up to the threat. Though lagging far behind the internet, the mainstream international media certainly is catching on. On August 3, the Wall Street Journal ran an online special concerning peak oil with two experts, James Hamilton of the University of California at San Diego and Robert Kaufmann of Boston University's Center for Energy & Environmental Studies. Kaufman noted that "the peak isn't just an economic problem, it is one of the biggest social and political challenges for this century" and Hamilton agreed that "it's critical that we put all our resources to their best use" in confronting it. In short, these two mainstream economists (with reputations to protect in a very conservative age), went so far as to argue that there is a large role for government in organizing the response to peak oil. When two prominent American economists tell the Wall Street Journal that there's a big role for government in dealing with a problem, you know that the equivalent of a mountain-sized asteroid is on the way. And on August 21, the New York Times ran a long and well-researched article on the essential issues.
Unlike America, Japan's challenge isn't upping gasoline taxes in order to encourage fuel efficiency and discourage unnecessary driving in the world's most wasteful society. Japanese and European taxes on petroleum burden a barrel of oil by about $US80 to 90, while American fuel taxes are a very light touch at about $US11. Japan thus already has high fuel taxes, which in turn promote fuel efficiency and encourages use of mass transit. It also has perhaps the best record of cutting energy use per unit of economic output. Data for 2000 compiled by the Japanese Natural Resources and Energy Agency indicate that if Japan�s unit energy consumption per GDP in the industrial sector is set at 1, then that of the US is 1.65, the UK 1.33, France 1.1, and Germany 1.17. On the other hand, Japan has the worst performance among the industrialized states.
Eating Oil
How are food and oil related? They're actually intimately related, because we use oil for fertilizer, to fuel farm machinery, to make the plastic wrap and packages, to transport the produce, and so on. We literally and figuratively eat oil. For every calorie of food we eat, probably 10 or more calories of energy have been used in producing it.
Japan only produces 40 percent of its food supply. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), ranking 28th out of the 29 OECD countries. By comparison, the UK's food self-sufficiency ratio is 74, Germany's is 96, America's 125, and that of France is 132. Moreover, FAO data show that Japan�s self-sufficiency is declining, having dropped from 60 percent in 1970 to its present low level. By contrast, the UK has gone from 46 percent self-sufficiency in 1970 to its present ability to supply about three-quarters of its consumption. And German self-sufficiency in 1970 was a relatively low 68 percent compared to its nearly complete self-sufficiency today. These data underline the failure of Japan�s postwar agriculture policy. The self-sufficiency rate for rice in Japan is 100 percent, but only 14 percent for wheat, 6 percent for beans, 82 percent for vegetables, 44 percent for fruits, 54 percent for meat and 57 percent for seafood.
As noted above, Japanese consumers already "eat" a very great deal of oil. Not only is there much domestic haulage, but the more than 60 million tons of food imported annually is transported over great distances as in the case of North American grain and fruit, and Australian beef. Japanese attention to the food problem, however, has thus far centred on the amount of food wasted and the environmental impact of the greenhouse gases give off. For example, Japanese government calculations indicate that in fiscal 2002, 725 kilocalories per capita of food were thrown out per day. The cumulative total represents about 11 trillion yen in wasted food, which is about twice what Japan will spend on national defence in 2005 and thus hardly small potatoes. A Food Recycling Law passed in 2001 will compel food-related businesses to trim 20 percent from the amount they discard by fiscal 2006.
The food-waste focus of this law has deflected Japanese concern from the fossil-fuels consumed in producing and shipping the country�s food. The UK became a world leader in studies of energy use and food transport in the wake of the 1994 release of the UK SAFE Alliance�s �Food Miles Report". Some of the research results stimulated by this report are striking. The British group, Sustain, authors of a 2001 report, "Eating Oil" (www.sustainweb.org/pdf/eatoil_sumary.PDF) calculate that 127 calories of fuel are burned for each calorie of lettuce flown into the UK from Los Angeles. In effect, oil is being squandered to distance airlift a product that is essentially water. Japan is hardly alone in failing to produce data on these critical issues. But the magnitute of the problem for Japan is acute.
Food Mileage
The extent of this transportation of foodstuffs can be calculated as "food mileage" by multiplying the transportation distance with the volume of food transported. The higher the food mileage, the larger the burden that a particular country places on fossil-fuel resources, as well as the global environment. In the era of cheap oil, these burdens were negative externalities that were largely ignored. But as the costs mount and become more visible, increasing questions are being raised about food mileage and other energy issues shaping food consumption.
Japan's total food mileage in 2001 was a massive 900 billion ton-kilometres. This was more than three times that of the United States. But the numbers are even more startling when seen in per capita terms. Each Japanese consumer annually consumed 7093 ton-kilometres of food whereas consumers in the US consumed 1051. Even Britain, another island nation, took only 3195 ton-kilometres per capita.
And note the cost in CO2. Intuitively, we assume that the heart of the carbon problem is associated with auto emissions. Probably this is because the US, with 4 percent of the world�s population, produces about 25 percent of CO2 emissions and has an enormous number of very polluting automobiles. Yet even in the US, automobile emissions make up only 20 percent of the total. We can see why if we look at the UK�s "Eating Oil" report again. It turns out that the family car is not the biggest domestic culprit in producing CO2. For the UK, "The food system is a significant contributor to climate change. A typical UK family of four would, each year, emit 4.2 tonnes of CO2 from their house, 4.4 tonnes from their car, and 8 tonnes from the production, processing, packaging and distribution of the food they eat.� Though comparable data apparently do not yet exist for Japan, the relative breakdowns are probably comparable to Britain�s. If anything, the relative amounts emitted from the average Japanese family home and automobile are perhaps less than in the UK, while Japan�s much greater food mileage likely means that more CO2 is emitted getting food to their tables.
Moving towards food self-sufficiency will not resolve Japan�s food mileage problem. Imports are unlikely ever to be displaced entirely, and it is not even clear that they ought to be in a number of bulk commodities. Yet increased food self-sufficiency is a reasonable goal for Japan. Other countries have boosted their self-sufficiency in the interests of food security and for other reasons. Even with cuts in food miles, the long-distance transport of produce in domestic markets would remain, in spite of Japan�s emerging boom in �chisan chisho� (produce and consume locally) activism. Yet the fossil fuel consumed by � and pollution emitted from - domestic transport can generally be greatly reduced through the use, wherever possible, of rail transport in place of air, water and road transport. Marine shipping is regarded as energy efficient; but it generally involves very long distances and consumes the dirtiest fuel available, bunker oil, making a large bulk carrier as polluting as about 12,000 cars Of course, even to talk of the need to promote agricultural self-sufficiency in Japan is to elicit guffaws or even outright condemnation in an era when leaving things to the market is generally seen as the only responsible and realistic course.
Promoting agricultural self-sufficiency is seen as particularly wasteful and pointless because it generally requires subsidies and higher prices than the free market. The clear threat of peak oil, however, makes it unwise to wait and see whether accelerating oil prices will make domestic production more attractive. In 2001 Japan produced a �food crisis manual� that envisioned a crisis of supply due to abnormal weather in Japan, poor harvests overseas, reduced agricultural production due to global warming, and disruption of world trade due to regional conflicts. The manual essentially advises that potatoes and other starchy tubers be grown virtually everywhere and even in place of the rice crop. Surely it would be prudent to use this ongoing crisis to save oil and build up a sustainable agriculture sector to boot.
Sources
Oil and Peak Oil
The Oil Drum is a regularly updated blog, managed by academics in the energy field and the social sciences. http://www.theoildrum.com/
The Energy Bulletin is a regularly updated index of articles, sorted into a wide range of useful categories. http://www.energybulletin.net/index.php
Matthew Simmons, Chairman of Simmons International, uploads his presentations here. http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/research.aspx?Type=msspeeches
Food Mileage
The UK Food Miles site is managed by Sustain: The alliance for better food and farming http://www.sustainweb.org/chain_fm_index.asp
The BBC introduction to food miles http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/foodmiles.shtml
A new Japanese site Japanese site on food mileage and CO2 emissions (rather than oil consumption) http://www.food-mileage.com/ (This site is run by the "daichi wo mamoru kai" or "association to protect the earth"; their home page is http://www.daichi.or.jp/)
Notes on Japan's food mileage in English can be found in a translation of the Environment Ministry's 2003 report http://www.env.go.jp/en/w-paper02/2003/fulll.pdf
A Japanese government page on the "local production, local consumption" movement is http://www.chushi.maff.go.jp/chisanchisyo/
Andrew DEWIT is associate professor of Economics at Rikkyo University in Tokyo and a Japan Focus coordinator. He wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted September 22, 2005. The author can be contacted by e-mail at dewit@rikkyo.ne.jp
Peak Oil and Japan's Food Dependence
22 September 2005 Oil Food Security
In Brief: US invest bank Morgan Stanley claims that Japan is far less vulnerable to high oil prices than Europe or America. Furthermore, problems in the West would act as 'tripwires' to trigger action on oil prices before Japan suffered any damage.
Extract
In its September 12 edition, Morgan Stanley's online newsletter reviewed recent calculations by the Cabinet Office�s Maeda Akira. The calculations indicate that oil would have to go to US$129 per barrel before Japan suffered a shock comparable to the 1979 second oil price shock. By contrast, the US and EU were far more vulnerable, as prices would only have to go to US$81 or US$77, respectively, before they suffered damage on the scale of 1979 and afterwards. Before prices went to those latter levels, the EU and the US would presumably do their utmost to bring them down. Japan could thus count on its western allies to act as tripwires and mobilize on oil prices long before it was forced to.
�Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century, and one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over.� Chevron
Over the past year, benchmark oil prices shot up from a little over US$40 per barrel and reached just over $70 a few weeks ago. As of this writing, prices have fallen back to about $64, but that probably reflects the end of the summer driving season in the US, which somewhat reduces pressure on gasoline supplies. A lot of optimism also animates the markets, in spite of the havoc Hurricane Katrina wreaked on American oil production and refining capacity. The markets look to the International Energy Agency's (IEA) early September decision to coordinate a release of 2 million barrels of oil and oil products per day, for at least 30 days, from its 26 member countries' strategic reserves and supplies.
These developments appear to have helped the global economy avoid becoming instantly impaled on the over $100 per barrel oil "superspike" predicted by Goldman Sachs last April. Yet supplies of refined products remain tight everywhere, leading Japanese producers for example to look askance at their government's commitment to ship gasoline to the US where refineries are unlikely to be brought online again very soon. On top of that, damage from repeated hurricanes, including Ivan last year and Dennis nearly two months ago, greatly set back production in new fields in the Gulf of Mexico. An anticipated new flow of 600,000 barrels per day by 2007 has been slashed by half. Moreover, as we head towards fall and winter, current projections are that heating oil and natural gas prices are likely to climb by as much as 24 percent from their current elevated levels. These developments have led energy analysts, who last year predicted an average oil price of $39 per barrel for this year (as of mid-September the average is $54.77), to revise their estimates. For example, after looking at supply constraints and the continuing expansion of demand, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's chief economist now estimates that oil prices are likely to average $84 a barrel in 2006, $93 in 2007, and $100 in the fourth quarter of 2007.
In short, there is clearly something fundamentally wrong with the oil supply, something that allows temporary disruptions from political unrest, storm damage and the like to become increasingly serious crises. The recent damage from Hurricane Katrina, for example, will depress American oil production and refining by several percentage points of total capacity. In the past, this spare capacity would have filled the gap. Yet now, in spite of the IEA's efforts to coordinate a fix on a global scale, the shortfall in American production threatens instead to ripple around the world and generate further upward pressure on prices.
Many credible analysts and experts suggest that a large part of the problem is peak oil. The peak is from a model of oil production named after the geophysicist M King Hubbert, who worked for Shell Oil. Hubbert estimated total US reserves and calculated when output from them would be at maximum, based on the observed rate of depletion of individual oil fields. Contrary to what a lot of people - especially hyper-optimistic economists - appear to believe, oil fields are not underground lakes of petroleum, waiting to be sucked up like the contents of a milkshake. Rather, they are formations of oil-bearing rock under pressure, and without maintenance of sufficient pressure around the area where a given well is drilled there is no economically feasible way to extract the oil. Oil fields are said to be depleted when it takes an equivalent amount of energy - through injecting water, natural gas, and so on - to extract the oil as is obtained from the extracted oil itself. There is thus plenty of oil - sometimes nearly half of the initial deposit - left in depleted oil fields. Hubbert determined that the exploitation of fields followed a bell-curve shaped trajectory from the initial drilling through to depletion. After the peak of the bell-curve, there is a gradual but inexorable decline in production.
Based on his model, Hubbert predicted that American oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, approximately 40 years after the peak in US oil discoveries. He gave a paper on his theory in 1956 at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, and was regarded as crazy. But he turned out to be right, as American oil production peaked in 1971. Subsequently, about 50 oil-producing countries have reached their production peak. These countries include the former Soviet Union (which peaked in 1987), Brunei (1979), Libya (1970), Iran (1974), and Indonesia (1997). The peak in global oil discoveries occurred in 1964, and new applications of Hubbert's model suggest that global production should be reaching its maximum rather soon and then start falling. Optimistic studies suggest that 2020 will be the peak; more realistic models indicate that it will arrive later in this decade. The peak oil hypothesis is, therefore, that global oil production is at maximum output already, or shortly will be, and that oil production will subsequently decline. One expects, in this scenario, that easily recovered and cheaply processed oil is the first to peak out, followed by deposits in hard to reach areas (such as beneath the oceans) and/or with plenty of sulfur and other impurities.
Shell Canada, for example, has announced that it will increase its investment in the Alberta tar sands to $7.3 billion from $4 billion, in the hope of producing an additional 100,000 barrels a day. This is a huge capital expenditure for a relatively small increment in output. This and other examples suggested, as peak oil theorists warn, that we are at the end of an era of plentiful and inexpensive hydrocarbon-based energy, which will require a massive commitment to conservation and finding alternative energy sources.The threat of peaking oil output is made all the more serious by demand that continues to surge, driven not only by expanding US consumption, but by rapidly rising demand from China, India and other developing nations. Analysts note in particular that over 40 percent of recent increases in global demand for oil is from China, and that it is driven by the growth of income and almost insensitive to price. According to the IEA's own data, global oil demand of about 84 million barrels per day is running smack into an equivalent production capacity, leaving no spare capacity at all in the event of unforeseen problems.
There is no precedent for this situation, as previous energy crises have been the consequence of deliberate restrictions on supply. Oil - and especially cheap oil - is of course a finite resource, but for more than a century, production volumes have always matched demand. The IEA and other organizations' projections of demand and supply simply assume that increased demand will be met, mostly from the fields of Saudi Arabia. Until recently, Saudi production was even confidently expected to double over the next two decades. Yet neither the IEA nor any other non-OPEC organization has credible data on Middle Eastern reserves and output. To get a measure of how high in the sky this pie of limitless production capacity was, consider that analysts at present are reduced to guesstimating Saudi output by counting the number of tankers that leave the country's oil ports. Saudi authorities continue to promise that they will expand production to meet world consumption needs. But confidence in their ability to do so has waned sharply in recent months, as promises are one thing and performance is another. Worsening supply constraints appears to confirm skeptics� claims that the Saudis lack the production capacity to continue playing their longstanding linchpin role in global oil markets.
Peak oil theorists thus argue that with recoverable reserves of oil limited, energy costs are likely to increase. However, the serious peak oil warnings are coming from people like Matt Simmons, chairman of Simmons and Company International (www.simmonsco-intl.com), an oil investment bank and an advisor to US Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force. In other words, he's an oil industry insider. He even supports drilling in the highly fragile ecosystem of the Arctic, for example, which is anathema to most people outside of the oil industry. But he's also an intelligent and principled player in the oil markets, who began wondering a few years ago if optimistic outlooks for oil production, especially from Saudi Arabian oil fields, were realistic. Saudi Arabia, as noted above, is the only producer with the potential spare capacity to supply increasing demand. The key issue for Simmons was that 90% of Saudi production comes from just 5 big fields, about a half-century old, and there has been no credible data on production for over two decades.
We are, of course, talking about the world's most strategic resource, one used in so many products and processes - transportation, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc - that you can see dozens of examples without having to get out of your chair. Indeed, probably much of your chair is made out of oil. So ubiquitous is oil in the modern economy that sustained supply constraints can lead to price increases that flow in with the unstoppable force of a storm surge. Oil provides 40% of global energy and over 90% of transport fuel, as well as the fertilizers and pesticides and fuel that make possible the intensive, large-scale farming that feeds the roughly 6.3 billion people who live on the planet. Confronting declining production is an enormous challenge that we should be actively preparing for.
A Blind Eye to Peak Oil
Japan's mainstream media has studiously avoided addressing the issue of peak oil, even though the country has essentially no oil reserves. Searching the databases of the major Japanese newspapers yields one lone Asahi newspaper piece from last January 16. And searching google with the various Japanese translations of �peak oil� renders only a few hundred hits, whereas searching in the original English produces about 1,700,000 hits.
Indeed, there appears to surprising complacency in Japan in general concerning oil prices. Even as China scours the world in search of energy deals, Japan seems content with far less. Moreover, in negotiating energy deals with Russia, for example, the Japanese state seems as concerned to limit supplies to China as it is secure its own needs. This complacency is perhaps based on the belief that the energy price increases are temporary and are just as likely to be followed by a glut, as Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and several other analysts argue. If one believed this line of thinking, then heavy investment in expensive new supplies - as the Chinese are doing - would make little sense except as an expensive form of insurance. It could be that Japan, with the OECD's highest public debt as a ratio of GDP, is reluctant to spend money and thus very open to arguments that it really does not have to.
In addition, the Japanese are rightly proud of their proven ability to weather oil-price increases by increasing fuel efficiency. Static calculations suggest that Japan is far better equipped than the US and EU to deal with another round of price hikes. In its September 12 edition, Morgan Stanley's online newsletter reviewed recent calculations by the Cabinet Office�s Maeda Akira. The calculations indicate that oil would have to go to US$129 per barrel before Japan suffered a shock comparable to the 1979 second oil price shock. By contrast, the US and EU were far more vulnerable, as prices would only have to go to US$81 or US$77, respectively, before they suffered damage on the scale of 1979 and afterwards. Before prices went to those latter levels, the EU and the US would presumably do their utmost to bring them down. Japan could thus count on its western allies to act as tripwires and mobilize on oil prices long before it was forced to.
Yet with prices nearing those tripwire levels, much of the world is waking up to the threat. Though lagging far behind the internet, the mainstream international media certainly is catching on. On August 3, the Wall Street Journal ran an online special concerning peak oil with two experts, James Hamilton of the University of California at San Diego and Robert Kaufmann of Boston University's Center for Energy & Environmental Studies. Kaufman noted that "the peak isn't just an economic problem, it is one of the biggest social and political challenges for this century" and Hamilton agreed that "it's critical that we put all our resources to their best use" in confronting it. In short, these two mainstream economists (with reputations to protect in a very conservative age), went so far as to argue that there is a large role for government in organizing the response to peak oil. When two prominent American economists tell the Wall Street Journal that there's a big role for government in dealing with a problem, you know that the equivalent of a mountain-sized asteroid is on the way. And on August 21, the New York Times ran a long and well-researched article on the essential issues.
Unlike America, Japan's challenge isn't upping gasoline taxes in order to encourage fuel efficiency and discourage unnecessary driving in the world's most wasteful society. Japanese and European taxes on petroleum burden a barrel of oil by about $US80 to 90, while American fuel taxes are a very light touch at about $US11. Japan thus already has high fuel taxes, which in turn promote fuel efficiency and encourages use of mass transit. It also has perhaps the best record of cutting energy use per unit of economic output. Data for 2000 compiled by the Japanese Natural Resources and Energy Agency indicate that if Japan�s unit energy consumption per GDP in the industrial sector is set at 1, then that of the US is 1.65, the UK 1.33, France 1.1, and Germany 1.17. On the other hand, Japan has the worst performance among the industrialized states.
Eating Oil
How are food and oil related? They're actually intimately related, because we use oil for fertilizer, to fuel farm machinery, to make the plastic wrap and packages, to transport the produce, and so on. We literally and figuratively eat oil. For every calorie of food we eat, probably 10 or more calories of energy have been used in producing it.
Japan only produces 40 percent of its food supply. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), ranking 28th out of the 29 OECD countries. By comparison, the UK's food self-sufficiency ratio is 74, Germany's is 96, America's 125, and that of France is 132. Moreover, FAO data show that Japan�s self-sufficiency is declining, having dropped from 60 percent in 1970 to its present low level. By contrast, the UK has gone from 46 percent self-sufficiency in 1970 to its present ability to supply about three-quarters of its consumption. And German self-sufficiency in 1970 was a relatively low 68 percent compared to its nearly complete self-sufficiency today. These data underline the failure of Japan�s postwar agriculture policy. The self-sufficiency rate for rice in Japan is 100 percent, but only 14 percent for wheat, 6 percent for beans, 82 percent for vegetables, 44 percent for fruits, 54 percent for meat and 57 percent for seafood.
As noted above, Japanese consumers already "eat" a very great deal of oil. Not only is there much domestic haulage, but the more than 60 million tons of food imported annually is transported over great distances as in the case of North American grain and fruit, and Australian beef. Japanese attention to the food problem, however, has thus far centred on the amount of food wasted and the environmental impact of the greenhouse gases give off. For example, Japanese government calculations indicate that in fiscal 2002, 725 kilocalories per capita of food were thrown out per day. The cumulative total represents about 11 trillion yen in wasted food, which is about twice what Japan will spend on national defence in 2005 and thus hardly small potatoes. A Food Recycling Law passed in 2001 will compel food-related businesses to trim 20 percent from the amount they discard by fiscal 2006.
The food-waste focus of this law has deflected Japanese concern from the fossil-fuels consumed in producing and shipping the country�s food. The UK became a world leader in studies of energy use and food transport in the wake of the 1994 release of the UK SAFE Alliance�s �Food Miles Report". Some of the research results stimulated by this report are striking. The British group, Sustain, authors of a 2001 report, "Eating Oil" (www.sustainweb.org/pdf/eatoil_sumary.PDF) calculate that 127 calories of fuel are burned for each calorie of lettuce flown into the UK from Los Angeles. In effect, oil is being squandered to distance airlift a product that is essentially water. Japan is hardly alone in failing to produce data on these critical issues. But the magnitute of the problem for Japan is acute.
Food Mileage
The extent of this transportation of foodstuffs can be calculated as "food mileage" by multiplying the transportation distance with the volume of food transported. The higher the food mileage, the larger the burden that a particular country places on fossil-fuel resources, as well as the global environment. In the era of cheap oil, these burdens were negative externalities that were largely ignored. But as the costs mount and become more visible, increasing questions are being raised about food mileage and other energy issues shaping food consumption.
Japan's total food mileage in 2001 was a massive 900 billion ton-kilometres. This was more than three times that of the United States. But the numbers are even more startling when seen in per capita terms. Each Japanese consumer annually consumed 7093 ton-kilometres of food whereas consumers in the US consumed 1051. Even Britain, another island nation, took only 3195 ton-kilometres per capita.
And note the cost in CO2. Intuitively, we assume that the heart of the carbon problem is associated with auto emissions. Probably this is because the US, with 4 percent of the world�s population, produces about 25 percent of CO2 emissions and has an enormous number of very polluting automobiles. Yet even in the US, automobile emissions make up only 20 percent of the total. We can see why if we look at the UK�s "Eating Oil" report again. It turns out that the family car is not the biggest domestic culprit in producing CO2. For the UK, "The food system is a significant contributor to climate change. A typical UK family of four would, each year, emit 4.2 tonnes of CO2 from their house, 4.4 tonnes from their car, and 8 tonnes from the production, processing, packaging and distribution of the food they eat.� Though comparable data apparently do not yet exist for Japan, the relative breakdowns are probably comparable to Britain�s. If anything, the relative amounts emitted from the average Japanese family home and automobile are perhaps less than in the UK, while Japan�s much greater food mileage likely means that more CO2 is emitted getting food to their tables.
Moving towards food self-sufficiency will not resolve Japan�s food mileage problem. Imports are unlikely ever to be displaced entirely, and it is not even clear that they ought to be in a number of bulk commodities. Yet increased food self-sufficiency is a reasonable goal for Japan. Other countries have boosted their self-sufficiency in the interests of food security and for other reasons. Even with cuts in food miles, the long-distance transport of produce in domestic markets would remain, in spite of Japan�s emerging boom in �chisan chisho� (produce and consume locally) activism. Yet the fossil fuel consumed by � and pollution emitted from - domestic transport can generally be greatly reduced through the use, wherever possible, of rail transport in place of air, water and road transport. Marine shipping is regarded as energy efficient; but it generally involves very long distances and consumes the dirtiest fuel available, bunker oil, making a large bulk carrier as polluting as about 12,000 cars Of course, even to talk of the need to promote agricultural self-sufficiency in Japan is to elicit guffaws or even outright condemnation in an era when leaving things to the market is generally seen as the only responsible and realistic course.
Promoting agricultural self-sufficiency is seen as particularly wasteful and pointless because it generally requires subsidies and higher prices than the free market. The clear threat of peak oil, however, makes it unwise to wait and see whether accelerating oil prices will make domestic production more attractive. In 2001 Japan produced a �food crisis manual� that envisioned a crisis of supply due to abnormal weather in Japan, poor harvests overseas, reduced agricultural production due to global warming, and disruption of world trade due to regional conflicts. The manual essentially advises that potatoes and other starchy tubers be grown virtually everywhere and even in place of the rice crop. Surely it would be prudent to use this ongoing crisis to save oil and build up a sustainable agriculture sector to boot.
Sources
Oil and Peak Oil
The Oil Drum is a regularly updated blog, managed by academics in the energy field and the social sciences. http://www.theoildrum.com/
The Energy Bulletin is a regularly updated index of articles, sorted into a wide range of useful categories. http://www.energybulletin.net/index.php
Matthew Simmons, Chairman of Simmons International, uploads his presentations here. http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/research.aspx?Type=msspeeches
Food Mileage
The UK Food Miles site is managed by Sustain: The alliance for better food and farming http://www.sustainweb.org/chain_fm_index.asp
The BBC introduction to food miles http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/foodmiles.shtml
A new Japanese site Japanese site on food mileage and CO2 emissions (rather than oil consumption) http://www.food-mileage.com/ (This site is run by the "daichi wo mamoru kai" or "association to protect the earth"; their home page is http://www.daichi.or.jp/)
Notes on Japan's food mileage in English can be found in a translation of the Environment Ministry's 2003 report http://www.env.go.jp/en/w-paper02/2003/fulll.pdf
A Japanese government page on the "local production, local consumption" movement is http://www.chushi.maff.go.jp/chisanchisyo/
Andrew DEWIT is associate professor of Economics at Rikkyo University in Tokyo and a Japan Focus coordinator. He wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted September 22, 2005. The author can be contacted by e-mail at dewit@rikkyo.ne.jp
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/events/516
Roscoe Bartlett Energy Conference, Part 1
28 September 2005 Oil
In Brief: On September 26, 2005, Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett held an energy conference with participants Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, Matthew Simmons, Richard Heinberg, Donald Wulfinghoff, John Spears and John Howe. This is a transcript of that conference.
REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, MARYLAND 6TH DISTRICT, 2005 ENERGY CONFERENCE
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005, 9:00 A.M. - 12:00 NOON
FREDERICK COMMUNITY COLLEGE, FREDERICK, MARYLAND
PARTICIPANTS: DR. KENNETH DEFFEYES, MATTHEW SIMMONS, RICHARD HEINBERG, DONALD WULFINGHOFF, JOHN SPEARS, JOHN HOWE
Transcript by: Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.
REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE G. BARTLETT (R-MD): Good morning and thank you all very much for coming. This is kind of like coming home to me. I worked here for 12 years at the community college, taught anatomy and physiology to the nursing students and also taught a biology course. And when the publishers saw that I taught a biology course, they all sent me their textbooks hoping that I would adopt it for the class of course and then they could sell some textbooks. And so over my desk went all of the textbooks in biology. And all of them had chapters on energy and environment and so forth. And I would read those. And so my concern about the subject that we're talking about today is more than 30 years old because I have been reading and thinking about this for at least 30 years now.
I really appreciate you all coming and especially appreciative of the members of the panels that have come. We have here today represented some of the experts from around the country and indeed around the world. I would just mention them briefly now - who they are - and then introduce them in more detail a little later.
Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, professor. He worked with M. King Hubbert. Many of you may not know who M. King Hubbert is. I'm sure you will after today's session. You'll know who it is. And he will be talking to us about his concerns about the world's energy resources.
Matt Simmons is the president. I spoke with the president about energy and mentioned Matt. Oh, yes, I know Matt. Matt was his energy advisor during his first campaign and his second campaign. He is president and CEO. I guess you have relinquished one of those titles now so that he can spend more time to education of the largest energy investment banks in the world.
He has a new book out called "Twilight in the Desert" - intriguing title. And it's about Saudi Arabia and his concerns that Saudi Arabia probably has peaked in oil production. You may have noticed that when OPEC gets together and when the oil sheikhs come here they don't promise that they are going to pump a lot more oil to bring the price of oil and gas down. I think they are not promising because they can't produce more oil.
Richard Heinberg - and I'm really envious of him. He has taken the two best titles for books: "The Party is Over," is the title of one of his books. And the second title - really great title is "Power Down," because as you'll see in today's conference, that is exactly what we're going to have to do.
Then our second panel is going to do deal with what do we do about it? How do we transition so that we have a relatively soft landing? Donald Wulfinghoff - and he has written really a tall, an enormous book on energy conservation in buildings. He is perhaps the world's authority on energy conservation in buildings, which, by the way, is where we use our most energy. Most conspicuously we use energy in transportation, but we use most of it in our buildings and he'll talk about that.
John Spears - what does sustainability look like? How do we get there? And John Howe. John is a retired engineer in New England, and he has been pioneering this. He has written two books. And he has been giving these books away because he just is so concerned that Americans need to know about the energy crisis and what is coming.
I have a couple of slides to kind of give us started here. Okay, we need to go back six decades to kind of put this in context. During the '40s and '50s, and a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert worked for the Shell Oil Company, and he noticed the exploitation of individual oil fields, and they all seemed to following a bell curve.
Now, most people know what a bell curve is. If you are noting the size of people - some of them are very short, some are very tall, but most of us is somewhere in the middle, and if you put all those down, you get a bell curve. And he noticed that the exploitation and exhaustion of these oil fields followed a bell curve. Then about halfway through it reached a peak and the second half of oil, logically, was more difficult to get than the first half.
The green there, the smooth green curve shows his prediction, and the more ragged curves shows the actual data points he predicted in 1956 that the United States would peak in 1970 and right on target the United States peaked in 1970, in spite of feverish drilling. I read the other day that maybe 80 percent of all of the oil wells drilled in the world have been drilled in this country. In spite of feverish drilling, it's been downhill ever since.
The red curve there is Russia - a bit more oil than we. And they picked a bit after us. And you see that they kind of fell off when the Soviet Union came apart. They are going to have a second much smaller peak because of the disarray that occurred there when the Soviet Union dissolved.
The next slide. The next slide is a schematic and this is a very interesting slide. The U-curve there or the parabolic curve there is the - the exponential curve, is a 2 percent growth, just 2 percent growth. From the beginning of the yellow to the end of the yellow is 35 years because that is the amount of time it takes with 2 percent compounded growth to double.
And what this shows is that if peak oil occurs at the point where it is shown there, that you start to have problems when the two curves diverge, because China increased their use of oil last year by about 15 percent. They increased their imports by 25 percent. And so for those who believe that peak oil is in the future -- probably. But we're now seeing the effects of it.
You know, there are three things that are not controversial. M. King Hubbert predicted that the United States would peak in 1970. We did. He predicted the world would peak about now and oil this morning was over $64 a barrel. So those are inescapable facts.
The next curve - the next chart. The next chart - this depicts the challenge that we have. And this is a little depiction of the Apollo 13. And they had started on their way to the moon, you noticed, and things collapsed, and they had to really make some changes if they were going to get back alive. This is a pretty good analogy. It's not that we're all going to die if we don't do the right things, and they all would have died if they didn't do the right things. But, boy, they had to do the right things at the right time or they weren't going to have a smooth landing. And there was a great movie made of that. I'm sure many of you have seen that movie.
Well, let's move now into our first presenter, Dr. Deffeyes. He had the privilege of working with M. King Hubbert. I hope he tells us something about that. He is author and Princeton University professor emeritus. He joined the Shell research lab where M. King Hubbert had recently issued his controversial predictions that U.S. oil production would peak during the '70s. It peaked at 1970, some people say '71, but about then.
After reworking Hubbert's numbers, Dr. Deffeyes sought other employment. He is the author of "Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage," and his new book, "Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak." He makes the case that world oil production is no longer increasing. Dr. Deffeyes.
(Applause.)
KENNETH DEFFEYES: This is a historic occasion in that a conservative congressman, an independent banker, and Ivy League democrat, and a radical social critic are telling you that we have arrived at the same answer. And it's - you better believe it - time. (Laughter.)
Now, if you want to make an author feel bad, this is a logo off of the coffee cup, my 40,000-word book reduced to a coffee cup - (laughter) - but it pretty well - it gives the message saying that it's wakeup time and we have to take this seriously. This is M. King Hubbert's original 1956 graph, except I have added the dots to show what happened. And the peak fit pretty well, and the 19 - wrong one - this shoulder is Prudhoe Bay kicking in - biggest oil field ever in the United States wasn't big enough to give us new high bigger than the 1970 peak.
Now, this could have staggered on upwards. And Matt Simmons' expression is you only see it in the rearview mirror. But one of the clues that I got at least was that the Texas Railroad Commission in 1972 removed production rationing in Texas. Before that, they were the OPEC of its day and regulated - excuse me - he would talk in Portland late last week. It was a nice audience of 300 people, one of whom had a bad cold. (Laughter.) I had brought it home.
But the bell-shaped curve worked out. And this is my most recent book. And the reason that I'm telling you about it is that I was able to - excuse me - to simplify Hubbert's mathematical derivation. And this is United States oil production. For the reason you just heard, it's the most explored area in the world. And after 1958, it settles down to a pretty good straight line. So with your permission, my computer and I draw the best-fitting straight line from 1958 on and once you let me draw that straight line, it's all over.
The three lines of high-school algebra up at the top are an alternative derivation of Hubbert's theory. And the only difference is he goes from A to B, and pages and pages of heavy deferential equations, and I go from B to A in three lines of high-school algebra. You get the same answer. The first equation is just the equation of a straight line. The second equation I plug in the things that are on the graph, P over Q is the vertical axis, and I go through and substitute what is on this actual graph. And on the third equation, I multiply both sides by Q. Now, that is the Hubbert theory.
And what it says is that the heavy magic is inside the parenthesis. What is inside the parenthesis is the fraction of oil that hasn't been produced yet. Or if you're doing exploration, it's the fraction of oil that hasn't been found yet. And the analogy is to fishing in a pond. If you notice after fishing several months in a pond, you're not catching as many fish, you can decide you'll go to the fishing tackle store and buy a fancy new fly rod - you know, new technology - or you can decide that you have caught most of the fish and you're going to go the grocery store and buy fish.
So the thing inside the parenthesis is the fraction of oil that hasn't been produced yet and what is not inside the parenthesis is the price of oil, which gripes economists - no end and new technology, which grips new technologists. And the answer is new technology and high oil prices help but they don't help very much. The big deal is how many fish are still left in the pond.
Now, this is Hubbert in 1968 predicting world oil production. And the 1968 curve, the more optimistic one peaks in the year 2000, and he has - 2000 - 100 billion barrels. Now, Hubert's critics say, well, 2000 came and went, you know. It didn't peak. Hubbert is wrong. But, look, for the standpoint of 1968, this is pretty good shooting to get to within five years of the year and to get to within about 3 percent of the total amount of oil.
Now, this is M. King Hubbert in the 1930s. He was no easier to get along with then than he was - (chuckles) - later in life. But it's interesting, I got a letter from a crystallographer long since retired who said I knew Hubbert at Columbia University in the 1930s. And he was interested in the problem even then. And looking back, I suspect that the first time - 1956, that the story was mature enough that he could see the answer he pounced.
Now, for the world - and we're getting to the core of the story here - after 1983, the world production settles down to a pretty good straight line, and there is one more black dot - because I had to release this to the publisher before the 2004 numbers came out - so the 2004 numbers - another black dot jammed between there and the plus mark. The plus mark is when half of the oil is being produced, and that third equation, a couple of slides back, had as one of its consequences that the peak of production occurs at the symmetry point when half of the oil has been produced.
And so I got an enlarged version of this and counted forward. And that is where I got to Thanksgiving Day this year, saying that that is my estimate of the peak. Now, I did that to make the economists nervous. It really is uncertain by about three weeks on either side. (Laughter.)
Now, this came across the Dow Jones newswire in 2003. And to me, it's almost an identical replica of the Texas Railroad Commission announcement that there would be no production rationing in Texas next month, and saying we don't have any surplus production capacity. And Matt Simmons' book confirms this view, but I took this as the first announcement that we knew - that I knew the world oil peak was real.
Now, this is the glubiest (ph) of the all of the diagrams, and it says that - sorry, these are attributing the oil to the first well in the field. When you drill a discovery well and you don't get oil, what do you do? Well, you keep drilling horizontally and vertically until you drill up the oil field. But it's an irreversible event. You don't get to discover that oil field a second time and you're not going to forget where your discovery well was. So this says that 90 percent - sorry, 96 percent of all of the oil we're ever going to find is in oil fields we have already discovered. And the - I don't have to extrapolate very far. That is where my 2013 billion barrels comes from is where that line hits the axis.
Now, the U.S. Geological Survey has an enormously more optimistic estimate. They have to find another Middle East plus another North Sea to come out even to fill in that gap between my estimate and theirs. Now, for the United States, they have estimated that there is another Kuwait undiscovered beneath the United States. Of course I tell them, hey, whisper in my ear where that sucker is. (Laughter.) I'll go have these with you. Is it South Alabama? So - because it doesn't exist.
But this is the gloom-and-doom picture. Now, when I put those same curves, the actual numbers and the best-fitting curves on a cumulative graph, the Bell-shape curve becomes and S-shaped curve. And the thing that is labeled exploration is the 6 percent that is not yet discovered. But the thing I have named after my friend Bob Snyder (sp) is now that the buzz word, "redevelopment" - going back and looking at old oil fields, existing oil fields - not for secondary recovery or tertiary recovery, but for overlooked productive oil sands. And in West Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, Bob Snyder found or bought some 60 oil fields and found several hundred million barrels of additional oil. And had an after-tax cash flow rate of return of 17 percent. So just a stunning performance.
And there are some companies doing that. And when I talk to financial firms, I tell them, if you find any company that is doing a good job of redevelopment, you know, call me collect; I want to invest in those. With the best rumor, if you're into financing, is that XTO, Cross Timbers Oil out of Forth Worth, is doing a good job. I haven't bought XTO yet. I'm looking into it. So this is the picture saying there is a considerable amount of the oil can be developed from existing fields. And it's not that it's not in the estimates. It's something that is going to happen.
Now, everyone asks about price. And here are natural gas prices in the United States. This is first sale of natural gas down the stream from the producing well. And the Henry Hubb's stock spot market prices look a lot like this only wilder. And the thing - it's very smooth up until about 1985. Then you start seeing little wintertime peaks, and then it just goes crazy. And the stock spot market price at Henry Hubb Louisiana - I think it was $17 the day before yesterday, the last time I looked. We are going into the winter with already high-midwinter prices. The current price is way off the top of this screen here.
Come on, baby. All right, now there is some essential services. (Laughter.) This is an ambulance that we want to make sure that we have got oil for. And we don't - you see the Red Cross on the side of the ambulance there. Here are industries that are going to get pretty hard. And the big ones are at the top of the alphabet. The zymurgy is just the industrial use of yeast to make wine and cheese and bread. (Laughter.)
But up at the top, agriculture is at great risk because the green revolution of 1970 that made starving to death no longer fashionable was based on new seed varieties, heavy use of mineral fertilizers, and pesticides. Now, the pesticides are mostly petrochemicals. And the mineral fertilizers, the nitrogen requires natural gas for the source of hydrogen to take nitrogen out of the atmosphere. And the phosphate is very energy intensive, converting rock phosphate to soluble superphosphate. So agriculture - excuse me - and particularly third-world agriculture is at risk.
Now, the automotive business - it isn't a matter of simply CAFE standards, raising the required mileage. One opportunity that I think is being missed - there are diesel automobiles. And if you look up on Google, common-rail diesels, you'll find that there are diesel automobiles in Europe that get more than 100 miles to the gallon. And we are not selling those things in the U.S. I wish we were and I don't know why not.
From the standpoint of aviation, everybody is going to get hit. And one of my predictions is those nice vegetables that get flown from the - and fruits - they come up from the southern hemisphere during our winter will get impossibly expensive, and we're going to have to learn to love rutabagas and parsnips and turnips - (laughter) - a bunch of things that I hate because they can be stored in root cellars in the region where they are grown.
So it is going to affect us. However, we have a family legend - my brother and I. After my first book came out, my brother read it and said, uh-oh, aviation is really in trouble. And he says, I know a vice president at Boeing. I'm going to send him a copy of the book. Well, forgot about it. Four years later, Boeing introduces the 7E7, now, the 787 with the lowest fuel cost per seat mile of any commercial airliner. And they are racking out sales and beating out Airbus for the first time in several years.
And my brother and I quietly agree - I went back to my brother and said, did you send the guy the book? He said, well, I'm not claiming credit, but I sent him the book and I said, you better read this, you better memorize this; this is your future. So my brother and I claim to have bailed out Boeing from this problem. (Laughter.)
Now, this is a reminder that there will be rationing. The economists all think it will be rationing by price and they'll raise the price until nobody can afford it any more and you do without. The next one - the next administration - fix the price of oil and thereby invent rationing by inconvenience. There were these long lines of cars waiting for what little gasoline there was in the filling station.
And the third one - during World War II, President Roosevelt had us running around with little red and blue ration coupons. So there will be rationing where there is going to be pressure on the government to do something and doing something might involve something other that just letting the price rise.
I found this in Taiwan. I don't read Chinese but I claim it should say, tell the kids to turn out the lights. There a lot of small-scale things that we can do. And your speakers - later you will hear about some of these, but changing our habits - multiple uses every time you take the car out of the garage, turning out the lights, energy conservation is certainly going to be a major part of what has to happen.
Now, people ask, well, how about some new technology? Well, this is an old technology. This is a guy delivering in the city of Paris in 1870 a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Now, a more dangerous toxic mixture is hard to imagine. (Scattered laughter.) But it was used for cooking and it was used for lighting. And you can see a gas street lamp across the street.
Well, the modern version of this - Texaco engineers improved it with using pure oxygen, higher temperatures, better catalysts, and once you have got the hydrogen, you can do lots of things. The Chinese are making fertilizer, nitrogen fertilizers with the hydrogen. It's used in petroleum refining. The Canadian Tarzans - every time they break a carbon-carbon bond to lighten up that oil, they have to stick on two hydrogens. Where do they get the hydrogen? Natural gas.
So there are - there is a long list. But one of my colleagues is very enthusiastic about this one: dimethyl ether, which I had never heard of - and it's an almost perfect diesel fuel in that - excuse me - there are no carbon-carbon bonds in that molecule so it can't make soot. You can't get black smoke coming out of a dimethyl ether engine, is non-toxic. I didn't believe that. I had to go to the drug store. And the propellant in hairspray today is all dimethyl ether.
The old operating room anesthetic was diethyl ether. And it's made from coal. And there is a pilot plan in China turning out - I think it's in the 100,000-gallon-a-day department. They are selling it as a heating fuel, a cooking fuel to compete with butane and propane, but their ambition is to get the cost down under $2 a gallon and sell it as diesel fuel.
Okay, the hard landing, soft landing - of the soft landings, you need to get enough new nuclear capacity, energy-efficient automobiles, energy-efficient housing, wind energy in place by this coming Thanksgiving. (Laughter.) Well, you know, tough assignment. So what does a hard landing look like? What are we trying to avoid? And the simplest of hard landings is a global recession worse than 1930, worse than the Great Depression.
The extreme hard landing - I borrowed the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The pesticides, as I said, are all petrochemicals, that fertilizer is going to be expensive and difficult to transport, so that things could get pretty bad, and the - or story - Amos Nure at Stanford is all but predicting a war between the United States and China over access to world oil supplies. Now, he says, I don't want to see a war between the U.S. and China, and I hope that by predicting it, we can avoid it.
But back to the soft landing, the announced purpose of this meeting is to arrange for a soft landing. And this is my reading of your chances. My granddaughter Emma colored this and signed it. It's a snowball in hell. (Laughter.) Good luck.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you very much. Let me use just one little analogy to try to put the challenge we have in perspective. We in our country are very much like the young couple that just got married and learned that they had a big inheritance from their grandparents. So they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent from their income. And the grandparents' inheritance is not going to last until they retire. So obviously they are going to have to do something. Either they are going to have to spend less money or they are going to have to make more money.
I use that 85-15 because that is exactly where we are in this country. Eighty-five percent of the energy we use comes from fossil fuels. That will wind down and by and by, we're going to have to live on that 15 percent and hopefully we can grow it above the 15 percent that it is now. But that is the dimensions of the challenge that we face.
Our next speaker is really world-renowned. He has just published a new book, which I think is going to be a best seller, "Twilight in the Desert." He has now relinquished on of his positions in his company so that he has more time to do what he is doing today and to help educate the American people. Matt Simmons.
(Applause.)
MATTHEW SIMMONS: Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It's been interesting in the last six months to - I've had some unbelievably interesting educational experiences as a result of coming out with this book and participating in - I guess this summer - 110 radio talk shows around North America. And I will tell you that people hearing bad news truthfully are willing to take bad news. It's been really remarkable. I've also had a really interesting experience getting acquainted with Congressman Bartlett and seeing how amazing it is that someone can pick so quickly up on these facts. I happen also to be slowly but surely co-authoring an ed-op piece with another congressman. He's been long retired - Stewart Udall. Fifty years ago, Stewart Udall was sworn in as a congressman of the United States, and then during the '60s, he was secretary of the interior in the Kennedy and Johnson administration. And our co-authored piece - if I can ever finish up my second draft and send it back to Stewart Udall - is "50 Years of Energy Mistakes" because he can go back with the benefit of hindsight and actually discuss 50 years, 25 sessions of Congress, how we made one mistake after another. So this is basically a big problem.
It was also interesting - last Tuesday morning, I was at the - in London at the Oil & Money Conference, which is probably the most important global sort of conference held once a year where all of the sort of senior OPEC people are there and all of the - a lot of the CEOs of major oil companies. And on the first panel of the morning, there were three of us - a lawyer, and then I was the first speaker, and the third speaker was Dr. Sadad Al-Husseini, who is retired executive vice president of Saudi Aramco in charge of oil and gas. I think the audience thought that they were going to witness a literal verbal battle because my views on the worry about Saudi Arabia's oil are now very public and Dr. Al-Husseini, who is a Ph.D. from Brown, was known as the brains of Saudi Aramco until he retired a year and a half ago. I surprised the audience by not really getting at all into Middle East oil. I basically said, we're all consumed now with the fact that we've run out of refinery capacity. What's even more profound is we've run out of drilling capacity. We're out of drilling rigs. We're just totally out of drilling rigs, and it'll take longer to actually restore capacity in drilling rigs than refineries.
And then Dr. Al-Husseini got up, and he - very politically correct because he wants to still live in Saudi Arabia - gave a very possible message through a lot of different slides. He effectively said that the Middle East has a productive capacity today of 21 (million) to 23 million barrels a day, somewhere in that range. And best case is by 2025 it will be 25 million barrels a day. Best case. And he showed basically the decline of Iran, and he showed the Burgan field and what would happen if it increased and then collapsed. He stayed totally away from his own country, but he speaking for his countrymen. And so it was a pretty astonishing speech.
What I was asked to address today is the topic of today's energy reality, and in my opinion it's a pretty simple story. We are in a deep hole. One of the interesting comments that I heard from an energy economist about four years ago was that the - he said, if you wake up one morning and you find out that you're in a deep hole, rule number one is stop digging. Well, our wakeup call is here because America and the world drifted into a benign energy war. How we drifted there was that demand was supposed to peak. It think it's so interesting. If you go back a decade ago and Google the word "peak," it was all demand is about to peak. It wasn't supply. Supply was supposed to grow and grow cheaply. Energy economist told other economists that didn't know anything about energy that told everyone else. And they said that one thing that's going to happen is technology is going to basically continually bring down the cost of extracting oil and gas - make it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
That belief was so deeply embedded that by 1999 when oil prices had suffered their biggest collapse in 50 years on a perceived oil glut that never showed up - it was just bad data - the best minds in the oil industry said, no, $10 oil won't last. It's going to go to five (dollars) and stay there for almost a decade because Saudi Arabia is going to flood the world with oil. And that became so believe that it became the cover story of The Economist. And then nine months later in their millennium issue, they published one of the funniest stories I've ever heard - "We Was Wrong" -- called it the biggest blooper of the 20th century.
Well, these were all great theses, but they were simply dreams. And now the alarm clock is ringing to wake up. These were just simply dreams. It turned out that everything went awry. Demand didn't peak; it grew too fast. 1995 - 10 years ago, demand finally exceeded 70 million barrels a day, but it took almost the entire year before people said, my gosh, demand is surprisingly growing again. Then over the next 10 years every time it grew, it was deemed to be an aberration. And the best guesses for the fourth quarter or the first quarter of the period we're going into is that global energy demand - oil demand - is apparently going to be between 87 (million) and 88 million barrels a day. That will be somewhere between 2 (million) and 5 million barrels a day more than we can supply.
And then in this era that costs were going to come down through technology, turned out a funny thing happened there. The cost to drill and complete an average well doubled. And we did find a lot of new supply over this period of time. It's just that they were all little things. I mean, Shell Oil Company now is talking about their expiration goal of finding some big cats. It was only a decade ago that the lingo was, we're going after elephants. And it turns out that all this technology we were talking about - it was sort of also illusory because we couldn't afford because of low prices to drill adequate appraisal wells and core the wells so we knew what was there. So we used the concept 3-D seismic, which has never ever shown anything about the -- anything about the possible structure, actually created reserves that weren't ever there. And so we systemically overstated our proven reserves. And then energy reserves that we had quite a bit of 10 or 15 years ago in this efficient free market were perceived to be glut. And so we used them up in the mantra of we're really getting efficient, and just in time supply has arrived with the energy patch.
And by August 2005, our spare capacity was disappearing. It was disappearing at the wellhead. It was disappearing in our system of pipeline and tankage to process to oil and natural gas so that it would become usable. It was disappearing in drilling rigs. It was disappearing in refineries. It was disappearing in people - people. We spent 20 years laying off about four times more people than we hired while the industry got more people intensive. Projects - there were no more projects to do either. We were effectively at 100 percent.
Somebody want to - well, now I need some help on it. We were at 100 percent capacity as we drifted into the end of August. And ironically, I spent the summer talking a lot about the fact that this sort of smells to me like the summer of 1939. In the summer of 1939, all of Europe was still in a daydream that we'll never have another war. And if you read the papers in the last week of August 1939, they were still daydreaming, we'll never have another war. And then on the 2nd of September we found out that we were already in the middle of World War II. It had started a couple years ago.
Well, in my opinion, Katrina was our energy 9/11. And ironically it happened on the 29th of August. What Katrina took away was more capacity than we had left in a nutshell. The full impact of Katrina is just barely beginning to be assessed. About the day before we had to evacuate the Gulf of Mexico again, they were just starting to do any inspection below the waterline. So all of the stuff - it didn't look that there was much damage - was also a dream. It might be that it didn't do much damage. The timeframe to rebuild is very hazy. All of these comments - well, this system is probably going to be out for two to three weeks - is basically just in the estimate that if we had everybody ready to go today and we knew what we should do and we were on a fast track, it would take two to three weeks. Natural gas got hit far worse than oil. And a local emergency from the Gulf will spin into a global issue.
If any of you didn't have a chance this morning to look at USA Today, there's a very interesting on page 4B showing the path of Rita. And what Rita did was finally sweep right over, while it was force five, the heart and soul of the platforms and pipelines of the Gulf of Mexico. And I think it will probably be Thursday or Friday before we have any sort of reports of the visual - how many platforms we don't have and what's happened to rigs. But it couldn't be good news.
So the question really becomes how did we dig ourselves into such a deep hole? Well, it was basically two decades of poor data. We had an energy data system that wasn't ever very good, and it got worse. It was basically then two decades of terrible analysis of bad data. It was basically the fact that all of our energy experts were basically the generals fighting the last war. These experts were still smarting over the fact that they got shrill in 1980 and '81 and predicted we were going to have $100 oil just as oil prices collapsed, as we had four years respite of demand growth as nuclear power came on. And they said, man alive, I've learned my lesson. Don't ever trust demand. And I'll tell you one thing, every time oil is high, we'll create a glut just like clockwork.
And low prices created by bad analysis and the perception that we had a glut created the wrong signals. Everyone was always saying prices are good signals. Well, we got actually the wrong signals from low prices. The low price signal said we'll always have low prices. And then turns out that strong opinions - really strong opinions by people who called themselves experts overruled facts. At this Oil & Money Conference last Wednesday morning, one of my favorite people in the energy business, Herman Franssen, who used to be chief economist at the IEA and is really respected among his peer group of chief economists, said to his profession - he said, I think basically, gentlemen, it's time to stop using the word I believe outside of church.
(Laughter.)
Well, what's our next step? Rule number one is stop digging. Rule number two is reform energy data. We urgently need a global mandated field by field production report on a quarterly basis accompanied by the number of wellheads that fields is producing so for the first time ever, analysts can do serious supply analysis. Rule number three is, let's go to an energy war footing just like we were forced to go to a war footing after Poland was invaded. And when we went to that war footing in five-and-a-half years from scratch, we created a war machine that was so powerful that we destroyed Europe and Japan. We can create a war machine and lick the energy war if we start today.
We also basically have another role model. In June 1947, we began the Marshall Plan. And in five years, the Marshall Plan - 2,500 people actually fanned out around Europe and created the blueprint and the foundation for rebuilding Europe. So it can be done, but not if we sit around. I basically believe there is a plan B that works, that it's going to work by basically addressing in the oil front - transportation energy has to be reduced. We have to move goods by trains and boats. Turns out the SUV isn't the problem. It's large trucks moving goods thousands of miles, getting three to five miles per gallon and clogging up our highways. Movement of people - we don't need 5,000 people to work in the same building on the mantra we need to communicate. And yet an exit poll says only 2 percent know each other. We have the technology today to work at home or in your village and keep your same job and be more efficient. We need to distribute food where we grow it, kind of victory gardens. Look at Whole Foods as a model. And they create a string of organic gardens with about a 30-mile radius of all their stores, and the food is good.
Natural gas problems, unfortunately, are really far more difficult to figure out how we fix. In fact, I don't know how we fix our natural gas problems. One thing we do is we stop using natural gas to create electricity, where we use up too much while we're creating electricity. And then R&D has to explode. For the first time in 100 years, we need to get serious about inventing some new forms of energy. Well, can the job get done? It has to. And ingenuity is the byproduct of panic. And I think what Katrina and Rita did, we will soon find out, was basically great panic. And I think probably unfortunately that was good news because we needed a wakeup call. The alternatives are too bad. And the longer we wait, the deeper the hole becomes. So stop digging. When should we start plan B? I actually say today would be a great time to start plan B. Thank you.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you very much. Matt Simmons used our response to the war in Europe as an analogy of what we need to do now. There are other analogies that may help us understand the challenge that we face. I think that the challenge we face is something like a combination of our decade of putting a man on the moon and the Manhattan Project. Unless we face this challenge with the kind of determination that we did those two challenges, we're going to have a pretty bumpy ride.
Richard Heinberg is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, and a core faculty member of the New College of California. He is the author of "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," and "Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World," to name a couple of his many works on the peak oil subject. He appears prominently in a documentary film, "The End of Suburbia," and has an award-winning newsletter and many articles to his name. Mr. Heinberg.
(Applause.)
RICHARD HEINBERG: Thank you. Well, I teach human ecology in a small private college so that informs my perspective on this subject. I see oil in terms of energy and human history. We're energy junkies, always have been, always will be. All organisms need energy in order to survive, and for all of our history as a species, we've been using our peculiar intelligence to try to find ways of harnessing more energy from our environment. We invented - we harnessed fire, first of all, then invented agriculture. We domesticated animals so that we could capture their muscle power by having them pull plows and so on. We invented water mills and windmills. But then, with the beginning of the industrial revolution, we discovered how to use - let's see, how do I get this thing to work. The slide is not advancing. Any suggestions?
(Laughter.)
Starting to use fossil fuels was like winning the energy lottery. There was nothing anywhere like it before. Think of it this way: suppose you had to push your car 20 miles. You can use levers, you can use pulleys, but you can't use electricity or any kind of fuel. That would be a fairly big job, right? Well, we get that service performed for us with a single gallon of gasoline, for which we pay a little less than $3 right now, and then we tend to complain about that.
The enormous benefits from fossil fuels were such that it was inevitable that we would become hooked on them and begin to design all of our social systems around them. This, of course, is the situation, as we have seen with the U.S., where discovery peaked in 1930. Forty years later, extraction peaked. So we learned the lesson about peak oil - what it is, how it works. It's no longer just a matter of projection into the future or reading tealeaves. We're talking mostly history here in fact. This is a well-studied scientific phenomenon, and it has real life consequences.
The U.S. used to be the world's foremost oil-producing nation. When I tell that to my 20-something college students, they look at me as though I must be crazy because they've lived their entire lives in a situation where the U.S. was by far the world's foremost importer. We import almost 60 percent of what we use now, but we used to be the world's foremost oil exporting nation. Seven out of every eight barrels of oil used by the Allies in World Wars I and II came from Texas and Oklahoma oil wells. We were loaning money to the rest of the world in those days. Now how things have changed. Of course we have become the world's foremost oil importer. China and Japan are number two and three in that regard, and the U.S. imports twice as much as China and Japan combined. And we've become the world's foremost debtor nation. We're borrowing about $2.5 billion per day just to finance our trade deficit, and about 40 percent of that borrowing goes to pay for oil.
So are all of these changes to our economy the result of U.S. peak oil? Not all of them. Certainly some of them could be wrapped up to bad management and other kinds of decisions, but a lot of the changes that we've seen in the U.S. over the last 50 years or so are simply the result of the gradual exhaustion of the energy resource phase that helped make this the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world. Now, as ExxonMobil has helpfully informed us, global oil discoveries peaked around 1963, '64. And they've been going downhill ever since. This little bit of optimistic news at the end there is really just some discoveries in central Asia and Kazakhstan. And since 2000, discoveries have continued to dwindle, and now they're about the level of the early 1920s. So there's not much more to expect from discovery.
This is a graph that's published by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, Colin Campbell primarily, and it shows difference between conventional oil and non-conventional petroleum resources like natural gas liquids and tars and so on. As you can see, historically we've gotten most of our oil from, you know, the cheap easy stuff that flows out of the ground under pressure. And these non-conventional sources are becoming more and more important in spite of the fact that they're much more expensive and difficult to produce simply because the regular oil - regular conventional oil - is just about at peak right now. There's not much more to be had in that regard.
Now Chevron is beginning to take out ads in newspapers and magazines that have a nice website called willyoujoinus.com, again helpfully informing us that oil production is in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil producing countries. In other words, it's not just the U.S. that's peaked. Country after country is doing the same thing. Indonesia, an extremely important oil exporter throughout the twentieth century, this year is importing more oil than it exports. So almost every year we see another country move from the column of oil exporters to the column of oil importers. Obviously that can't go on forever.
OPEC has informed us quietly that light sweet crude has peaked. Since the year 2000, of course, the amount produced on a yearly basis has continued to increase. But the amount of light sweet crude - the easiest stuff to refine into gasoline - has actually declined. So total oil production has been on the increase, but light sweet crude is actually declining. Saudi Arabia, of course, whenever we get into a jam always steps up and says that they will produce a little more oil. But what they're producing, of course, is the heavy, sour crude that no one really wants. And so it has to be discounted 10 (dollars) or $12 a barrel.
China - Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation chief economist Xiang Wei Ping (ph) just this moth said he expects global oil production to peak at 94 (million) to 100 million barrels a day during the next five years. And here's a nice little quote. High oil prices will have adverse effects on China's economy said Xiang. Yes, I think so. That's a pretty safe statement.
Now this is an extraordinarily important report that, even though I didn't help author this report, I want to hammer on it for a few minutes because I think it's something that everyone should be talking about and virtually no one is. It was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy. Science Applications International Corporation compiled the report. Robert L. Hirsch was the project leader, and the title of it is "Peaking of World Oil Production Impacts Mitigation and Risk Management." Now U.S. DOE asked ASIC basically two questions: is global peak oil a real problem, and, if so, what should we do about it? Now this is the executive summary that they came up with, and I'll read it to you. 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.
Now this report is extraordinary because, well among other reasons, economists have been telling us for some time that peaking of world oil production, even if we need to be thinking about it at all, is really a very small issue because as prices increase, they'll stimulate more exploration. They'll stimulate the production of alternative fuels, and they'll stimulate conservation. And with the combination of all three of those factors, we should make a very smooth and easy transition so that 25 or 50 years from now, we'll all be driving hydrogen cars down the street. No one will know that anything even happened. There won't even have been a bump on the road. We'll look back, and we'll say, what was that all about?
Well, the Hirsch report says that, in fact, those price signals will come at least 10 years too late and maybe 20 years too late to make a real difference. In other words, yes, we can make a transition, but it takes time to prepare that transition before the price signal arrives. For example, we all know we could be driving more fuel efficient cars right now as was mentioned. There are European cars that are already getting 100 miles to the gallon and more. Problem is it takes time to change over the U.S. car fleet. First of all, U.S. manufacturers have to retool and start making those much more highly efficient cars in large quantities. That will take probably four or five years. Then, not everyone buys a new car every year. I happen to drive a 25-year-old Mercedes diesel that I run on biodiesel, but that's not too uncommon. A lot of us drive cars that are 1-, 2-, 5-, 10-, 15-years-old. So that's going to take 15 to 20 years to change out the entire U.S. car and truck fleet. So we're looking at a process of transition there that will likely take 20 to 25 years.
It's the same wherever you look. To produce new supplies of energy from sources like biofuels, hydrogen, coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, which of course is ridiculous anyway because we're running out of natural gas - all of these will take years to implement, to ramp up to any large scale. I was recently in South Africa speaking to the executives of Sasol Corporation, which has the world's most highly developed coal-to-liquids technology. South Africa also has lots of high quality coal, but in South Africa they're getting 150,000 barrels of synthetic oil per day from coal. Now that's good for South Africa, but that country is at the same time importing 450,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Saudi Arabia and Iran. So even in the country that has the most highly developed technology and good coal, they're still mostly importing oil. So to think that we could deploy that technology rapidly enough to fend off peak oil if we don't have a decade or two to prepare is really foolish.
Yes, there are differences among the experts as to when the peak is likely to arrive. Some of us are saying it's virtually here now, but there are other experts saying, well, maybe it'll be 20 years down the line. And the effective message from that more optimistic forecast is don't worry, be happy. Forget about it. We don't have to do anything. Certainly the government shouldn't have to do anything about this because the market will take care of it. But the Hirsch report gives us an entirely different message and one that we should be talking about. When I found out about the Hirsch report, I discovered it on a high school website - a high school in Chula Vista, CA. It has not, to my knowledge, yet been published on the Department of Energy's website or by any U.S. government agency. It's not being discussed by the administration. It's not being discussed in Congress except perhaps by Representative Bartlett. So we have a huge pattern of denial with regard to this problem. And even when a U.S. government report tells us about the problem, we choose to ignore that.
So as we've already seen, this is a problem that is going to impact the global economy profoundly. Ninety-seven percent of our transportation energy comes from liquid fuels, from petroleum. Food and agriculture - the miracle of agricultural production over the last several decades almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel inputs. And finally, our tendency as human beings to fight over scarce resources - we've had oil wars in the past already during the twentieth century. It's extremely likely that we'll have more in the years ahead unless we do something about this.
Now, we've already heard a bit about Katrina. I think it's important to think of Katrina also as a metaphor for how we are responding to the problem of peak oil. We could see Katrina coming from miles and days ahead. Everyone in New Orleans new that the city was vulnerable, and yet there was a shameful lack of preparation and response. The next disaster, peak oil - fully anticipated by the experts - everyone agrees, in fact, that global oil production will peak - only some disagreement about the timing. I think we're going to see a woeful lack of preparation unfortunately because the even is probably so close that we don't have that 20-year cushion that the Hirsch report says that we need. We need mitigation efforts ahead of time. And we, I think at this point, need to begin to create crisis management options - what we can do immediately to reduce demand primarily, but also to set into force alternative supply strategies.
As a result of these two hurricanes, I think our forecasts for peak oil may be shifting somewhat. At least mine are. I no longer anticipate seeing a clear and sharp peak where one day or one month or one year we can say production is on the increase and the next year or month, it's on the decline. There was the peak. I think we've been prematurely catapulted into a bumpy plateau period, which may last five years, maybe 10 years, during which we will see impacts to supply and demand from political and economic events and probably further natural disasters. And every time supply collapses, we'll be able to point to a particular approximate cause - a natural disaster or a political problem, a revolution in Nigeria or who knows. And we'll say, well, that's temporary. We'll fix that. But underlying all of that will be the fact that we are in the peak period right now. And perhaps five, 10 years from now we'll be able to look back in the rearview mirror and say, oh yes, we peaked sometime during that period. But meanwhile we need to understand this underlying problem and be dealing with that rather than simply trying to put out the immediate fires.
As a part of our strategy, I think we need to think globally. And here, Colin Campbell, who is one of the global figures - retired petroleum geologist - one of the global figures who has been warning us about peak oil for some time - has authored a global oil depletion protocol. And I spent a few days with Colin in Ireland recently, and he helped me understand how vitally important this is because with out a global oil depletion protocol, first of all, prices are going to become so volatile that they will wreck any opportunity to plan our future. Whether we're talking about a company, a town, city, state, a nation, it will be impossible to plan our economic future unless we have some assurance of stable prices. And the only way we'll have that is if we have some means of moderating supply and demand. Also if we don't have a global oil depletion protocol, we will have conflict in the world over remaining oil supplies. And that conflict itself will exacerbate the problem because that will take oil supply offline. And it will be a self-reinforcing, self-catalyzing problem.
So in order to deal with that, we need to have some kind of international agreement to systematically and cooperatively reduce production and reduce imports. Now historically, we've almost always had some control on price and on production, whether it was Standard Oil back in the late 19th century or the Texas Railroad Commission starting in 1935 and going up to 1970 when U.S. oil production peaked or OPEC from 1970 to the present. Now none of those mechanisms work. OPEC is producing virtually flat out. So unless we have some other mechanism for moderating production and therefore price and therefore competition for remaining supplies, I think we're in for a difficult time. And I believe that the oil depletion protocol is our best last shot at avoiding what could be an economic and geopolitical Armageddon.
At the same time, I think communities around our nation need to begin focusing their strategies. And I have been travelling around the country speaking to city counsels and citizen groups in various places about what can be done to size up vulnerabilities and strengths at the local level to begin dealing with the impacts of peak oil. The pain is going to be felt very largely at the local level, where people will no longer be able to get to work or to get to the store where they can buy their stuff. The stuff won't be getting to the store because the trucks won't be running. People will be having difficulty heating their homes. So these are problems that will have to be managed largely at the local level. And so city and county officials need to be alerted and need to be strategizing and planning for long term emergency services - finding ways to produce food, more food at the local level for local consumption, making sure that local water supplies are tied to energy sources that are not vulnerable to this problem.
I was just a couple of days ago in Flagstaff, AZ, and they're pumping their water from 2,000 feet under ground. Imagine the energy intensity of that. And meanwhile Arizona state law says that they can't capture rainwater. Private individuals can't capture rainwater. This is insane. That puts people there in an extremely vulnerable situation. So every community has to assess its situation in this regard and see what its vulnerabilities are.
So there are lots of things that can be done, and of course we will be hearing more about those in the second set of presenters. But I think it's important to realize the nature, the scale, and the scope of the problem that's facing us. It is enormous. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Mr. Heinberg mentioned the fact that part of the solution to this problem is going to be the action of local officials, elected officials. And I'm pleased that several have joined us today - Delegate Sue Krebbs from Carolyn Howard (ph) County, Delegate Joe Bartlett from Fredrick County, Senator Bob Cooper came all the way from Hartford County, and Chris Shank from Washington County. Thank you very much for joining us.
(Applause.)
Many people will tell you not to worry because the market will take care of this. As the price of oil and oil products and gas and gas products goes up, people will conserve, and we will start looking for alternatives. I just wanted to give you one little indication of how challenging this is. Mr. Heinberg mentioned the energy density of these fossil fuels. One barrel of oil - 42 gallons - the refined product of which you can buy at the pump now for a little over $100, will provide the work output of 12 people working all year for you. And you pay just a little over $100 for it. To give you some idea that that's probably correct, Mr. Heinberg used this little analogy. Imagine how far that one little gallon of gasoline takes your car. In our Prius, it takes us an honest 45 miles. In your SUV, it may take you 10 miles. By the way, water is still more expensive in the grocery store than gasoline is at the pump. But reflect on how far that gallon of gasoline takes you in whatever vehicle you drive and how long it would take you to pull it that far. Now I know you can't pull your SUV, but you could use a come-along and chains and hook onto the guardrail, and by and by, you could - what, you get 12 miles out of it? By and by you could pull your SUV - would take you several days, I think, many days to go 12 miles.
That's the energy density in fossil fuel, and that's the challenge we have. Another little example of this: If you go out this next weekend and work really hard all day long in your yard, I will get more work out of Electric Motor with far less than 25 cents worth of electricity. Now that's kind of humbling, isn't it? That you're worth less than 25 cents a day as compared to fossil fuels. But that's the challenge that we face.
Mr. Heinberg mentioned the necessity to anticipate peak oil so as to avoid problems. The National Academy of Scientists has said that if you wait until peak oil is here, there are going to be very serious economic consequences. If you anticipate it by 10 years, there will be meaningful economic consequences. To avoid economic consequences, you're going to have to anticipate it by 20 years.
I would like to note that we here in the United States have pretty much blown 25 years. Hubbert (ph) predicted that we would peak in about 1970. We did in 1970. By 1980, we knew we were well down the other side of Hubbert's peak. When Reagan came to office, it was very obvious that we were producing less oil in this country than we had been producing. And so his solution to that - totally the wrong solution by the way, but who knew at that time? His solution to that was to give our oil industry incentives to drill, and he did that. And boy did we drill, but we didn't find any more oil. And by the way, you cannot consume more oil than you find. And a little later, we will have a chance to look at the amount of oil that the world has found and the amount of oil that we have used and how much there is yet to use.
A couple of congresses ago, I was privileged to chair the Energy Subcommittee on Science. And one of the first things we did was to try and determine the dimensions of the problem. So we had the world's experts in on the amount of oil that remained. And it was - there wasn't much variation. It was between like, what, 960 and 1,030 - about 1,000 giga-barrels of oil. That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? A trillion barrels of oil, but the world uses 84 million barrels a day. We use, by the way - this one person in 22, we use a fourth of all the oil that's used in the world. When you look at this thousand giga-barrels that remains and the rate at which we are using it, and it comes out to about 40 years. Now we're not going to run along a 40-year level and fall off the cliff. It's going to go down following this bell curve. It's going to go down.
Well, we're pretty much on time. We'll take a break until about half past to give you a chance to stretch and come back promptly at half past for our second panel. And there we're going to look at what we can do about this.
(Break.)
Roscoe Bartlett Energy Conference, Part 1
28 September 2005 Oil
In Brief: On September 26, 2005, Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett held an energy conference with participants Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, Matthew Simmons, Richard Heinberg, Donald Wulfinghoff, John Spears and John Howe. This is a transcript of that conference.
REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, MARYLAND 6TH DISTRICT, 2005 ENERGY CONFERENCE
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005, 9:00 A.M. - 12:00 NOON
FREDERICK COMMUNITY COLLEGE, FREDERICK, MARYLAND
PARTICIPANTS: DR. KENNETH DEFFEYES, MATTHEW SIMMONS, RICHARD HEINBERG, DONALD WULFINGHOFF, JOHN SPEARS, JOHN HOWE
Transcript by: Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.
REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE G. BARTLETT (R-MD): Good morning and thank you all very much for coming. This is kind of like coming home to me. I worked here for 12 years at the community college, taught anatomy and physiology to the nursing students and also taught a biology course. And when the publishers saw that I taught a biology course, they all sent me their textbooks hoping that I would adopt it for the class of course and then they could sell some textbooks. And so over my desk went all of the textbooks in biology. And all of them had chapters on energy and environment and so forth. And I would read those. And so my concern about the subject that we're talking about today is more than 30 years old because I have been reading and thinking about this for at least 30 years now.
I really appreciate you all coming and especially appreciative of the members of the panels that have come. We have here today represented some of the experts from around the country and indeed around the world. I would just mention them briefly now - who they are - and then introduce them in more detail a little later.
Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, professor. He worked with M. King Hubbert. Many of you may not know who M. King Hubbert is. I'm sure you will after today's session. You'll know who it is. And he will be talking to us about his concerns about the world's energy resources.
Matt Simmons is the president. I spoke with the president about energy and mentioned Matt. Oh, yes, I know Matt. Matt was his energy advisor during his first campaign and his second campaign. He is president and CEO. I guess you have relinquished one of those titles now so that he can spend more time to education of the largest energy investment banks in the world.
He has a new book out called "Twilight in the Desert" - intriguing title. And it's about Saudi Arabia and his concerns that Saudi Arabia probably has peaked in oil production. You may have noticed that when OPEC gets together and when the oil sheikhs come here they don't promise that they are going to pump a lot more oil to bring the price of oil and gas down. I think they are not promising because they can't produce more oil.
Richard Heinberg - and I'm really envious of him. He has taken the two best titles for books: "The Party is Over," is the title of one of his books. And the second title - really great title is "Power Down," because as you'll see in today's conference, that is exactly what we're going to have to do.
Then our second panel is going to do deal with what do we do about it? How do we transition so that we have a relatively soft landing? Donald Wulfinghoff - and he has written really a tall, an enormous book on energy conservation in buildings. He is perhaps the world's authority on energy conservation in buildings, which, by the way, is where we use our most energy. Most conspicuously we use energy in transportation, but we use most of it in our buildings and he'll talk about that.
John Spears - what does sustainability look like? How do we get there? And John Howe. John is a retired engineer in New England, and he has been pioneering this. He has written two books. And he has been giving these books away because he just is so concerned that Americans need to know about the energy crisis and what is coming.
I have a couple of slides to kind of give us started here. Okay, we need to go back six decades to kind of put this in context. During the '40s and '50s, and a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert worked for the Shell Oil Company, and he noticed the exploitation of individual oil fields, and they all seemed to following a bell curve.
Now, most people know what a bell curve is. If you are noting the size of people - some of them are very short, some are very tall, but most of us is somewhere in the middle, and if you put all those down, you get a bell curve. And he noticed that the exploitation and exhaustion of these oil fields followed a bell curve. Then about halfway through it reached a peak and the second half of oil, logically, was more difficult to get than the first half.
The green there, the smooth green curve shows his prediction, and the more ragged curves shows the actual data points he predicted in 1956 that the United States would peak in 1970 and right on target the United States peaked in 1970, in spite of feverish drilling. I read the other day that maybe 80 percent of all of the oil wells drilled in the world have been drilled in this country. In spite of feverish drilling, it's been downhill ever since.
The red curve there is Russia - a bit more oil than we. And they picked a bit after us. And you see that they kind of fell off when the Soviet Union came apart. They are going to have a second much smaller peak because of the disarray that occurred there when the Soviet Union dissolved.
The next slide. The next slide is a schematic and this is a very interesting slide. The U-curve there or the parabolic curve there is the - the exponential curve, is a 2 percent growth, just 2 percent growth. From the beginning of the yellow to the end of the yellow is 35 years because that is the amount of time it takes with 2 percent compounded growth to double.
And what this shows is that if peak oil occurs at the point where it is shown there, that you start to have problems when the two curves diverge, because China increased their use of oil last year by about 15 percent. They increased their imports by 25 percent. And so for those who believe that peak oil is in the future -- probably. But we're now seeing the effects of it.
You know, there are three things that are not controversial. M. King Hubbert predicted that the United States would peak in 1970. We did. He predicted the world would peak about now and oil this morning was over $64 a barrel. So those are inescapable facts.
The next curve - the next chart. The next chart - this depicts the challenge that we have. And this is a little depiction of the Apollo 13. And they had started on their way to the moon, you noticed, and things collapsed, and they had to really make some changes if they were going to get back alive. This is a pretty good analogy. It's not that we're all going to die if we don't do the right things, and they all would have died if they didn't do the right things. But, boy, they had to do the right things at the right time or they weren't going to have a smooth landing. And there was a great movie made of that. I'm sure many of you have seen that movie.
Well, let's move now into our first presenter, Dr. Deffeyes. He had the privilege of working with M. King Hubbert. I hope he tells us something about that. He is author and Princeton University professor emeritus. He joined the Shell research lab where M. King Hubbert had recently issued his controversial predictions that U.S. oil production would peak during the '70s. It peaked at 1970, some people say '71, but about then.
After reworking Hubbert's numbers, Dr. Deffeyes sought other employment. He is the author of "Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage," and his new book, "Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak." He makes the case that world oil production is no longer increasing. Dr. Deffeyes.
(Applause.)
KENNETH DEFFEYES: This is a historic occasion in that a conservative congressman, an independent banker, and Ivy League democrat, and a radical social critic are telling you that we have arrived at the same answer. And it's - you better believe it - time. (Laughter.)
Now, if you want to make an author feel bad, this is a logo off of the coffee cup, my 40,000-word book reduced to a coffee cup - (laughter) - but it pretty well - it gives the message saying that it's wakeup time and we have to take this seriously. This is M. King Hubbert's original 1956 graph, except I have added the dots to show what happened. And the peak fit pretty well, and the 19 - wrong one - this shoulder is Prudhoe Bay kicking in - biggest oil field ever in the United States wasn't big enough to give us new high bigger than the 1970 peak.
Now, this could have staggered on upwards. And Matt Simmons' expression is you only see it in the rearview mirror. But one of the clues that I got at least was that the Texas Railroad Commission in 1972 removed production rationing in Texas. Before that, they were the OPEC of its day and regulated - excuse me - he would talk in Portland late last week. It was a nice audience of 300 people, one of whom had a bad cold. (Laughter.) I had brought it home.
But the bell-shaped curve worked out. And this is my most recent book. And the reason that I'm telling you about it is that I was able to - excuse me - to simplify Hubbert's mathematical derivation. And this is United States oil production. For the reason you just heard, it's the most explored area in the world. And after 1958, it settles down to a pretty good straight line. So with your permission, my computer and I draw the best-fitting straight line from 1958 on and once you let me draw that straight line, it's all over.
The three lines of high-school algebra up at the top are an alternative derivation of Hubbert's theory. And the only difference is he goes from A to B, and pages and pages of heavy deferential equations, and I go from B to A in three lines of high-school algebra. You get the same answer. The first equation is just the equation of a straight line. The second equation I plug in the things that are on the graph, P over Q is the vertical axis, and I go through and substitute what is on this actual graph. And on the third equation, I multiply both sides by Q. Now, that is the Hubbert theory.
And what it says is that the heavy magic is inside the parenthesis. What is inside the parenthesis is the fraction of oil that hasn't been produced yet. Or if you're doing exploration, it's the fraction of oil that hasn't been found yet. And the analogy is to fishing in a pond. If you notice after fishing several months in a pond, you're not catching as many fish, you can decide you'll go to the fishing tackle store and buy a fancy new fly rod - you know, new technology - or you can decide that you have caught most of the fish and you're going to go the grocery store and buy fish.
So the thing inside the parenthesis is the fraction of oil that hasn't been produced yet and what is not inside the parenthesis is the price of oil, which gripes economists - no end and new technology, which grips new technologists. And the answer is new technology and high oil prices help but they don't help very much. The big deal is how many fish are still left in the pond.
Now, this is Hubbert in 1968 predicting world oil production. And the 1968 curve, the more optimistic one peaks in the year 2000, and he has - 2000 - 100 billion barrels. Now, Hubert's critics say, well, 2000 came and went, you know. It didn't peak. Hubbert is wrong. But, look, for the standpoint of 1968, this is pretty good shooting to get to within five years of the year and to get to within about 3 percent of the total amount of oil.
Now, this is M. King Hubbert in the 1930s. He was no easier to get along with then than he was - (chuckles) - later in life. But it's interesting, I got a letter from a crystallographer long since retired who said I knew Hubbert at Columbia University in the 1930s. And he was interested in the problem even then. And looking back, I suspect that the first time - 1956, that the story was mature enough that he could see the answer he pounced.
Now, for the world - and we're getting to the core of the story here - after 1983, the world production settles down to a pretty good straight line, and there is one more black dot - because I had to release this to the publisher before the 2004 numbers came out - so the 2004 numbers - another black dot jammed between there and the plus mark. The plus mark is when half of the oil is being produced, and that third equation, a couple of slides back, had as one of its consequences that the peak of production occurs at the symmetry point when half of the oil has been produced.
And so I got an enlarged version of this and counted forward. And that is where I got to Thanksgiving Day this year, saying that that is my estimate of the peak. Now, I did that to make the economists nervous. It really is uncertain by about three weeks on either side. (Laughter.)
Now, this came across the Dow Jones newswire in 2003. And to me, it's almost an identical replica of the Texas Railroad Commission announcement that there would be no production rationing in Texas next month, and saying we don't have any surplus production capacity. And Matt Simmons' book confirms this view, but I took this as the first announcement that we knew - that I knew the world oil peak was real.
Now, this is the glubiest (ph) of the all of the diagrams, and it says that - sorry, these are attributing the oil to the first well in the field. When you drill a discovery well and you don't get oil, what do you do? Well, you keep drilling horizontally and vertically until you drill up the oil field. But it's an irreversible event. You don't get to discover that oil field a second time and you're not going to forget where your discovery well was. So this says that 90 percent - sorry, 96 percent of all of the oil we're ever going to find is in oil fields we have already discovered. And the - I don't have to extrapolate very far. That is where my 2013 billion barrels comes from is where that line hits the axis.
Now, the U.S. Geological Survey has an enormously more optimistic estimate. They have to find another Middle East plus another North Sea to come out even to fill in that gap between my estimate and theirs. Now, for the United States, they have estimated that there is another Kuwait undiscovered beneath the United States. Of course I tell them, hey, whisper in my ear where that sucker is. (Laughter.) I'll go have these with you. Is it South Alabama? So - because it doesn't exist.
But this is the gloom-and-doom picture. Now, when I put those same curves, the actual numbers and the best-fitting curves on a cumulative graph, the Bell-shape curve becomes and S-shaped curve. And the thing that is labeled exploration is the 6 percent that is not yet discovered. But the thing I have named after my friend Bob Snyder (sp) is now that the buzz word, "redevelopment" - going back and looking at old oil fields, existing oil fields - not for secondary recovery or tertiary recovery, but for overlooked productive oil sands. And in West Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, Bob Snyder found or bought some 60 oil fields and found several hundred million barrels of additional oil. And had an after-tax cash flow rate of return of 17 percent. So just a stunning performance.
And there are some companies doing that. And when I talk to financial firms, I tell them, if you find any company that is doing a good job of redevelopment, you know, call me collect; I want to invest in those. With the best rumor, if you're into financing, is that XTO, Cross Timbers Oil out of Forth Worth, is doing a good job. I haven't bought XTO yet. I'm looking into it. So this is the picture saying there is a considerable amount of the oil can be developed from existing fields. And it's not that it's not in the estimates. It's something that is going to happen.
Now, everyone asks about price. And here are natural gas prices in the United States. This is first sale of natural gas down the stream from the producing well. And the Henry Hubb's stock spot market prices look a lot like this only wilder. And the thing - it's very smooth up until about 1985. Then you start seeing little wintertime peaks, and then it just goes crazy. And the stock spot market price at Henry Hubb Louisiana - I think it was $17 the day before yesterday, the last time I looked. We are going into the winter with already high-midwinter prices. The current price is way off the top of this screen here.
Come on, baby. All right, now there is some essential services. (Laughter.) This is an ambulance that we want to make sure that we have got oil for. And we don't - you see the Red Cross on the side of the ambulance there. Here are industries that are going to get pretty hard. And the big ones are at the top of the alphabet. The zymurgy is just the industrial use of yeast to make wine and cheese and bread. (Laughter.)
But up at the top, agriculture is at great risk because the green revolution of 1970 that made starving to death no longer fashionable was based on new seed varieties, heavy use of mineral fertilizers, and pesticides. Now, the pesticides are mostly petrochemicals. And the mineral fertilizers, the nitrogen requires natural gas for the source of hydrogen to take nitrogen out of the atmosphere. And the phosphate is very energy intensive, converting rock phosphate to soluble superphosphate. So agriculture - excuse me - and particularly third-world agriculture is at risk.
Now, the automotive business - it isn't a matter of simply CAFE standards, raising the required mileage. One opportunity that I think is being missed - there are diesel automobiles. And if you look up on Google, common-rail diesels, you'll find that there are diesel automobiles in Europe that get more than 100 miles to the gallon. And we are not selling those things in the U.S. I wish we were and I don't know why not.
From the standpoint of aviation, everybody is going to get hit. And one of my predictions is those nice vegetables that get flown from the - and fruits - they come up from the southern hemisphere during our winter will get impossibly expensive, and we're going to have to learn to love rutabagas and parsnips and turnips - (laughter) - a bunch of things that I hate because they can be stored in root cellars in the region where they are grown.
So it is going to affect us. However, we have a family legend - my brother and I. After my first book came out, my brother read it and said, uh-oh, aviation is really in trouble. And he says, I know a vice president at Boeing. I'm going to send him a copy of the book. Well, forgot about it. Four years later, Boeing introduces the 7E7, now, the 787 with the lowest fuel cost per seat mile of any commercial airliner. And they are racking out sales and beating out Airbus for the first time in several years.
And my brother and I quietly agree - I went back to my brother and said, did you send the guy the book? He said, well, I'm not claiming credit, but I sent him the book and I said, you better read this, you better memorize this; this is your future. So my brother and I claim to have bailed out Boeing from this problem. (Laughter.)
Now, this is a reminder that there will be rationing. The economists all think it will be rationing by price and they'll raise the price until nobody can afford it any more and you do without. The next one - the next administration - fix the price of oil and thereby invent rationing by inconvenience. There were these long lines of cars waiting for what little gasoline there was in the filling station.
And the third one - during World War II, President Roosevelt had us running around with little red and blue ration coupons. So there will be rationing where there is going to be pressure on the government to do something and doing something might involve something other that just letting the price rise.
I found this in Taiwan. I don't read Chinese but I claim it should say, tell the kids to turn out the lights. There a lot of small-scale things that we can do. And your speakers - later you will hear about some of these, but changing our habits - multiple uses every time you take the car out of the garage, turning out the lights, energy conservation is certainly going to be a major part of what has to happen.
Now, people ask, well, how about some new technology? Well, this is an old technology. This is a guy delivering in the city of Paris in 1870 a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Now, a more dangerous toxic mixture is hard to imagine. (Scattered laughter.) But it was used for cooking and it was used for lighting. And you can see a gas street lamp across the street.
Well, the modern version of this - Texaco engineers improved it with using pure oxygen, higher temperatures, better catalysts, and once you have got the hydrogen, you can do lots of things. The Chinese are making fertilizer, nitrogen fertilizers with the hydrogen. It's used in petroleum refining. The Canadian Tarzans - every time they break a carbon-carbon bond to lighten up that oil, they have to stick on two hydrogens. Where do they get the hydrogen? Natural gas.
So there are - there is a long list. But one of my colleagues is very enthusiastic about this one: dimethyl ether, which I had never heard of - and it's an almost perfect diesel fuel in that - excuse me - there are no carbon-carbon bonds in that molecule so it can't make soot. You can't get black smoke coming out of a dimethyl ether engine, is non-toxic. I didn't believe that. I had to go to the drug store. And the propellant in hairspray today is all dimethyl ether.
The old operating room anesthetic was diethyl ether. And it's made from coal. And there is a pilot plan in China turning out - I think it's in the 100,000-gallon-a-day department. They are selling it as a heating fuel, a cooking fuel to compete with butane and propane, but their ambition is to get the cost down under $2 a gallon and sell it as diesel fuel.
Okay, the hard landing, soft landing - of the soft landings, you need to get enough new nuclear capacity, energy-efficient automobiles, energy-efficient housing, wind energy in place by this coming Thanksgiving. (Laughter.) Well, you know, tough assignment. So what does a hard landing look like? What are we trying to avoid? And the simplest of hard landings is a global recession worse than 1930, worse than the Great Depression.
The extreme hard landing - I borrowed the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The pesticides, as I said, are all petrochemicals, that fertilizer is going to be expensive and difficult to transport, so that things could get pretty bad, and the - or story - Amos Nure at Stanford is all but predicting a war between the United States and China over access to world oil supplies. Now, he says, I don't want to see a war between the U.S. and China, and I hope that by predicting it, we can avoid it.
But back to the soft landing, the announced purpose of this meeting is to arrange for a soft landing. And this is my reading of your chances. My granddaughter Emma colored this and signed it. It's a snowball in hell. (Laughter.) Good luck.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you very much. Let me use just one little analogy to try to put the challenge we have in perspective. We in our country are very much like the young couple that just got married and learned that they had a big inheritance from their grandparents. So they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all of the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent from their income. And the grandparents' inheritance is not going to last until they retire. So obviously they are going to have to do something. Either they are going to have to spend less money or they are going to have to make more money.
I use that 85-15 because that is exactly where we are in this country. Eighty-five percent of the energy we use comes from fossil fuels. That will wind down and by and by, we're going to have to live on that 15 percent and hopefully we can grow it above the 15 percent that it is now. But that is the dimensions of the challenge that we face.
Our next speaker is really world-renowned. He has just published a new book, which I think is going to be a best seller, "Twilight in the Desert." He has now relinquished on of his positions in his company so that he has more time to do what he is doing today and to help educate the American people. Matt Simmons.
(Applause.)
MATTHEW SIMMONS: Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It's been interesting in the last six months to - I've had some unbelievably interesting educational experiences as a result of coming out with this book and participating in - I guess this summer - 110 radio talk shows around North America. And I will tell you that people hearing bad news truthfully are willing to take bad news. It's been really remarkable. I've also had a really interesting experience getting acquainted with Congressman Bartlett and seeing how amazing it is that someone can pick so quickly up on these facts. I happen also to be slowly but surely co-authoring an ed-op piece with another congressman. He's been long retired - Stewart Udall. Fifty years ago, Stewart Udall was sworn in as a congressman of the United States, and then during the '60s, he was secretary of the interior in the Kennedy and Johnson administration. And our co-authored piece - if I can ever finish up my second draft and send it back to Stewart Udall - is "50 Years of Energy Mistakes" because he can go back with the benefit of hindsight and actually discuss 50 years, 25 sessions of Congress, how we made one mistake after another. So this is basically a big problem.
It was also interesting - last Tuesday morning, I was at the - in London at the Oil & Money Conference, which is probably the most important global sort of conference held once a year where all of the sort of senior OPEC people are there and all of the - a lot of the CEOs of major oil companies. And on the first panel of the morning, there were three of us - a lawyer, and then I was the first speaker, and the third speaker was Dr. Sadad Al-Husseini, who is retired executive vice president of Saudi Aramco in charge of oil and gas. I think the audience thought that they were going to witness a literal verbal battle because my views on the worry about Saudi Arabia's oil are now very public and Dr. Al-Husseini, who is a Ph.D. from Brown, was known as the brains of Saudi Aramco until he retired a year and a half ago. I surprised the audience by not really getting at all into Middle East oil. I basically said, we're all consumed now with the fact that we've run out of refinery capacity. What's even more profound is we've run out of drilling capacity. We're out of drilling rigs. We're just totally out of drilling rigs, and it'll take longer to actually restore capacity in drilling rigs than refineries.
And then Dr. Al-Husseini got up, and he - very politically correct because he wants to still live in Saudi Arabia - gave a very possible message through a lot of different slides. He effectively said that the Middle East has a productive capacity today of 21 (million) to 23 million barrels a day, somewhere in that range. And best case is by 2025 it will be 25 million barrels a day. Best case. And he showed basically the decline of Iran, and he showed the Burgan field and what would happen if it increased and then collapsed. He stayed totally away from his own country, but he speaking for his countrymen. And so it was a pretty astonishing speech.
What I was asked to address today is the topic of today's energy reality, and in my opinion it's a pretty simple story. We are in a deep hole. One of the interesting comments that I heard from an energy economist about four years ago was that the - he said, if you wake up one morning and you find out that you're in a deep hole, rule number one is stop digging. Well, our wakeup call is here because America and the world drifted into a benign energy war. How we drifted there was that demand was supposed to peak. It think it's so interesting. If you go back a decade ago and Google the word "peak," it was all demand is about to peak. It wasn't supply. Supply was supposed to grow and grow cheaply. Energy economist told other economists that didn't know anything about energy that told everyone else. And they said that one thing that's going to happen is technology is going to basically continually bring down the cost of extracting oil and gas - make it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
That belief was so deeply embedded that by 1999 when oil prices had suffered their biggest collapse in 50 years on a perceived oil glut that never showed up - it was just bad data - the best minds in the oil industry said, no, $10 oil won't last. It's going to go to five (dollars) and stay there for almost a decade because Saudi Arabia is going to flood the world with oil. And that became so believe that it became the cover story of The Economist. And then nine months later in their millennium issue, they published one of the funniest stories I've ever heard - "We Was Wrong" -- called it the biggest blooper of the 20th century.
Well, these were all great theses, but they were simply dreams. And now the alarm clock is ringing to wake up. These were just simply dreams. It turned out that everything went awry. Demand didn't peak; it grew too fast. 1995 - 10 years ago, demand finally exceeded 70 million barrels a day, but it took almost the entire year before people said, my gosh, demand is surprisingly growing again. Then over the next 10 years every time it grew, it was deemed to be an aberration. And the best guesses for the fourth quarter or the first quarter of the period we're going into is that global energy demand - oil demand - is apparently going to be between 87 (million) and 88 million barrels a day. That will be somewhere between 2 (million) and 5 million barrels a day more than we can supply.
And then in this era that costs were going to come down through technology, turned out a funny thing happened there. The cost to drill and complete an average well doubled. And we did find a lot of new supply over this period of time. It's just that they were all little things. I mean, Shell Oil Company now is talking about their expiration goal of finding some big cats. It was only a decade ago that the lingo was, we're going after elephants. And it turns out that all this technology we were talking about - it was sort of also illusory because we couldn't afford because of low prices to drill adequate appraisal wells and core the wells so we knew what was there. So we used the concept 3-D seismic, which has never ever shown anything about the -- anything about the possible structure, actually created reserves that weren't ever there. And so we systemically overstated our proven reserves. And then energy reserves that we had quite a bit of 10 or 15 years ago in this efficient free market were perceived to be glut. And so we used them up in the mantra of we're really getting efficient, and just in time supply has arrived with the energy patch.
And by August 2005, our spare capacity was disappearing. It was disappearing at the wellhead. It was disappearing in our system of pipeline and tankage to process to oil and natural gas so that it would become usable. It was disappearing in drilling rigs. It was disappearing in refineries. It was disappearing in people - people. We spent 20 years laying off about four times more people than we hired while the industry got more people intensive. Projects - there were no more projects to do either. We were effectively at 100 percent.
Somebody want to - well, now I need some help on it. We were at 100 percent capacity as we drifted into the end of August. And ironically, I spent the summer talking a lot about the fact that this sort of smells to me like the summer of 1939. In the summer of 1939, all of Europe was still in a daydream that we'll never have another war. And if you read the papers in the last week of August 1939, they were still daydreaming, we'll never have another war. And then on the 2nd of September we found out that we were already in the middle of World War II. It had started a couple years ago.
Well, in my opinion, Katrina was our energy 9/11. And ironically it happened on the 29th of August. What Katrina took away was more capacity than we had left in a nutshell. The full impact of Katrina is just barely beginning to be assessed. About the day before we had to evacuate the Gulf of Mexico again, they were just starting to do any inspection below the waterline. So all of the stuff - it didn't look that there was much damage - was also a dream. It might be that it didn't do much damage. The timeframe to rebuild is very hazy. All of these comments - well, this system is probably going to be out for two to three weeks - is basically just in the estimate that if we had everybody ready to go today and we knew what we should do and we were on a fast track, it would take two to three weeks. Natural gas got hit far worse than oil. And a local emergency from the Gulf will spin into a global issue.
If any of you didn't have a chance this morning to look at USA Today, there's a very interesting on page 4B showing the path of Rita. And what Rita did was finally sweep right over, while it was force five, the heart and soul of the platforms and pipelines of the Gulf of Mexico. And I think it will probably be Thursday or Friday before we have any sort of reports of the visual - how many platforms we don't have and what's happened to rigs. But it couldn't be good news.
So the question really becomes how did we dig ourselves into such a deep hole? Well, it was basically two decades of poor data. We had an energy data system that wasn't ever very good, and it got worse. It was basically then two decades of terrible analysis of bad data. It was basically the fact that all of our energy experts were basically the generals fighting the last war. These experts were still smarting over the fact that they got shrill in 1980 and '81 and predicted we were going to have $100 oil just as oil prices collapsed, as we had four years respite of demand growth as nuclear power came on. And they said, man alive, I've learned my lesson. Don't ever trust demand. And I'll tell you one thing, every time oil is high, we'll create a glut just like clockwork.
And low prices created by bad analysis and the perception that we had a glut created the wrong signals. Everyone was always saying prices are good signals. Well, we got actually the wrong signals from low prices. The low price signal said we'll always have low prices. And then turns out that strong opinions - really strong opinions by people who called themselves experts overruled facts. At this Oil & Money Conference last Wednesday morning, one of my favorite people in the energy business, Herman Franssen, who used to be chief economist at the IEA and is really respected among his peer group of chief economists, said to his profession - he said, I think basically, gentlemen, it's time to stop using the word I believe outside of church.
(Laughter.)
Well, what's our next step? Rule number one is stop digging. Rule number two is reform energy data. We urgently need a global mandated field by field production report on a quarterly basis accompanied by the number of wellheads that fields is producing so for the first time ever, analysts can do serious supply analysis. Rule number three is, let's go to an energy war footing just like we were forced to go to a war footing after Poland was invaded. And when we went to that war footing in five-and-a-half years from scratch, we created a war machine that was so powerful that we destroyed Europe and Japan. We can create a war machine and lick the energy war if we start today.
We also basically have another role model. In June 1947, we began the Marshall Plan. And in five years, the Marshall Plan - 2,500 people actually fanned out around Europe and created the blueprint and the foundation for rebuilding Europe. So it can be done, but not if we sit around. I basically believe there is a plan B that works, that it's going to work by basically addressing in the oil front - transportation energy has to be reduced. We have to move goods by trains and boats. Turns out the SUV isn't the problem. It's large trucks moving goods thousands of miles, getting three to five miles per gallon and clogging up our highways. Movement of people - we don't need 5,000 people to work in the same building on the mantra we need to communicate. And yet an exit poll says only 2 percent know each other. We have the technology today to work at home or in your village and keep your same job and be more efficient. We need to distribute food where we grow it, kind of victory gardens. Look at Whole Foods as a model. And they create a string of organic gardens with about a 30-mile radius of all their stores, and the food is good.
Natural gas problems, unfortunately, are really far more difficult to figure out how we fix. In fact, I don't know how we fix our natural gas problems. One thing we do is we stop using natural gas to create electricity, where we use up too much while we're creating electricity. And then R&D has to explode. For the first time in 100 years, we need to get serious about inventing some new forms of energy. Well, can the job get done? It has to. And ingenuity is the byproduct of panic. And I think what Katrina and Rita did, we will soon find out, was basically great panic. And I think probably unfortunately that was good news because we needed a wakeup call. The alternatives are too bad. And the longer we wait, the deeper the hole becomes. So stop digging. When should we start plan B? I actually say today would be a great time to start plan B. Thank you.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you very much. Matt Simmons used our response to the war in Europe as an analogy of what we need to do now. There are other analogies that may help us understand the challenge that we face. I think that the challenge we face is something like a combination of our decade of putting a man on the moon and the Manhattan Project. Unless we face this challenge with the kind of determination that we did those two challenges, we're going to have a pretty bumpy ride.
Richard Heinberg is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, and a core faculty member of the New College of California. He is the author of "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," and "Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World," to name a couple of his many works on the peak oil subject. He appears prominently in a documentary film, "The End of Suburbia," and has an award-winning newsletter and many articles to his name. Mr. Heinberg.
(Applause.)
RICHARD HEINBERG: Thank you. Well, I teach human ecology in a small private college so that informs my perspective on this subject. I see oil in terms of energy and human history. We're energy junkies, always have been, always will be. All organisms need energy in order to survive, and for all of our history as a species, we've been using our peculiar intelligence to try to find ways of harnessing more energy from our environment. We invented - we harnessed fire, first of all, then invented agriculture. We domesticated animals so that we could capture their muscle power by having them pull plows and so on. We invented water mills and windmills. But then, with the beginning of the industrial revolution, we discovered how to use - let's see, how do I get this thing to work. The slide is not advancing. Any suggestions?
(Laughter.)
Starting to use fossil fuels was like winning the energy lottery. There was nothing anywhere like it before. Think of it this way: suppose you had to push your car 20 miles. You can use levers, you can use pulleys, but you can't use electricity or any kind of fuel. That would be a fairly big job, right? Well, we get that service performed for us with a single gallon of gasoline, for which we pay a little less than $3 right now, and then we tend to complain about that.
The enormous benefits from fossil fuels were such that it was inevitable that we would become hooked on them and begin to design all of our social systems around them. This, of course, is the situation, as we have seen with the U.S., where discovery peaked in 1930. Forty years later, extraction peaked. So we learned the lesson about peak oil - what it is, how it works. It's no longer just a matter of projection into the future or reading tealeaves. We're talking mostly history here in fact. This is a well-studied scientific phenomenon, and it has real life consequences.
The U.S. used to be the world's foremost oil-producing nation. When I tell that to my 20-something college students, they look at me as though I must be crazy because they've lived their entire lives in a situation where the U.S. was by far the world's foremost importer. We import almost 60 percent of what we use now, but we used to be the world's foremost oil exporting nation. Seven out of every eight barrels of oil used by the Allies in World Wars I and II came from Texas and Oklahoma oil wells. We were loaning money to the rest of the world in those days. Now how things have changed. Of course we have become the world's foremost oil importer. China and Japan are number two and three in that regard, and the U.S. imports twice as much as China and Japan combined. And we've become the world's foremost debtor nation. We're borrowing about $2.5 billion per day just to finance our trade deficit, and about 40 percent of that borrowing goes to pay for oil.
So are all of these changes to our economy the result of U.S. peak oil? Not all of them. Certainly some of them could be wrapped up to bad management and other kinds of decisions, but a lot of the changes that we've seen in the U.S. over the last 50 years or so are simply the result of the gradual exhaustion of the energy resource phase that helped make this the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world. Now, as ExxonMobil has helpfully informed us, global oil discoveries peaked around 1963, '64. And they've been going downhill ever since. This little bit of optimistic news at the end there is really just some discoveries in central Asia and Kazakhstan. And since 2000, discoveries have continued to dwindle, and now they're about the level of the early 1920s. So there's not much more to expect from discovery.
This is a graph that's published by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, Colin Campbell primarily, and it shows difference between conventional oil and non-conventional petroleum resources like natural gas liquids and tars and so on. As you can see, historically we've gotten most of our oil from, you know, the cheap easy stuff that flows out of the ground under pressure. And these non-conventional sources are becoming more and more important in spite of the fact that they're much more expensive and difficult to produce simply because the regular oil - regular conventional oil - is just about at peak right now. There's not much more to be had in that regard.
Now Chevron is beginning to take out ads in newspapers and magazines that have a nice website called willyoujoinus.com, again helpfully informing us that oil production is in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil producing countries. In other words, it's not just the U.S. that's peaked. Country after country is doing the same thing. Indonesia, an extremely important oil exporter throughout the twentieth century, this year is importing more oil than it exports. So almost every year we see another country move from the column of oil exporters to the column of oil importers. Obviously that can't go on forever.
OPEC has informed us quietly that light sweet crude has peaked. Since the year 2000, of course, the amount produced on a yearly basis has continued to increase. But the amount of light sweet crude - the easiest stuff to refine into gasoline - has actually declined. So total oil production has been on the increase, but light sweet crude is actually declining. Saudi Arabia, of course, whenever we get into a jam always steps up and says that they will produce a little more oil. But what they're producing, of course, is the heavy, sour crude that no one really wants. And so it has to be discounted 10 (dollars) or $12 a barrel.
China - Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation chief economist Xiang Wei Ping (ph) just this moth said he expects global oil production to peak at 94 (million) to 100 million barrels a day during the next five years. And here's a nice little quote. High oil prices will have adverse effects on China's economy said Xiang. Yes, I think so. That's a pretty safe statement.
Now this is an extraordinarily important report that, even though I didn't help author this report, I want to hammer on it for a few minutes because I think it's something that everyone should be talking about and virtually no one is. It was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy. Science Applications International Corporation compiled the report. Robert L. Hirsch was the project leader, and the title of it is "Peaking of World Oil Production Impacts Mitigation and Risk Management." Now U.S. DOE asked ASIC basically two questions: is global peak oil a real problem, and, if so, what should we do about it? Now this is the executive summary that they came up with, and I'll read it to you. 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.
Now this report is extraordinary because, well among other reasons, economists have been telling us for some time that peaking of world oil production, even if we need to be thinking about it at all, is really a very small issue because as prices increase, they'll stimulate more exploration. They'll stimulate the production of alternative fuels, and they'll stimulate conservation. And with the combination of all three of those factors, we should make a very smooth and easy transition so that 25 or 50 years from now, we'll all be driving hydrogen cars down the street. No one will know that anything even happened. There won't even have been a bump on the road. We'll look back, and we'll say, what was that all about?
Well, the Hirsch report says that, in fact, those price signals will come at least 10 years too late and maybe 20 years too late to make a real difference. In other words, yes, we can make a transition, but it takes time to prepare that transition before the price signal arrives. For example, we all know we could be driving more fuel efficient cars right now as was mentioned. There are European cars that are already getting 100 miles to the gallon and more. Problem is it takes time to change over the U.S. car fleet. First of all, U.S. manufacturers have to retool and start making those much more highly efficient cars in large quantities. That will take probably four or five years. Then, not everyone buys a new car every year. I happen to drive a 25-year-old Mercedes diesel that I run on biodiesel, but that's not too uncommon. A lot of us drive cars that are 1-, 2-, 5-, 10-, 15-years-old. So that's going to take 15 to 20 years to change out the entire U.S. car and truck fleet. So we're looking at a process of transition there that will likely take 20 to 25 years.
It's the same wherever you look. To produce new supplies of energy from sources like biofuels, hydrogen, coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, which of course is ridiculous anyway because we're running out of natural gas - all of these will take years to implement, to ramp up to any large scale. I was recently in South Africa speaking to the executives of Sasol Corporation, which has the world's most highly developed coal-to-liquids technology. South Africa also has lots of high quality coal, but in South Africa they're getting 150,000 barrels of synthetic oil per day from coal. Now that's good for South Africa, but that country is at the same time importing 450,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Saudi Arabia and Iran. So even in the country that has the most highly developed technology and good coal, they're still mostly importing oil. So to think that we could deploy that technology rapidly enough to fend off peak oil if we don't have a decade or two to prepare is really foolish.
Yes, there are differences among the experts as to when the peak is likely to arrive. Some of us are saying it's virtually here now, but there are other experts saying, well, maybe it'll be 20 years down the line. And the effective message from that more optimistic forecast is don't worry, be happy. Forget about it. We don't have to do anything. Certainly the government shouldn't have to do anything about this because the market will take care of it. But the Hirsch report gives us an entirely different message and one that we should be talking about. When I found out about the Hirsch report, I discovered it on a high school website - a high school in Chula Vista, CA. It has not, to my knowledge, yet been published on the Department of Energy's website or by any U.S. government agency. It's not being discussed by the administration. It's not being discussed in Congress except perhaps by Representative Bartlett. So we have a huge pattern of denial with regard to this problem. And even when a U.S. government report tells us about the problem, we choose to ignore that.
So as we've already seen, this is a problem that is going to impact the global economy profoundly. Ninety-seven percent of our transportation energy comes from liquid fuels, from petroleum. Food and agriculture - the miracle of agricultural production over the last several decades almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel inputs. And finally, our tendency as human beings to fight over scarce resources - we've had oil wars in the past already during the twentieth century. It's extremely likely that we'll have more in the years ahead unless we do something about this.
Now, we've already heard a bit about Katrina. I think it's important to think of Katrina also as a metaphor for how we are responding to the problem of peak oil. We could see Katrina coming from miles and days ahead. Everyone in New Orleans new that the city was vulnerable, and yet there was a shameful lack of preparation and response. The next disaster, peak oil - fully anticipated by the experts - everyone agrees, in fact, that global oil production will peak - only some disagreement about the timing. I think we're going to see a woeful lack of preparation unfortunately because the even is probably so close that we don't have that 20-year cushion that the Hirsch report says that we need. We need mitigation efforts ahead of time. And we, I think at this point, need to begin to create crisis management options - what we can do immediately to reduce demand primarily, but also to set into force alternative supply strategies.
As a result of these two hurricanes, I think our forecasts for peak oil may be shifting somewhat. At least mine are. I no longer anticipate seeing a clear and sharp peak where one day or one month or one year we can say production is on the increase and the next year or month, it's on the decline. There was the peak. I think we've been prematurely catapulted into a bumpy plateau period, which may last five years, maybe 10 years, during which we will see impacts to supply and demand from political and economic events and probably further natural disasters. And every time supply collapses, we'll be able to point to a particular approximate cause - a natural disaster or a political problem, a revolution in Nigeria or who knows. And we'll say, well, that's temporary. We'll fix that. But underlying all of that will be the fact that we are in the peak period right now. And perhaps five, 10 years from now we'll be able to look back in the rearview mirror and say, oh yes, we peaked sometime during that period. But meanwhile we need to understand this underlying problem and be dealing with that rather than simply trying to put out the immediate fires.
As a part of our strategy, I think we need to think globally. And here, Colin Campbell, who is one of the global figures - retired petroleum geologist - one of the global figures who has been warning us about peak oil for some time - has authored a global oil depletion protocol. And I spent a few days with Colin in Ireland recently, and he helped me understand how vitally important this is because with out a global oil depletion protocol, first of all, prices are going to become so volatile that they will wreck any opportunity to plan our future. Whether we're talking about a company, a town, city, state, a nation, it will be impossible to plan our economic future unless we have some assurance of stable prices. And the only way we'll have that is if we have some means of moderating supply and demand. Also if we don't have a global oil depletion protocol, we will have conflict in the world over remaining oil supplies. And that conflict itself will exacerbate the problem because that will take oil supply offline. And it will be a self-reinforcing, self-catalyzing problem.
So in order to deal with that, we need to have some kind of international agreement to systematically and cooperatively reduce production and reduce imports. Now historically, we've almost always had some control on price and on production, whether it was Standard Oil back in the late 19th century or the Texas Railroad Commission starting in 1935 and going up to 1970 when U.S. oil production peaked or OPEC from 1970 to the present. Now none of those mechanisms work. OPEC is producing virtually flat out. So unless we have some other mechanism for moderating production and therefore price and therefore competition for remaining supplies, I think we're in for a difficult time. And I believe that the oil depletion protocol is our best last shot at avoiding what could be an economic and geopolitical Armageddon.
At the same time, I think communities around our nation need to begin focusing their strategies. And I have been travelling around the country speaking to city counsels and citizen groups in various places about what can be done to size up vulnerabilities and strengths at the local level to begin dealing with the impacts of peak oil. The pain is going to be felt very largely at the local level, where people will no longer be able to get to work or to get to the store where they can buy their stuff. The stuff won't be getting to the store because the trucks won't be running. People will be having difficulty heating their homes. So these are problems that will have to be managed largely at the local level. And so city and county officials need to be alerted and need to be strategizing and planning for long term emergency services - finding ways to produce food, more food at the local level for local consumption, making sure that local water supplies are tied to energy sources that are not vulnerable to this problem.
I was just a couple of days ago in Flagstaff, AZ, and they're pumping their water from 2,000 feet under ground. Imagine the energy intensity of that. And meanwhile Arizona state law says that they can't capture rainwater. Private individuals can't capture rainwater. This is insane. That puts people there in an extremely vulnerable situation. So every community has to assess its situation in this regard and see what its vulnerabilities are.
So there are lots of things that can be done, and of course we will be hearing more about those in the second set of presenters. But I think it's important to realize the nature, the scale, and the scope of the problem that's facing us. It is enormous. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Mr. Heinberg mentioned the fact that part of the solution to this problem is going to be the action of local officials, elected officials. And I'm pleased that several have joined us today - Delegate Sue Krebbs from Carolyn Howard (ph) County, Delegate Joe Bartlett from Fredrick County, Senator Bob Cooper came all the way from Hartford County, and Chris Shank from Washington County. Thank you very much for joining us.
(Applause.)
Many people will tell you not to worry because the market will take care of this. As the price of oil and oil products and gas and gas products goes up, people will conserve, and we will start looking for alternatives. I just wanted to give you one little indication of how challenging this is. Mr. Heinberg mentioned the energy density of these fossil fuels. One barrel of oil - 42 gallons - the refined product of which you can buy at the pump now for a little over $100, will provide the work output of 12 people working all year for you. And you pay just a little over $100 for it. To give you some idea that that's probably correct, Mr. Heinberg used this little analogy. Imagine how far that one little gallon of gasoline takes your car. In our Prius, it takes us an honest 45 miles. In your SUV, it may take you 10 miles. By the way, water is still more expensive in the grocery store than gasoline is at the pump. But reflect on how far that gallon of gasoline takes you in whatever vehicle you drive and how long it would take you to pull it that far. Now I know you can't pull your SUV, but you could use a come-along and chains and hook onto the guardrail, and by and by, you could - what, you get 12 miles out of it? By and by you could pull your SUV - would take you several days, I think, many days to go 12 miles.
That's the energy density in fossil fuel, and that's the challenge we have. Another little example of this: If you go out this next weekend and work really hard all day long in your yard, I will get more work out of Electric Motor with far less than 25 cents worth of electricity. Now that's kind of humbling, isn't it? That you're worth less than 25 cents a day as compared to fossil fuels. But that's the challenge that we face.
Mr. Heinberg mentioned the necessity to anticipate peak oil so as to avoid problems. The National Academy of Scientists has said that if you wait until peak oil is here, there are going to be very serious economic consequences. If you anticipate it by 10 years, there will be meaningful economic consequences. To avoid economic consequences, you're going to have to anticipate it by 20 years.
I would like to note that we here in the United States have pretty much blown 25 years. Hubbert (ph) predicted that we would peak in about 1970. We did in 1970. By 1980, we knew we were well down the other side of Hubbert's peak. When Reagan came to office, it was very obvious that we were producing less oil in this country than we had been producing. And so his solution to that - totally the wrong solution by the way, but who knew at that time? His solution to that was to give our oil industry incentives to drill, and he did that. And boy did we drill, but we didn't find any more oil. And by the way, you cannot consume more oil than you find. And a little later, we will have a chance to look at the amount of oil that the world has found and the amount of oil that we have used and how much there is yet to use.
A couple of congresses ago, I was privileged to chair the Energy Subcommittee on Science. And one of the first things we did was to try and determine the dimensions of the problem. So we had the world's experts in on the amount of oil that remained. And it was - there wasn't much variation. It was between like, what, 960 and 1,030 - about 1,000 giga-barrels of oil. That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? A trillion barrels of oil, but the world uses 84 million barrels a day. We use, by the way - this one person in 22, we use a fourth of all the oil that's used in the world. When you look at this thousand giga-barrels that remains and the rate at which we are using it, and it comes out to about 40 years. Now we're not going to run along a 40-year level and fall off the cliff. It's going to go down following this bell curve. It's going to go down.
Well, we're pretty much on time. We'll take a break until about half past to give you a chance to stretch and come back promptly at half past for our second panel. And there we're going to look at what we can do about this.
(Break.)
Roscoe Bartlett Energy Conference, Part 2
28 September 2005 Oil
In Brief: On September 26, 2005, Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett held an energy conference with participants Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, Matthew Simmons, Richard Heinberg, Donald Wulfinghoff, John Spears and John Howe. This is a transcript of that conference.
REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, MARYLAND 6TH DISTRICT, 2005 ENERGY CONFERENCE
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005, 9:00 A.M. � 12:00 NOON
FREDERICK COMMUNITY COLLEGE, FREDERICK, MARYLAND
PARTICIPANTS: DR. KENNETH DEFFEYES, MATTHEW SIMMONS, RICHARD HEINBERG, DONALD WULFINGHOFF, JOHN SPEARS, JOHN HOWE
Transcript by: Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.
Previous section
REP. BARTLETT: We�ve done a very good job so far of keeping on schedule, and so we�ll try to keep on schedule by starting when we told you when we told you we would start the second half of our program today.
We have another elected official with us, Mary Margaret Whipple from the state senate of Virginia. Thank you very much for joining us here today. (Applause.)
The first 200 people who arrived today will be getting a free oil poster. I�ve just started to read that. It�s pretty much like reading � it�s a pretty good textbook and it�s really a very good poster. And this is free to teachers. If you will call oil poster � I mean, if you will go on the net � oilposter.org � and tell them you are teacher, they will be happy to send you a free poster. This is really a very good poster. It summarizes most of the things that we are talking about here today.
Donald Wulfinghoff earned his B.S. in physics from the University of Louisville, a M.S. in physics from the University of Florida. He has been a researcher, consultant and teacher in energy efficiency, where he has served organizations in the White House to heavy industry plants, to small schools, to the most complex hospitals. He has authored �Energy Efficiency Manual� and �Managing Your Energy.� That �Energy Efficiency Manual,� I wish you had one on the desk. That really is an impressive book. He spent 20 years writing it. Mr. Wulfinghoff is probably the world�s expert on efficiency in buildings and he reminds us that more energy is used in our buildings than in the transportation sector. It is not nearly as obvious, but the opportunities for conservation there are enormous.
Mr. Wulfinghoff, thank you very much for joining us. (Applause.)
DONALD WULFINGHOFF: Good morning, everyone. And thank you, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, and thanks to your brilliant energy advisor Dr. John Darnell for inviting me to speak with you � that�s the infamous book � for inviting me to speak with you today. You have heard � you�ve got my notes. There we are. You�ve heard from the world�s experts on energy supply where we�re going. It�s my job to outline how we make a soft landing. The purpose of my discussion is to show how the United States can continue to thrive, be free, and be happy in a world where energy is very expensive and occasionally scarce.
I�m going to make a distinction between the terms �energy efficiency� and �energy conservation.� They are different concepts. However, for the sake of time, I�m going to use either one of those words as shorthand for both rather than make the distinction. My talk will be about the transition period, not the long term. The transition period is the interval during which we prepare to live within the bounds of the reduced quantity of energy that will be available in the future and the higher price that will occur in the future.
The transition actually began in 1973 with the Arab oil embargo, and it is important to understand this fact: Virtually every idea and virtually all the technology needed to make the transition was developed in the �70s. We do not lack for ideas and we do not lack for technology. What we have to do is we have to get the right ideas and the right technology in the game and the wrong ideas and the wrong technology out of the game.
Since the mid-1980s there has been no progress in energy efficiency in the United States and in most of the world. We have to restart the progress toward extreme energy efficiency � not just little energy efficiency, extreme energy efficiency � for the reasons that you heard this morning, and that process has to be managed effectively. So what I�m going to try to do in a very short period of time is to show where energy is used and where it is wasted in the United States economy to estimate the savings potential in each sector of the economy and to recommend the actions needed to make a soft landing in the future. The logic of efficiency has already bee covered. We�re rapidly exhausting fossil fuels. By default, what�s left is renewable energy, but renewable sources, no matter how optimistic you are, during the transition period at least, cannot cover more than a fraction of our current consumption. Therefore, finally we have to live with a much smaller quantity of energy consumption fulfilling the same functions that we do today.
Now, the good news is that a very large part of present U.S. energy use is fat. It can be eliminated without harm to our quality of life. But we have to make that happen, and it won�t happen by itself and the previous speakers were very good about telling us that time is of the essence. If we stay one year ahead of the curve, we�ll make a soft landing; one year behind the curve, catastrophe. I believe that.
Effective action starts by identifying all our opportunities for saving energy and then pursuing each option systematically. There is no magic bullet. Achieving energy efficiency requires many diverse actions in the different sectors of our society. Each action requires its own people, it�s own techniques, it has its own economics, and each action has obstacles that must be overcome.
Okay, U.S. energy we can break down into three sectors: transportation, buildings, and industry. We�ll start with transportation, which is 27 percent of U.S. total energy. It is the smallest sector of energy consumption; it is, however, the most critical. The reason that it is the most critical is that most transportation is fueled by oil. As a nation, we drive to work. If we run out of oil, we can�t get work. We can�t get to work, we can�t buy food, we can�t pay the rent, we can�t pay taxes, and wherever we work, it shuts down � catastrophe, and it happens pretty quickly. So we�re highly vulnerable on oil.
Fortunately, transportation offers a very large potential for reducing energy consumption and � very important to understand � no new technology is needed. The needed changes are remarkably free of external obstacles, unlike the other sectors. Most actions can be initiated individually or market forces will drive them. The biggest need is for awareness of what we need to do, and the biggest obstacle is distraction by ineffective solutions.
So, transportation energy is the biggest threat to our survival but it�s also the easiest place to make major reductions. There are three main transition-era strategies for transportation. The first is much more important than the second; the second is much more important than the third. The first one is to minimize transportation. We transport way too much and we transport unnecessarily way too far. This is not a technology issue. The second is to improve vehicle fuel economy, and third is to shift away from petroleum fuels.
So let�s look at this most important technique, which is to minimize transportation. There are four basic � look at the odometer of your car and see where the miles go. The largest number of miles probably go to commuting. Commuting is entirely unproductive. It wastes vast amounts of fuel and energy for the manufacture of vehicles. Everyone hates it, so it isn�t something we want. The solution is to live near where you work or to work where near you live. The action is individual, it is entirely voluntary, and it is feasible immediately. Furthermore, it has some great advantages: huge increase in productivity. If you�re sitting in traffic two hours every day, you�re wasting two hours of your prime daytime productivity. You arrive at work tired. Get rid of those two hours wasted. Large saving for household costs for vehicles; maintenance and fuel; reduced highway accident death and injury; reduced respiratory disease, sucking other people�s exhaust fumes; reduced lower-back trouble, which is chronic in our country, which is largely the result of sitting on car seats; and improved physical fitness. So this is just a win-win-win-win-win-win situation. Get rid of commuting.
Okay, then if you look at your odometer again, the second-largest place where we do a lot of wasted driving is repetitive things that we do on a daily or several-times-a-week basis � grocery shopping, children�s soccer practice, dining out and so forth. This is tougher. The solution is a return to small, self-contained communities, perhaps communities within larger cities. Action is voluntary but it requires a whole new market for housing of a different kind.
Now, when you start talking about reorganizing how we live, some people get a terrible case of fright, but there is no need for that because we know how to do this. U.S. communities will simply return to a style of life that has existed for most of the history of the United States, and if you talk to any American who has spent time in Europe � I hate to use Europe as an example of something � of a place where they do something better, but the simple fact of the matter is you go to Europe, you spend time there for a couple weeks, and you come back raving about how great it is. You can walk to everywhere; perform all the daily functions you need to perform just by walking around. So that�s the solution for that.
The third type of transportation will take care of itself. This is occasional long-range travel, going to conferences on the other side of the continent, taking the entire family to Disneyworld. Such travel is highly discretionary and there are alternatives. It�ll take care of itself. No need to worry about that one.
And finally, minimize freight transportation. We heard about that this morning and I agree entirely with the other speaker. The freight system is already very efficient on mile basis. However, we transport way too much stuff. And what we�re going to have to do is return to a culture of thrift. And people say, oh, gee, don�t we depend on growth? No. For as long as this civilization has existed, from the time the pilgrims arrived up until about 50 years ago, thrift was the basis of the strength of the United States. We�re simply going to go back to that.
The second major technique is improve vehicle fuel economy. This will come mostly from reduction of weight and drag of vehicles, not from any major improvement of motor efficiency, not during the transition period. It might happen but I wouldn�t count on it.
Dr. Darnell, who is Congressman Bartlett�s energy advisor, sent me a nice clip of a Volkswagen prototype that, in a very carefully orchestrated test run, got 300 miles to the gallon. We�re not talking mopeds or motorcycles here. This was a real car but it was a two-person car. It went fast � drove down the autobahn at autobahn speeds � safe, gets you out of the weather, but kind of exotic. If we make it realistic, 100 miles per gallon is a perfectly reasonable target.
And finally, the least important for the transition period is to shift away from petroleum fuels. Petroleum, of course, is the critical issue here, but the only thing we can do during a transition period that I can come up with is that we reduce driving radius to within the radius of electric cars. You are not going to increase the radius of electric cars simply because the laws of chemistry only allow you store so much energy in a battery.
Overall, we can radically improve transportation efficiency with the means that exist today. The biggest hazard is being distracted by ineffective solutions. Some of you are not going to like this, but the stuff we have to get over that is not going to be a solution is, first of all, mass transit. Mass transit is a social service. It does not save energy. It can�t save energy except in very limited environments like Manhattan, for example.
Hybrid cars. It�s a very easy calculation to show that hybrid cars, once you include the extra energy that it takes to manufacture a hybrid car, and once you compare, on the basis of similar weight, speed, acceleration and so forth, hybrid cars do not save energy. Hybrid cars are a political phenomenon, not a technical improvement.
The hydrogen economy is a bunch of fluff. It�s perhaps somewhat more legitimate than desktop fusion, but that is a concept that will evaporate and go away. So hydrogen economy, according to the opinion of many people, me being one, is just a hopeless diversion.
Coal-derived fuels we�ve heard about � yeah, you can do it. The Germans fought World War II with coal-derived fuels, but you�re trading one big problem for another. So we don�t go there.
Ethanol. According to the best experts that I have listened to � Dr. Pimental and others � ethanol is a break-even; it�s a net-energy loser probably and it has horrible environmental consequences. That�s just the wrong way to go.
Telecommuting. I disagree with one of the previous speakers. I think there is very little work that is done in this country that can reasonably be done by telecommuting. So we need to do the things that really will work and not get distracted by stuff that won�t work.
So summarizing transportation: The most important action is for people to organize their travel and living arrangements in a way that is desirable in itself, and if that is done, everything else will fall into place with a minimum of government action. So this is for you to do, not for the government to do � in contrast with the next sector, which is the building sector, which is the largest sector, 39 percent of total energy consumption, which is loaded with obstacles which will require a kick from government � an educated kick from government to overcome the obstacles that we face.
Characteristics of the building sector. First of all, it splits two ways. Housing is 21 percent of total U.S. energy consumption, and non-residential, which is office buildings, hospitals, schools, shopping centers and so forth, is 18 percent of total U.S. energy consumption, and those are two entirely separate worlds with different people, different set of rules, different licensing and so forth. Buildings use electricity � a lot of electricity. They also use a lot of natural gas, which is being depleted to a lesser extent. They use propane and petroleum, which is certainly also being depleted.
Both residential and non-residential buildings today use about five times more energy than is economically reasonable. And the implication of this is that buildings offer a tremendous opportunity for improving efficiency. Our target should be and is possible to reduce building energy consumption to one-fifth of what current building energy consumption in on average. The bad news is, you�d better do it before the building leaves the drawing board, because once the concrete hardens, most of the major opportunities for improving efficiency have either vanished or it becomes very expensive to retrofit that building. So you�ve got to do it from the get-go. No new technology is needed, once again, but there are a few items that we would like to have.
Progress in building efficiency has absolutely halted and even regressed. In the housing sector there was a one-time improvement in efficiency around the �80s as a result of increased insulation, but now housing efficiency is regressing, and in the non-residential sector, non-residential buildings � office buildings, buildings like the one we�re sitting in � have never been less efficient at any time in human history. They just keep getting worse and worse and worse. So there has been no progress in the non-residential sector.
We talked about this. We�ll skip it. I�m going to give you a four-step outline for improving efficiency in residential housing. Now, we�re talking super-efficiency here. We are not going to do incremental improvements. We are going to go all the way. We are going to build buildings from this day forward that use 20 percent of what buildings conventionally use. What�s the conventional cost, oh, by the way? Five to 10 percent increase in construction costs of the house, no increase whatever in the land value, which is now getting to be the big part of the price tag.
So it�s very cheap but it�s a four-step process. The first step is insulation. We�re going to radically increase the amount of insulation and we�re going to distribute the insulation much more intelligently � it makes no sense to have three-and-a-half inches of insulation in the wall and 24 inches of insulation in the ceiling. That�s ridiculous. In this climate zone, the walls are going to be 12 inches thick � 12 inches of non-flammable fiber insulation. That�s the standard throughout the mid-latitudes. We�re going to adopt good insulation practices. The current practice of three-and-a-half inches of fiber plus one inch of foam insulation board is horrible. It�s a bad practice from a variety of standpoints. It makes for a very weak building, moisture problems and a bunch of other stuff.
And we�re going to exploit the opportunity as we�re making the buildings more efficient to make it more desirable in all other ways. We�re going to make that building with its 12-inch wall and its good connections, essentially hurricane proof, essentially earthquake-proof, and at very little increase in cost.
The next item of the outline, the second item, is windows. We avoid excess glass because glass is the single-largest source of heating and cooling costs in buildings today. We�re going to locate glass for efficient heating, cooling, view and daylighting, and we�re going to use external shading on houses so that no direct sunlight ever hits any window during any part of the year when we want the inside of the house to be cool.
The third part of our outline, the layout of the rooms and the heating and cooling systems -- you live one room at a time, so you heat and cool the house one room at a time. And you automate this process. You do it with programmable thermostats, which you can buy at the hardware store, and you do it with occupancy sensors, which you can buy at the hardware store. We don�t need new technology. We cluster and isolate rooms for efficiency and convenience. Fortunately, the most convenient clustering of rooms is also the most efficient. And we select our heating and cooling equipment for efficient isolation and low fuel costs. In this climatic zone, the entire mid-latitudes, we have two choices. One will be hot water heating; the other will be heat pumps, for a variety of reasons I don�t have time to go into. The central forced-air furnace is history. It�s a bad system. We�re going to get rid of it. It won�t exist anymore.
And the fourth part of our four-step outline for housing is appliances. And this one is dead easy. You simply select the most efficient, practical model of every appliance, whether it�s a toaster or whether it is a heating boiler, an air conditioner or whatever. We have an existing system of appliance efficiency ratings, and it works very well and we�re going to use that system.
Now, let�s jump over to buildings, what we�re going to do to make non-residential buildings efficient. We have to use a totally different approach because unlike housing, nonresidential buildings are designed by licensed professionals, several different licensed professionals � four, in fact � each of whom has a different piece of the action in the construction. In the external structure of the building, the architect is the responsible party. We�re going to improve insulation radically. We�re going to size and locate glass properly for view and daylighting, and we�re going to use external shading effectively. The current glass-box building is history. It�s the worst development in the history of architecture. It�s terrible malfeasance, and we�re going to get rid of that and lightweight curtain wall construction.
In the case of the heating, ventilating, air conditioning systems of nonresidential buildings, the mechanical engineer is the responsible party. Unfortunately, the mechanical engineers are still struggling to learn how to design efficiently, and two weeks from � well, approximately two weeks from today in Lausanne, Switzerland, there is going to be unveiled a radically new approach to HVAC design. It�s appropriate for the coming century. That will probably take a couple of years to get into the mechanical engineering profession.
And thirdly, lighting. Unlike housing, in non-residential buildings, look up in the ceiling � lighting is about 40 percent of total energy consumption in a lot of buildings � this room, right now, for example � and so that unfortunately is the responsibility of nobody. Sometimes the architect does it, sometimes the electrical engineer does it, sometimes a group of unlicensed people called lighting designers do it, and none of them have a handle on energy efficiency.
What we�re going to do is a variety of things, but the two big changes are going to be task lighting, which is a concept from the �70s which was never properly implemented, but now we know how to do it. It�s in here, and we�re going to follow the task-lighting prescription in Section 8 � or, no, sorry, Section 9 of the �Energy Efficiency Manual,� and that�s how we�re going to do lighting in the future. And then we�re going to learn to use lighting controls efficiently. A lot of our lighting in buildings goes to lighting empty space. There is nobody there to look at anything. So we�re going to learn to eliminate that source of waste.
Okay, what are buildings going to be like after the transition? The basic building types will remain unchanged. There won�t be any big, revolutionary changes in the buildings in terms of the utility of the buildings. The internal layout and usage will be largely unaffected. The occupants will hardly notice a difference, except that they will be more comfortable and they won�t have diseases. They won�t have indoor air-quality problems. The exterior appearance is different � radically different because we�re going to fix all the architectural negligence. Design is rigorous for efficiency. The design is more standardized. Buildings will monitor their energy usage from moment to moment, much as luxury cars now do.
Comfort problems, totally eliminated. No cold spots in winter; no hot spots in summer. Health problems. Sick building syndrome, Legionnaire�s disease, all gone � fixed. Fire resistance greatly improved. Buildings will last much longer and they will be more trouble free. And, very important in the non-residential sector � very important � buildings will be much more, and inherently, terrorism-resistant. I wish we had time to talk about that.
Okay, design approaches to avoid, just as in transportation, we don�t want to go chasing butterflies. The biggest butterfly, in my opinion � and this relates to the developed world, the United States � is a tendency to want to link the development of renewable resources to the development of energy efficiency; in other words, self-sustaining buildings, or in the extreme case, buildings going off the grid. That�s nuts. There is no logic to that whatsoever.
I do not make my own shoes. I buy them from a shoe factory. I do not have my own cattle in the backyard. If I want a hamburger, I go to McDonalds� and buy it. And even though I�m an energy expert, I don�t make my own electricity. I get it from Pepco, because they�re the experts in doing it and they know how to do it most economically. So we�ve got to get away from this kick of the self-sustaining building because if we try to marry renewable resources to energy efficiency, we will destroy progress in both. They must be pursued independently.
Obstacles. This is the weird part. There is not a single school of architecture, not a single school of engineering in the United States where a student can go and learn to build an efficient building. It�s as if our doctors had no medical schools, and this bizarre situation has to be fixed. Professional knowledge of building is still being organized and there is no effective constituency to promote energy efficiency at the present time. Worse, energy efficiency is resisted by the self-same licensed professionals who have a public responsibility to build efficient buildings.
The obstacles are numerous and entrenched and there is one way you�re going to get rid of them. And I�m getting short on time so I�ll summarize this.
Here is how we�re going to have energy efficiency in buildings. You say to the owner, the architect, the engineer, the developer, you will not get a permit to build this building unless is satisfies stringent and extreme energy efficiency codes. And if you, Mr. Architect and Mr. Engineer, build a building and if we go in and measure it and it doesn�t meet those standards, we pull your license. You do something else for a living this day forward. That�s the only way you do it. Once you have done that, you�ve got the attention of the professionals. Then you can start educating them about how to save energy. I wish we had time to talk about energy codes and why they�re important, because they�re extremely important.
So, summarizing buildings, the efficiency potential is huge. The efficiency potential is not being tapped because licensed professionals with a public trust are not behaving professionally, and the main role for the public, that�s you, is to light a fire under the professionals and make them design buildings properly.
We�re not going to talk about the building sector because we�re out of time. I�ll just summarize by saying that improvements in the building sector are limited for the reason that it is the only sector in the U.S. economy that since 1973 has made a large and significant improvement in energy efficiency.
And I think the fact that the screen just blanked off is a sign that I�m supposed to quit. So thank you very much.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you very much.
John Spears is a certified energy manager and was named the Region 2 environmental professional of the year 1995 by the Association of Energy Engineers. He has developed energy and environmental policy for all levels of government and pioneered the development of many energy conservation, solar and indoor air quality technologies. His passive-solar homes have been published in many popular magazines � Better Homes and Gardens, Building Ideas, Popular Science and others.
Mr. Spears.
(Applause.)
JOHN SPEARS: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, Congressman Bartlett. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to give you my perspective on this issue. I�ve been involved in energy efficiency, renewable energy policy, design as a designer, policymaker and so on since the early �70s, and the way I see it is that we currently live in a totally unsustainable world, based on 18th century technology of fossil fuel boilers, internal combustion engines from the industrial revolution, and it can�t continue. Whether we like it or not, as we�ve seen this morning, cheap oil is going to run out in our children�s lifetime, and it�s going to be their kids that are going to have to deal with the world that we leave behind if we don�t do anything about it.
We don�t have any options when it comes to fossil fuels. They are limited. The only options we have are renewably based technologies, and we must begin today while we have cheap oil, to move towards a 100-percent renewable energy-based economy, and that�s what I want to show you is absolutely possible today.
Let me start with a quick example on a much smaller scale. Let�s say this room is the universe and we want to provide power for the lights and the air conditioning in here. The first thing we do is go get a generator. We happen to have a gallon of gasoline to run that generator and we also know that there is a guy next door that has got all the gasoline we could ever use, so all we need to do is go over and make nice with him and we can keep our generator running.
Energy efficiency is real important so what we should probably do is change out the light bulbs and improve the air conditioning system so our gallon of gas lasts longer, and we can put off dealing with the guy next door. However, we have another problem. Long before the gasoline runs out, we�re all going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. This is exactly what�s happening today on the planet. We are consuming fossil fuels as fast as we can and killing ourselves in the process. There are three fundamental fatal flaws with this, which I�ll get into in a minute.
The other option to powering this room would be to first look at what we need. We need light and air conditioning. We can reduce that energy consumption by 60, 70 80 percent by poking some holes in the roof to let daylight in and turn the lights of, allowing natural ventilation � it�s probably a very nice day outside � and ventilate the room, and we can eliminate almost 80 percent of the energy requirement. The balance of that energy, we hang a solar panel out the window, collect some solar energy, use some of it to power the building�s needs during the day, some of it to charge some batteries and some of it to separate oxygen from hydrogen and store it to be used later in a hydrogen fuel cell to power the building later.
The hydrogen fuel cell uses only hydrogen. Its byproducts are only water vapor. That water vapor can then be re-separated and made more hydrogen from the solar panel. That system will last approximately 7 billion years � much longer than a gas generator.
So the three fundamental fatal flaws of our existing system are, one, it�s running out. We know it�s running out. We heard all these people this morning talk about how quickly it�s going to run out. Put it in perspective: that�s our kids� lifetime. It�s their kids� lifetime, our grandchildren. That�s the perspective we�re talking about with radical shifts in society. We need to do something about it now. And that�s not really taking into full consideration, I don�t think, the impacts of the growth in China and India, which have huge appetites for oil and gas. China will soon pass the U.S. as the largest consumer of imported oil and tension between the U.S. and China over oil are real. I do a lot of work in China for the Chinese government and I know this firsthand. The U.S. (sic) tries to consume as much oil on a per capita basis as the U.S. does, we�re in serious trouble.
The second fatal flaw, it�s killing us. Fossil fuels are polluting the land and the air and the water, causing global warming. Some people have said New Orleans is the first city to be lost to global warming. The health costs to individuals from air and water pollution have a direct impact on all of us. People are dying every day from cancers and other diseases caused by environmental pollution from burning fossil fuel.
And the third fatal flaw is it�s controlled by a few. In fact, it�s controlled by a few people that don�t like us very much. We import more of oil than we produce, and we import it from countries that don�t like us and are in fact breeding grounds for terrorists. Whether we like it or not, we�re held ransom by the Arab oil countries and other oil-importing countries. And this has actually become the basis of our foreign policy as we try to protect our oil imports, and will probably become increasingly so. Imagine what would happen if OPEC decided not to sell us as much oil as we wanted.
The other problem is the fact that central government has the central control over our energy, water and basic life support systems. This didn�t used to be true. It used to be that you could live quite comfortably, and this country was founded on personal freedom to allow you to live comfortably and not be bothered. Today you can only live comfortably if you can afford to pay the electric bill or afford to pay for the gasoline, which has a serious impact on our liberties and freedoms. New Orleans is another perfect example. As soon as the central energy, water and sewer system shut down, the city became unlivable and had to be evacuated. There were no options.
This diagram shows what our current system looks like. It�s basically a systems diagram of the system of our society. It�s based on inputs of energy. Those inputs of energy are running out, they�re owned by other people, they go into the system to produce the goods and services that we need to provide the quality of life we�re used to. The output from those systems are directly polluting the very things that are required for life � clean air, clean water, and soil to grow crops on.
The alternative to that is a model from nature, or a regenerative system � a system that can sustain forever. Inputs to the system are completely renewable sources. They produce all the goods and services for the community. There is no pollution line. And everything that�s produced can come back into the community and cause it to grow. This is the model that�s found in nature long before human beings ever inhabited the planet.
We have options. We have lots of options. And what I want to show you today is my personal experience with my options over 30-some years as a professional in the business, and I�m going to show you options that are real and today, not future technology, and a lot of these options you can find in Maryland.
The first one is solar. Solar (portable takes ?) are a magnificent technology. You take some sand, you can make a solar panel out of it. It makes electricity. It will do that � until you smash it with a hammer it will keep doing that. Two kinds of systems, one directly plugs into the grid, so you use the power when it�s being generated. If you�re generating more than you need it goes into the grid so somebody else can use it. And we have a nice law in Maryland that allows the meter to spin backwards if you�re not using as much as you�re generating. On a sunny day, my meter spins backwards as fast as most people�s spins forward.
The second system � there we go � incorporates batteries. Now, this system allows you to have power at night and power when the grid goes down. It also sells power back to the grid when you use more � when you make more than you use, but it also give you backup power for days when the grid goes down. When we had that bad hurricane a few years ago we were out of power around here for a week. My home and office continue to operate on the battery backup that we had built in, charged by the solar panels when the sun came back out.
This is the system that powers my house and office in Gaithersburg, just 30 minutes from here -- two kilowatts of solar panels manufactured here in Fredrick by the Solarex Company. To the right is the inverter that takes that energy and turns it into AC energy so it will go into the grid, and the battery pack.
This is another project in Darnestown, Maryland. This is a six-KW system done for a Buddhist temple, and this place was built as a refuge for people in case of hard times, whether that be disaster or economic problems.
These can also be built at the utility scale. At the utility scale � lots of utilities are working on these, particularly in the sunniest climates � Arizona and New Mexico and so on, either (portable takes ?) or sun concentrating to solar thermal system. This particular one, called Solar II is a 10-megawatt solar plant that uses melted salts to store the thermal energy for the night so the power plant continues running through the night. It is not just a daytime producer.
Mirrors focus the sunlight to a boiler at the top of that tower that produces steam and then generates electricity conventionally. These two systems use different types of focusing collectors � on the left one on a trough that makes the hot water, and on the right, those mirrors focus on what�s called a sterling engine that makes the power directly. The Pentagon has a number of these units on the right installed just a year or so ago.
Wind energy is another resource. The nice thing about wind energy, it�s actually cheaper to build a wind energy plant than any other kind of power plant. It�s cheaper to build a wind energy plant than a coal-fire power plant. It�s significantly cheaper than diesel or any other kind. The question is where are you putting them? You�ve got to put them where the wind is. You can�t put it someplace where there is no wind. So this is a map of the U.S. of the various areas where wind turbines make a lot of sense. This is a utility scale power system because they plug into the grid. But it is the fastest-growing energy technology today, growing at approximately 30 percent per year.
These are just some pictures of some large-scale wind turbines. They�re getting bigger and bigger every day. You can now put a megawatt power plant up in one wind turbine. And a lot of farmers like these because you can continue to farm underneath them. They don�t take up any real estate really.
Here�s a couple of local examples. The one on the right is � (unintelligible) � Foundation downtown Baltimore, and we did that back in the �80s, and the one on the left is a combined wind/solar system powering an island for a family on the eastern shore.
Buildings can be self-sufficient. Buildings can absolutely take care of all the life-support needs of the family. They can do that by providing power with solar, heating with passive solar, and active solar systems � hot water from solar. Water can be collected from rainwater and stored in a cistern. Waste can be completely processed in composting toilets and kitchen composters for use in fertilizing gardens for producing food, which can also be carried through the winter in solar greenhouses.
This is one of the first examples of a completely self-sufficient home that was built in Prince Edward Island, Canada � very, very harsh climate. This house combines a house, you�ll see on the right there � the house is on the left-hand side � and a very large commercial greenhouse, which grows food, both vegetables and fish in large fish tanks. The greenhouse also processes all the waste from the house. This house uses no external source of energy. It�s 100 percent self-sufficient for a family of four. Granted, it�s a bit extreme.
This is a smaller-scale model that is actually a small greenhouse that can be added to anybody�s house. It does all the same functions. With a composting toilet producing the fertilizer for the gardens and the gray water from the sinks and showers and so on to water the garden. And then the greenhouse also provides heat to the house.
This is one of the modern composting toilets we�re using in houses today. It uses one pint to flush toilets. The composter is in the basement. What comes out is about the same consistency as the bags of compost you buy at Home Depot to put on your garden, and you need to empty it out maybe once a year. These are very efficient, use no water. In Fredrick we�ve had severe water problems over the past three years that have stopped development. This is a solution to that.
This is a design of a system, a completely self-sufficient house, that I developed when I was the senior architect at the National Association of Home Builders Research Center in the early �80s. This house is a modern example of doing everything you just saw in a house that might look like a Ryan home in a development here in Fredrick. I won�t go through all of the details on it, but basically it�s got the greenhouse, it�s got the food production, it�s got complete waste processing. Heating and cooling is done by a geothermal heat pump, which is the most efficient source of heating and cooling you can do. It collects water, has battery backup. I could spend all day doing a workshop on just how this house is done, but it�s completely off-the-shelf stuff.
Here are some other examples. These are what they call zero-energy homes � homes that produce more energy than they use on an annual basis. They�re being built now all over the country. Examples: Colorado, Montana, Florida, Arizona. This one here, down in the lower-left-hand corner is in Virginia. They actually built that on the Mall first to show it off and then hauled it to the permanent site in Virginia.
These are some houses just locally that I�m currently working on. They�re built out of compressed earth bricks. We�re not even using lumber from Canada; we�re taking the dirt from the site, compressing it and making bricks and building the house from the material on the site to make houses that use no energy. That building on the right is my office, which by the way is on the solar home tour, which is next weekend. If any of you are interested, it�s free to the public, and there are homes all over the region that you can tour that are completely solar-powered.
This is a very exciting project that you�ll all get to participate in. Congressman Bartlett initiated this project to build a completely off-the-grid, self-sufficient building that everyone could see and understand the technology. This is a visitor�s center that�s being built on I-270 just south of here at the overlook, the scenic overlook. And this is � it was a competition from colleges all around the region, and this was the winning solution. It is currently in final design. It will be built starting, hopefully, this fall, and this time next year we�ll be giving tours of it. It is completely off the grid and self-sufficient. Again, we could do a whole day on just this wonderful building.
In two weeks you�ll have the opportunity to see many of these kinds of buildings built on the Mall by college students in schools of architecture from around the world, including Puerto Rico, Spain, and other countries, and Canada. The building on the lower left-hand corner is the University of Maryland entry. These buildings are completely self-sufficient, solar powered with all the features, maybe save the greenhouse that we discussed � on the Mall October 8th through the 16th. Don�t miss this one.
Communities are the next level. We can make the house self-sufficient. It�s actually probably better to think about the whole community as being self-sufficient � new way of development. I can�t get into too much detail here, but what I wan to show you, I want to get to, is a real example of 100 percent renewable energy. And it�s not just for the rich folks. These are low-income rehab projects. We�ve done Baltimore, $30,000 to build solar homes that use less than $100 a year for utility bill.
I�ve done a lot of work around the world designing and building communities. This is in South Africa. Did I just get cut off or � okay. The village plan � again, I�m going to skip through this rather quickly. You can see this stuff on my website so I won�t go into it in too much detail. Basically it�s based around community gardens where people can grow their own food, a town center where they can sell the food. The energy system is a completely � this is in a Chinese project � energy systems completely self-sufficient using the economic engine of a pig farm, using the waste from the pig farm to make methane gas. Methane gas then powers the homes. This is pictures of the gas holder, digesters, the engines and the generators. This community is 100 percent off the grid using waste from a pig farm.
Biofuels � we�ve heard something about that, but biofuels are homegrown energy. We absolutely can�t live without them. I�m having a little issue here; I �m going to skip through this. We can run vehicles on anything that contains carbon. We have the technology to convert just about anything to carbon, including waste. Municipal solid waste � where do I have to point this thing to make it work? Does anybody know?
MR. : (Off mike.)
MR. SPEARS: Okay, there we go.
Ethanol is about the cheapest thing. Right now we can produce ethanol at about $1.30 to $1.80 a gallon. We�re working with a company called Ekron (sp). It�s currently planning an $80 million gallon per year ethanol plant in Baltimore. Most of that�s going to come from corn, most of that from the state of Maryland, and also $30 million from a new process that takes cellulose or agricultural waste.
Municipal solid waste � Willie Nelson is a big biofuels � (audio break, tape change) -- if you own a Prius. Some people have modified the Prius with extra batteries, charged with solar panels. At the cost of solar panels today in California, this is cheaper than gasoline, charging an electric vehicle, driving it around with solar panels that can fit on the sides of a parking space. This is cheaper than gasoline.
Also one other point. I drive a Prius, 5.E85. That�s 85 percent ethanol. In my Prius I get the equivalent of 500 miles per gallon of gasoline on my Prius. All I did was buy the car and fill it up with a different fuel. You could do that, too.
Hydrogen, it is definitely the future. I am getting the stop sign so I�m going to skip through hydrogen. It is about 10 years out but we must make sure policy insists that it is generated by renewable sources.
All right, I�m going to leave you with this one. A study was done last year by these groups, mostly Germany and Japan, to look at the feasibility of turning an entire industrialized country into a 100 percent renewable based economy. This is their conclusion to that study. Energy-rich Japan report shows that the combination of best energy efficiency technologies available today and the massive investment in renewable energy could ultimately provide Japan with 100 percent of its energy needs from renewables, including transportation fuels without expensive, environmentally damaging imported fuels and nuclear fuels.
Rather than seeking energy security through its hugely expensive and polluting nuclear program, for example, Japan could instead build its own renewable energy industry. As an industry-hungry and supposedly resource poor country Japan could make this transition to clean renewable energy without sacrificing living standards or industrial capacity.
The technology is there to do it today. What is lacking is the will and commitment. I�m going to skip to this in just a second. It requires a robust mix of renewable sources and demand-side efficiency. We should not rule anything out. We should explore all options because it�s going to take all options working in cooperation to make it happen. Here�s just some examples of housing, solar, wind, solar-thermal and so on. Vehicles running on hydrogen, soybean oil, corn oil, any kind of oil.
This is a picture today in Nanjing, China -- southern China, where every rooftop, square foot is covered with solar panels making solar hot water, eliminating the need for coal.
We have the technology today, and it is good policy, as we�ve heard from the speakers this morning, it�s urgent. Energy independence is the best policy for national security. Homegrown energy is good economic policy, creating jobs, stopping the drain of U.S. dollars to import oil and to fund terrorists. Every dollar that we do not export in buying imported oil creates three dollars in economic activity domestically. That is good economic policy. Renewable energy is good environmental policy. Enough said there.
Sustainable communities are resistant to natural disasters, and we have to face this challenge sooner or later. Sooner is going to be a lot cheaper than later. We need to do it while we have cheap oil. We can�t wait until we�re in a disaster-recovery mode. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: There is a poem by Edgar Guest saying I�d rather see a sermon than hear one any day, and our next speaker must have read that book because he really practices what he preaches. John Howe is an engineer and author. He was an engineer with General Electric and Head Ski Company and division of AMF Corporation before heading his own company, Howe Engineering and Howe Winter Sports, Inc. He has written two books of note, �The End of Fossil Fuel Energy and a Plan for Sustainability,� and an updated version, �The End of Fossil Energy and the Last Chance for Sustainability.� Mr. Howe.
JOHN HOWE: Thank you. One thing about being the last performer in a gig is you throw away your set list and wing it. But anyway, I�m the maverick here. I don�t come from a corporation or a company. My wife and I are funding this effort on our own nickel, and because we�ve become so concerned with fossil energy. It�s just like a terminal illness. First there�s the denial, then the depression, then you say, well, what shall we do. Well, we�ll try to do something. We�ll try to be pro-active.
We tried to research, look for all the answers, find out what�s going on, and believe me, the answers and even the questions are not something that can be covered in a half hour or an hour or one session. It takes a semester course.
I thought that maybe the answer would be to write a book and try to digest all that�s happening, all the aspects of the subject into at least one understandable form. And my first book was called �The End of Fossil Energy and a Plan for Sustainability.� Fortunately my daughter is a publisher. She was able to put this together. We�re doing this on our own nickel, on Social Security, whatever, and because by self-publishing and printing a book we can get it out in a hurry.
The first book, 3,000 copies, went out like that. We gave them away � we give most of our books away. I�m going to talk about the book a little bit more. In the last couple of years since I started the first book in February 2003 things have changed so drastically. Things are moving so rapidly, and so many new books and people have come out, speaking about fossil energy. They talk about oil. Peak oil is the buzzword now, what�s the price of gas. But you�ve got to go further. You�ve got to peel away the layers of the onion. It�s not just oil. It�s natural gas. It�s coal. That�s 86 percent of our energy. What�s the rest of our energy? Where�s it coming from? Where�s it going? How good is it?
So like I say, I�m going to give you some different approaches, some different viewpoints of what�s happening here. But I want to get back to the book. The second book, I held this off � we just went to the printer in June, I guess. I held it off purposely because I wanted to get Matt Simmons� book, �Twilight in the Desert� in here because everybody was waiting for that to see what�s really happening in Saudi Arabia.
So the second book, called �The End of Fossil Energy and the Last Chance for Sustainability,� the last chance. The more you get into this, the more ominous the picture gets. Believe me, there are no simple answers. Again, this is self-funded, personal project. We don�t have the big corporations, I don�t have the PowerPoint, and if I did I�d have to change it. So what I suggest, I really offer to you, everyone of you, everybody here, write it down, send me your address on my e-mail address: howe@megalink.net. And I will personally send you a copy of the book within a week or two. We send these out all over the world.
MR. : We can�t hear you.
MR. HOWE: Okay, is that better? I need a monitor here.
MR. : Just say it more clearly � your e-mail address.
MR. HOWE: Okay, and I�ll tell you again at the end.
MR. : This is the only one.
MR. HOWE: Okay, this is the one that works, okay. I�ll talk like this. I need a monitor up here. (Chuckles.) This is better, okay.
It�s howe � H-O-W-E -- @megalink � M-E-G-A-L-I-N-K --.net. My name is John Howe, and my wife Debbie and I are doing this ourselves and we�re having a lot of fun. If nothing else, we find people all over the country that are also trying to make a difference, and we have a support group all over the world. We�re dealing with people all over the world now.
So to move ahead, it�s clear we have a terminal illness. We�ve heard that over and over again. It�s easy to define the problem. We have my mentors, Dick Heinberg and Matt Simmons, Kenneth Deffeyes telling us what the problem is. That�s easy, to define the problem. The solutions are much more difficult. The biggest problem we have right now is that, first off, the public does not hear this. Or the public is hearing mixed messages. The choir is not singing the same tune to the public. We�re squabbling amongst ourselves. This is confusing the media, confusing our leaders. So we have a terminal illness and we desperately need leadership.
Now we can deny that terminal illness, or our leaders can fail us and not give us the answers. Do we not want to hear that we have a terminal illness? And if our leaders don�t tell us we have a terminal illness, and it takes us prematurely when we had a chance for survival, then I would call that malpractice, big time. So we need leadership.
Now I�m going to jump around a little here but try to stick to some sort of format. I want to jump ahead because we�ve heard of the problems. That�s easy to define. I want to talk a little bit about what we in Yankee-speak call debunking dead-end delusions. Because the public is getting an incredibly mixed message. You�ve heard it right here today, this morning. How about this, how about that. This will save us, or that�s coming.
First off, the number one delusion is there�s not a problem. Believe me, it�s a huge problem. Whether we have 1 trillion barrels left or 2 trillion barrels left, I believe it�s even more serious than that. I kind of think we don�t even have the trillion barrels left because I think there�s a lot of phony business going on out there. The more you get into this, the more serious the problem gets. So first off we have a problem.
The second delusion is that � well, they�re not in any particular order, but I call them � I have my buzzwords � hydrogen hype. I agree with one sticker, not the other. There�s a book out called �The Hype about Hydrogen.� Hydrogen is not a fuel source unless you take a lot of energy to separate it, and about 97 percent of our hydrogen today comes from natural gas, and natural gas I believe if you read Julian Darley in �High Noon for Natural Gas,� natural gas is in even more dire straits than oil. Even though there may be a lot of it around the world, it�s a stranded resource and you just can�t ship it here and there and most of it that is available in the world is already spoken for. But tankers are contracted. The L&G ports are � shipping ports are contracted. And for us to build L&G ports to suddenly get hydrogen, get natural gas in USA will take a lot of time and it�s just a short stop solution.
So hydrogen, in all its problems, and I don�t want to go into the physics of storage and the cryogen � I�ll give you a little for instance. When we send a shuttle, wasting this tremendous amount of energy to send shuttles off into space � I see some nodding heads � we should be spending energy figuring out how we�re going to survive, but when we sent the shuttle up into space, it takes about 200,000 pounds of hydrogen. And when you see the pictures of Cape Canaveral, you see the fumes spewing out, it�s my understanding that it takes 300,000 pounds of hydrogen to be shipped from wherever they make it in Louisiana to get 200,000 into the shuttle. That�s at �460 degrees Fahrenheit. There are problems with hydrogen that you can�t imagine in storage and handling and energy to make it.
Now people in our own NERL, part of the National Energy Renewable Lab, they say, well, all we�ve got to do � and this is our administration teaching us � all we�ve got to do is spin a windmill and electrolyze hydrogen and put it in our SUV�s and we�re home free. They�ve even got pictures in the Solar Today issue of the National Society of Solar Engineering. These are our leaders, these are our teachers. But what they don�t tell you is that all the wind energy in USA Today, all the wind energy in one year is worth about one day�s worth of gasoline. And if you put it into hydrogen at 50 percent efficiency, it doesn�t work, folks. You�ve got to put numbers on these things. You can�t make a mountain out of a tiny speck, a little molehill. And yet there�s people touting this, that these are the answers are coming. That takes care of the hydrogen hype.
And the fool cells, we call them. (Laughter.) I hate to be derogatory but we have to get serious, deadly serious because the choir�s singing not a tune to the public. We�re arguing amongst ourselves and the public is not getting the right message. The media certainly won�t pick it up and get onto it unless it�s very isolated media.
Another one is the bio BS, okay. Sunlight is our source of energy, and to make the bio energy out of it, we�ve used bio energy for years and years. Otherwise our ancestors wouldn�t have been here to make it possible for us to be here. But we denuded the woods in the Middle Ages. Just look at Easter Island. If you take more bio energy than is coming in from that sunlight, and it�s very dilute, it takes a lot of area or a lot of time to concentrate bio energy. A tree does it for us, or Mother Nature did it for us millions of years ago and stored up this wonderful black stuff that we�re just blowing away right now, whether it�s oil or coal or whatever.
So you can�t take the energy from the sun and concentrate it into a fuel and use it at the rate that we would like to use fuels. For instance, let me give you one little factoid. If we were to make � and this irks me because in Maine our democratic leadership says we�re going to turn Aroostook County into a great soybean operation and make bio diesel and we�re home free. Well, let me tell you. Back of the envelope. I mean, this is not really complicated science or math. If you were to make soybeans on one acre into bio fuel, you�d get about 75 gallons, and that�s with a lot of fossil fuel input and a lot of deterioration of that soil. Seventy-five gallons of bio diesel. At that rate 5 percent, just 5 percent of our diesel fuel, or 5 percent of our heating fuel would take 30 million acres. Just 5 percent of our diesel fuel. Well, there�s only 300 million acres of arable land in the country today. I don�t think we�re going to take our food and turn it into fuel, especially as our system winds down and we need every bit of food we can get.
So another kind of delusion is that efficiency will save us. Well, there�s wonderful things about efficiency. I certainly defer to my co-speaker here. Efficiency, we have to get every bit of reduction of usage that we can find. But in the long run many times better efficiency has led to more consumption. This is called Jevan�s paradox. When we have better efficiency, the price goes down and people use more, and this is what�s happened time and time again. So efficiency is a tiny step in the right direction. You can�t argue with hybrids. They are more efficient, but they�re just a tiny step.
In the long run we�re going to run out, so what about the solutions? I�m going to jump ahead here to the solutions because that�s what we really want to hear. And believe me, they�re not very pretty or very easy. Again, be sure and get a book because this goes on and on and on.
First off, the number one solution, the metaphor I use is I�m sure many of you are familiar with the story of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance. The Endurance just is going down and we desperately need leadership. There�s not time for market forces or for individuals or whatever to � (applause) -- this is why it�s so � it just was an incredible spark for us who are in this field and studying it to have this champion here, who is a voice in Washington. (Applause.) There may be hope yet.
But another � and Representative Bartlett doesn�t know this, but just yesterday I was leaving the Common Ground Fair in Maine, our big fair, our big renewable, back-to-the-earth fair, whatever, and at that fair I was the keynote speaker Saturday. And I was leaving early yesterday in order to get a flight down here and Senator Kucinich was coming in and we kind of said hello. He has the book, by the way. The subject of his talk was sustainability.
In Maine we have different talks for different audiences. When I talk to the people of Maine, they know. They want to know what to do. They want to know the nuts and bolts and how to get off the grid and how big is your garden and so forth. But anyway, back to solutions. I tend to jump around here.
First off, we need the leadership. We need a Shackleton to guide us
28 September 2005 Oil
In Brief: On September 26, 2005, Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett held an energy conference with participants Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, Matthew Simmons, Richard Heinberg, Donald Wulfinghoff, John Spears and John Howe. This is a transcript of that conference.
REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, MARYLAND 6TH DISTRICT, 2005 ENERGY CONFERENCE
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005, 9:00 A.M. � 12:00 NOON
FREDERICK COMMUNITY COLLEGE, FREDERICK, MARYLAND
PARTICIPANTS: DR. KENNETH DEFFEYES, MATTHEW SIMMONS, RICHARD HEINBERG, DONALD WULFINGHOFF, JOHN SPEARS, JOHN HOWE
Transcript by: Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.
Previous section
REP. BARTLETT: We�ve done a very good job so far of keeping on schedule, and so we�ll try to keep on schedule by starting when we told you when we told you we would start the second half of our program today.
We have another elected official with us, Mary Margaret Whipple from the state senate of Virginia. Thank you very much for joining us here today. (Applause.)
The first 200 people who arrived today will be getting a free oil poster. I�ve just started to read that. It�s pretty much like reading � it�s a pretty good textbook and it�s really a very good poster. And this is free to teachers. If you will call oil poster � I mean, if you will go on the net � oilposter.org � and tell them you are teacher, they will be happy to send you a free poster. This is really a very good poster. It summarizes most of the things that we are talking about here today.
Donald Wulfinghoff earned his B.S. in physics from the University of Louisville, a M.S. in physics from the University of Florida. He has been a researcher, consultant and teacher in energy efficiency, where he has served organizations in the White House to heavy industry plants, to small schools, to the most complex hospitals. He has authored �Energy Efficiency Manual� and �Managing Your Energy.� That �Energy Efficiency Manual,� I wish you had one on the desk. That really is an impressive book. He spent 20 years writing it. Mr. Wulfinghoff is probably the world�s expert on efficiency in buildings and he reminds us that more energy is used in our buildings than in the transportation sector. It is not nearly as obvious, but the opportunities for conservation there are enormous.
Mr. Wulfinghoff, thank you very much for joining us. (Applause.)
DONALD WULFINGHOFF: Good morning, everyone. And thank you, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, and thanks to your brilliant energy advisor Dr. John Darnell for inviting me to speak with you � that�s the infamous book � for inviting me to speak with you today. You have heard � you�ve got my notes. There we are. You�ve heard from the world�s experts on energy supply where we�re going. It�s my job to outline how we make a soft landing. The purpose of my discussion is to show how the United States can continue to thrive, be free, and be happy in a world where energy is very expensive and occasionally scarce.
I�m going to make a distinction between the terms �energy efficiency� and �energy conservation.� They are different concepts. However, for the sake of time, I�m going to use either one of those words as shorthand for both rather than make the distinction. My talk will be about the transition period, not the long term. The transition period is the interval during which we prepare to live within the bounds of the reduced quantity of energy that will be available in the future and the higher price that will occur in the future.
The transition actually began in 1973 with the Arab oil embargo, and it is important to understand this fact: Virtually every idea and virtually all the technology needed to make the transition was developed in the �70s. We do not lack for ideas and we do not lack for technology. What we have to do is we have to get the right ideas and the right technology in the game and the wrong ideas and the wrong technology out of the game.
Since the mid-1980s there has been no progress in energy efficiency in the United States and in most of the world. We have to restart the progress toward extreme energy efficiency � not just little energy efficiency, extreme energy efficiency � for the reasons that you heard this morning, and that process has to be managed effectively. So what I�m going to try to do in a very short period of time is to show where energy is used and where it is wasted in the United States economy to estimate the savings potential in each sector of the economy and to recommend the actions needed to make a soft landing in the future. The logic of efficiency has already bee covered. We�re rapidly exhausting fossil fuels. By default, what�s left is renewable energy, but renewable sources, no matter how optimistic you are, during the transition period at least, cannot cover more than a fraction of our current consumption. Therefore, finally we have to live with a much smaller quantity of energy consumption fulfilling the same functions that we do today.
Now, the good news is that a very large part of present U.S. energy use is fat. It can be eliminated without harm to our quality of life. But we have to make that happen, and it won�t happen by itself and the previous speakers were very good about telling us that time is of the essence. If we stay one year ahead of the curve, we�ll make a soft landing; one year behind the curve, catastrophe. I believe that.
Effective action starts by identifying all our opportunities for saving energy and then pursuing each option systematically. There is no magic bullet. Achieving energy efficiency requires many diverse actions in the different sectors of our society. Each action requires its own people, it�s own techniques, it has its own economics, and each action has obstacles that must be overcome.
Okay, U.S. energy we can break down into three sectors: transportation, buildings, and industry. We�ll start with transportation, which is 27 percent of U.S. total energy. It is the smallest sector of energy consumption; it is, however, the most critical. The reason that it is the most critical is that most transportation is fueled by oil. As a nation, we drive to work. If we run out of oil, we can�t get work. We can�t get to work, we can�t buy food, we can�t pay the rent, we can�t pay taxes, and wherever we work, it shuts down � catastrophe, and it happens pretty quickly. So we�re highly vulnerable on oil.
Fortunately, transportation offers a very large potential for reducing energy consumption and � very important to understand � no new technology is needed. The needed changes are remarkably free of external obstacles, unlike the other sectors. Most actions can be initiated individually or market forces will drive them. The biggest need is for awareness of what we need to do, and the biggest obstacle is distraction by ineffective solutions.
So, transportation energy is the biggest threat to our survival but it�s also the easiest place to make major reductions. There are three main transition-era strategies for transportation. The first is much more important than the second; the second is much more important than the third. The first one is to minimize transportation. We transport way too much and we transport unnecessarily way too far. This is not a technology issue. The second is to improve vehicle fuel economy, and third is to shift away from petroleum fuels.
So let�s look at this most important technique, which is to minimize transportation. There are four basic � look at the odometer of your car and see where the miles go. The largest number of miles probably go to commuting. Commuting is entirely unproductive. It wastes vast amounts of fuel and energy for the manufacture of vehicles. Everyone hates it, so it isn�t something we want. The solution is to live near where you work or to work where near you live. The action is individual, it is entirely voluntary, and it is feasible immediately. Furthermore, it has some great advantages: huge increase in productivity. If you�re sitting in traffic two hours every day, you�re wasting two hours of your prime daytime productivity. You arrive at work tired. Get rid of those two hours wasted. Large saving for household costs for vehicles; maintenance and fuel; reduced highway accident death and injury; reduced respiratory disease, sucking other people�s exhaust fumes; reduced lower-back trouble, which is chronic in our country, which is largely the result of sitting on car seats; and improved physical fitness. So this is just a win-win-win-win-win-win situation. Get rid of commuting.
Okay, then if you look at your odometer again, the second-largest place where we do a lot of wasted driving is repetitive things that we do on a daily or several-times-a-week basis � grocery shopping, children�s soccer practice, dining out and so forth. This is tougher. The solution is a return to small, self-contained communities, perhaps communities within larger cities. Action is voluntary but it requires a whole new market for housing of a different kind.
Now, when you start talking about reorganizing how we live, some people get a terrible case of fright, but there is no need for that because we know how to do this. U.S. communities will simply return to a style of life that has existed for most of the history of the United States, and if you talk to any American who has spent time in Europe � I hate to use Europe as an example of something � of a place where they do something better, but the simple fact of the matter is you go to Europe, you spend time there for a couple weeks, and you come back raving about how great it is. You can walk to everywhere; perform all the daily functions you need to perform just by walking around. So that�s the solution for that.
The third type of transportation will take care of itself. This is occasional long-range travel, going to conferences on the other side of the continent, taking the entire family to Disneyworld. Such travel is highly discretionary and there are alternatives. It�ll take care of itself. No need to worry about that one.
And finally, minimize freight transportation. We heard about that this morning and I agree entirely with the other speaker. The freight system is already very efficient on mile basis. However, we transport way too much stuff. And what we�re going to have to do is return to a culture of thrift. And people say, oh, gee, don�t we depend on growth? No. For as long as this civilization has existed, from the time the pilgrims arrived up until about 50 years ago, thrift was the basis of the strength of the United States. We�re simply going to go back to that.
The second major technique is improve vehicle fuel economy. This will come mostly from reduction of weight and drag of vehicles, not from any major improvement of motor efficiency, not during the transition period. It might happen but I wouldn�t count on it.
Dr. Darnell, who is Congressman Bartlett�s energy advisor, sent me a nice clip of a Volkswagen prototype that, in a very carefully orchestrated test run, got 300 miles to the gallon. We�re not talking mopeds or motorcycles here. This was a real car but it was a two-person car. It went fast � drove down the autobahn at autobahn speeds � safe, gets you out of the weather, but kind of exotic. If we make it realistic, 100 miles per gallon is a perfectly reasonable target.
And finally, the least important for the transition period is to shift away from petroleum fuels. Petroleum, of course, is the critical issue here, but the only thing we can do during a transition period that I can come up with is that we reduce driving radius to within the radius of electric cars. You are not going to increase the radius of electric cars simply because the laws of chemistry only allow you store so much energy in a battery.
Overall, we can radically improve transportation efficiency with the means that exist today. The biggest hazard is being distracted by ineffective solutions. Some of you are not going to like this, but the stuff we have to get over that is not going to be a solution is, first of all, mass transit. Mass transit is a social service. It does not save energy. It can�t save energy except in very limited environments like Manhattan, for example.
Hybrid cars. It�s a very easy calculation to show that hybrid cars, once you include the extra energy that it takes to manufacture a hybrid car, and once you compare, on the basis of similar weight, speed, acceleration and so forth, hybrid cars do not save energy. Hybrid cars are a political phenomenon, not a technical improvement.
The hydrogen economy is a bunch of fluff. It�s perhaps somewhat more legitimate than desktop fusion, but that is a concept that will evaporate and go away. So hydrogen economy, according to the opinion of many people, me being one, is just a hopeless diversion.
Coal-derived fuels we�ve heard about � yeah, you can do it. The Germans fought World War II with coal-derived fuels, but you�re trading one big problem for another. So we don�t go there.
Ethanol. According to the best experts that I have listened to � Dr. Pimental and others � ethanol is a break-even; it�s a net-energy loser probably and it has horrible environmental consequences. That�s just the wrong way to go.
Telecommuting. I disagree with one of the previous speakers. I think there is very little work that is done in this country that can reasonably be done by telecommuting. So we need to do the things that really will work and not get distracted by stuff that won�t work.
So summarizing transportation: The most important action is for people to organize their travel and living arrangements in a way that is desirable in itself, and if that is done, everything else will fall into place with a minimum of government action. So this is for you to do, not for the government to do � in contrast with the next sector, which is the building sector, which is the largest sector, 39 percent of total energy consumption, which is loaded with obstacles which will require a kick from government � an educated kick from government to overcome the obstacles that we face.
Characteristics of the building sector. First of all, it splits two ways. Housing is 21 percent of total U.S. energy consumption, and non-residential, which is office buildings, hospitals, schools, shopping centers and so forth, is 18 percent of total U.S. energy consumption, and those are two entirely separate worlds with different people, different set of rules, different licensing and so forth. Buildings use electricity � a lot of electricity. They also use a lot of natural gas, which is being depleted to a lesser extent. They use propane and petroleum, which is certainly also being depleted.
Both residential and non-residential buildings today use about five times more energy than is economically reasonable. And the implication of this is that buildings offer a tremendous opportunity for improving efficiency. Our target should be and is possible to reduce building energy consumption to one-fifth of what current building energy consumption in on average. The bad news is, you�d better do it before the building leaves the drawing board, because once the concrete hardens, most of the major opportunities for improving efficiency have either vanished or it becomes very expensive to retrofit that building. So you�ve got to do it from the get-go. No new technology is needed, once again, but there are a few items that we would like to have.
Progress in building efficiency has absolutely halted and even regressed. In the housing sector there was a one-time improvement in efficiency around the �80s as a result of increased insulation, but now housing efficiency is regressing, and in the non-residential sector, non-residential buildings � office buildings, buildings like the one we�re sitting in � have never been less efficient at any time in human history. They just keep getting worse and worse and worse. So there has been no progress in the non-residential sector.
We talked about this. We�ll skip it. I�m going to give you a four-step outline for improving efficiency in residential housing. Now, we�re talking super-efficiency here. We are not going to do incremental improvements. We are going to go all the way. We are going to build buildings from this day forward that use 20 percent of what buildings conventionally use. What�s the conventional cost, oh, by the way? Five to 10 percent increase in construction costs of the house, no increase whatever in the land value, which is now getting to be the big part of the price tag.
So it�s very cheap but it�s a four-step process. The first step is insulation. We�re going to radically increase the amount of insulation and we�re going to distribute the insulation much more intelligently � it makes no sense to have three-and-a-half inches of insulation in the wall and 24 inches of insulation in the ceiling. That�s ridiculous. In this climate zone, the walls are going to be 12 inches thick � 12 inches of non-flammable fiber insulation. That�s the standard throughout the mid-latitudes. We�re going to adopt good insulation practices. The current practice of three-and-a-half inches of fiber plus one inch of foam insulation board is horrible. It�s a bad practice from a variety of standpoints. It makes for a very weak building, moisture problems and a bunch of other stuff.
And we�re going to exploit the opportunity as we�re making the buildings more efficient to make it more desirable in all other ways. We�re going to make that building with its 12-inch wall and its good connections, essentially hurricane proof, essentially earthquake-proof, and at very little increase in cost.
The next item of the outline, the second item, is windows. We avoid excess glass because glass is the single-largest source of heating and cooling costs in buildings today. We�re going to locate glass for efficient heating, cooling, view and daylighting, and we�re going to use external shading on houses so that no direct sunlight ever hits any window during any part of the year when we want the inside of the house to be cool.
The third part of our outline, the layout of the rooms and the heating and cooling systems -- you live one room at a time, so you heat and cool the house one room at a time. And you automate this process. You do it with programmable thermostats, which you can buy at the hardware store, and you do it with occupancy sensors, which you can buy at the hardware store. We don�t need new technology. We cluster and isolate rooms for efficiency and convenience. Fortunately, the most convenient clustering of rooms is also the most efficient. And we select our heating and cooling equipment for efficient isolation and low fuel costs. In this climatic zone, the entire mid-latitudes, we have two choices. One will be hot water heating; the other will be heat pumps, for a variety of reasons I don�t have time to go into. The central forced-air furnace is history. It�s a bad system. We�re going to get rid of it. It won�t exist anymore.
And the fourth part of our four-step outline for housing is appliances. And this one is dead easy. You simply select the most efficient, practical model of every appliance, whether it�s a toaster or whether it is a heating boiler, an air conditioner or whatever. We have an existing system of appliance efficiency ratings, and it works very well and we�re going to use that system.
Now, let�s jump over to buildings, what we�re going to do to make non-residential buildings efficient. We have to use a totally different approach because unlike housing, nonresidential buildings are designed by licensed professionals, several different licensed professionals � four, in fact � each of whom has a different piece of the action in the construction. In the external structure of the building, the architect is the responsible party. We�re going to improve insulation radically. We�re going to size and locate glass properly for view and daylighting, and we�re going to use external shading effectively. The current glass-box building is history. It�s the worst development in the history of architecture. It�s terrible malfeasance, and we�re going to get rid of that and lightweight curtain wall construction.
In the case of the heating, ventilating, air conditioning systems of nonresidential buildings, the mechanical engineer is the responsible party. Unfortunately, the mechanical engineers are still struggling to learn how to design efficiently, and two weeks from � well, approximately two weeks from today in Lausanne, Switzerland, there is going to be unveiled a radically new approach to HVAC design. It�s appropriate for the coming century. That will probably take a couple of years to get into the mechanical engineering profession.
And thirdly, lighting. Unlike housing, in non-residential buildings, look up in the ceiling � lighting is about 40 percent of total energy consumption in a lot of buildings � this room, right now, for example � and so that unfortunately is the responsibility of nobody. Sometimes the architect does it, sometimes the electrical engineer does it, sometimes a group of unlicensed people called lighting designers do it, and none of them have a handle on energy efficiency.
What we�re going to do is a variety of things, but the two big changes are going to be task lighting, which is a concept from the �70s which was never properly implemented, but now we know how to do it. It�s in here, and we�re going to follow the task-lighting prescription in Section 8 � or, no, sorry, Section 9 of the �Energy Efficiency Manual,� and that�s how we�re going to do lighting in the future. And then we�re going to learn to use lighting controls efficiently. A lot of our lighting in buildings goes to lighting empty space. There is nobody there to look at anything. So we�re going to learn to eliminate that source of waste.
Okay, what are buildings going to be like after the transition? The basic building types will remain unchanged. There won�t be any big, revolutionary changes in the buildings in terms of the utility of the buildings. The internal layout and usage will be largely unaffected. The occupants will hardly notice a difference, except that they will be more comfortable and they won�t have diseases. They won�t have indoor air-quality problems. The exterior appearance is different � radically different because we�re going to fix all the architectural negligence. Design is rigorous for efficiency. The design is more standardized. Buildings will monitor their energy usage from moment to moment, much as luxury cars now do.
Comfort problems, totally eliminated. No cold spots in winter; no hot spots in summer. Health problems. Sick building syndrome, Legionnaire�s disease, all gone � fixed. Fire resistance greatly improved. Buildings will last much longer and they will be more trouble free. And, very important in the non-residential sector � very important � buildings will be much more, and inherently, terrorism-resistant. I wish we had time to talk about that.
Okay, design approaches to avoid, just as in transportation, we don�t want to go chasing butterflies. The biggest butterfly, in my opinion � and this relates to the developed world, the United States � is a tendency to want to link the development of renewable resources to the development of energy efficiency; in other words, self-sustaining buildings, or in the extreme case, buildings going off the grid. That�s nuts. There is no logic to that whatsoever.
I do not make my own shoes. I buy them from a shoe factory. I do not have my own cattle in the backyard. If I want a hamburger, I go to McDonalds� and buy it. And even though I�m an energy expert, I don�t make my own electricity. I get it from Pepco, because they�re the experts in doing it and they know how to do it most economically. So we�ve got to get away from this kick of the self-sustaining building because if we try to marry renewable resources to energy efficiency, we will destroy progress in both. They must be pursued independently.
Obstacles. This is the weird part. There is not a single school of architecture, not a single school of engineering in the United States where a student can go and learn to build an efficient building. It�s as if our doctors had no medical schools, and this bizarre situation has to be fixed. Professional knowledge of building is still being organized and there is no effective constituency to promote energy efficiency at the present time. Worse, energy efficiency is resisted by the self-same licensed professionals who have a public responsibility to build efficient buildings.
The obstacles are numerous and entrenched and there is one way you�re going to get rid of them. And I�m getting short on time so I�ll summarize this.
Here is how we�re going to have energy efficiency in buildings. You say to the owner, the architect, the engineer, the developer, you will not get a permit to build this building unless is satisfies stringent and extreme energy efficiency codes. And if you, Mr. Architect and Mr. Engineer, build a building and if we go in and measure it and it doesn�t meet those standards, we pull your license. You do something else for a living this day forward. That�s the only way you do it. Once you have done that, you�ve got the attention of the professionals. Then you can start educating them about how to save energy. I wish we had time to talk about energy codes and why they�re important, because they�re extremely important.
So, summarizing buildings, the efficiency potential is huge. The efficiency potential is not being tapped because licensed professionals with a public trust are not behaving professionally, and the main role for the public, that�s you, is to light a fire under the professionals and make them design buildings properly.
We�re not going to talk about the building sector because we�re out of time. I�ll just summarize by saying that improvements in the building sector are limited for the reason that it is the only sector in the U.S. economy that since 1973 has made a large and significant improvement in energy efficiency.
And I think the fact that the screen just blanked off is a sign that I�m supposed to quit. So thank you very much.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you very much.
John Spears is a certified energy manager and was named the Region 2 environmental professional of the year 1995 by the Association of Energy Engineers. He has developed energy and environmental policy for all levels of government and pioneered the development of many energy conservation, solar and indoor air quality technologies. His passive-solar homes have been published in many popular magazines � Better Homes and Gardens, Building Ideas, Popular Science and others.
Mr. Spears.
(Applause.)
JOHN SPEARS: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, Congressman Bartlett. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to give you my perspective on this issue. I�ve been involved in energy efficiency, renewable energy policy, design as a designer, policymaker and so on since the early �70s, and the way I see it is that we currently live in a totally unsustainable world, based on 18th century technology of fossil fuel boilers, internal combustion engines from the industrial revolution, and it can�t continue. Whether we like it or not, as we�ve seen this morning, cheap oil is going to run out in our children�s lifetime, and it�s going to be their kids that are going to have to deal with the world that we leave behind if we don�t do anything about it.
We don�t have any options when it comes to fossil fuels. They are limited. The only options we have are renewably based technologies, and we must begin today while we have cheap oil, to move towards a 100-percent renewable energy-based economy, and that�s what I want to show you is absolutely possible today.
Let me start with a quick example on a much smaller scale. Let�s say this room is the universe and we want to provide power for the lights and the air conditioning in here. The first thing we do is go get a generator. We happen to have a gallon of gasoline to run that generator and we also know that there is a guy next door that has got all the gasoline we could ever use, so all we need to do is go over and make nice with him and we can keep our generator running.
Energy efficiency is real important so what we should probably do is change out the light bulbs and improve the air conditioning system so our gallon of gas lasts longer, and we can put off dealing with the guy next door. However, we have another problem. Long before the gasoline runs out, we�re all going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. This is exactly what�s happening today on the planet. We are consuming fossil fuels as fast as we can and killing ourselves in the process. There are three fundamental fatal flaws with this, which I�ll get into in a minute.
The other option to powering this room would be to first look at what we need. We need light and air conditioning. We can reduce that energy consumption by 60, 70 80 percent by poking some holes in the roof to let daylight in and turn the lights of, allowing natural ventilation � it�s probably a very nice day outside � and ventilate the room, and we can eliminate almost 80 percent of the energy requirement. The balance of that energy, we hang a solar panel out the window, collect some solar energy, use some of it to power the building�s needs during the day, some of it to charge some batteries and some of it to separate oxygen from hydrogen and store it to be used later in a hydrogen fuel cell to power the building later.
The hydrogen fuel cell uses only hydrogen. Its byproducts are only water vapor. That water vapor can then be re-separated and made more hydrogen from the solar panel. That system will last approximately 7 billion years � much longer than a gas generator.
So the three fundamental fatal flaws of our existing system are, one, it�s running out. We know it�s running out. We heard all these people this morning talk about how quickly it�s going to run out. Put it in perspective: that�s our kids� lifetime. It�s their kids� lifetime, our grandchildren. That�s the perspective we�re talking about with radical shifts in society. We need to do something about it now. And that�s not really taking into full consideration, I don�t think, the impacts of the growth in China and India, which have huge appetites for oil and gas. China will soon pass the U.S. as the largest consumer of imported oil and tension between the U.S. and China over oil are real. I do a lot of work in China for the Chinese government and I know this firsthand. The U.S. (sic) tries to consume as much oil on a per capita basis as the U.S. does, we�re in serious trouble.
The second fatal flaw, it�s killing us. Fossil fuels are polluting the land and the air and the water, causing global warming. Some people have said New Orleans is the first city to be lost to global warming. The health costs to individuals from air and water pollution have a direct impact on all of us. People are dying every day from cancers and other diseases caused by environmental pollution from burning fossil fuel.
And the third fatal flaw is it�s controlled by a few. In fact, it�s controlled by a few people that don�t like us very much. We import more of oil than we produce, and we import it from countries that don�t like us and are in fact breeding grounds for terrorists. Whether we like it or not, we�re held ransom by the Arab oil countries and other oil-importing countries. And this has actually become the basis of our foreign policy as we try to protect our oil imports, and will probably become increasingly so. Imagine what would happen if OPEC decided not to sell us as much oil as we wanted.
The other problem is the fact that central government has the central control over our energy, water and basic life support systems. This didn�t used to be true. It used to be that you could live quite comfortably, and this country was founded on personal freedom to allow you to live comfortably and not be bothered. Today you can only live comfortably if you can afford to pay the electric bill or afford to pay for the gasoline, which has a serious impact on our liberties and freedoms. New Orleans is another perfect example. As soon as the central energy, water and sewer system shut down, the city became unlivable and had to be evacuated. There were no options.
This diagram shows what our current system looks like. It�s basically a systems diagram of the system of our society. It�s based on inputs of energy. Those inputs of energy are running out, they�re owned by other people, they go into the system to produce the goods and services that we need to provide the quality of life we�re used to. The output from those systems are directly polluting the very things that are required for life � clean air, clean water, and soil to grow crops on.
The alternative to that is a model from nature, or a regenerative system � a system that can sustain forever. Inputs to the system are completely renewable sources. They produce all the goods and services for the community. There is no pollution line. And everything that�s produced can come back into the community and cause it to grow. This is the model that�s found in nature long before human beings ever inhabited the planet.
We have options. We have lots of options. And what I want to show you today is my personal experience with my options over 30-some years as a professional in the business, and I�m going to show you options that are real and today, not future technology, and a lot of these options you can find in Maryland.
The first one is solar. Solar (portable takes ?) are a magnificent technology. You take some sand, you can make a solar panel out of it. It makes electricity. It will do that � until you smash it with a hammer it will keep doing that. Two kinds of systems, one directly plugs into the grid, so you use the power when it�s being generated. If you�re generating more than you need it goes into the grid so somebody else can use it. And we have a nice law in Maryland that allows the meter to spin backwards if you�re not using as much as you�re generating. On a sunny day, my meter spins backwards as fast as most people�s spins forward.
The second system � there we go � incorporates batteries. Now, this system allows you to have power at night and power when the grid goes down. It also sells power back to the grid when you use more � when you make more than you use, but it also give you backup power for days when the grid goes down. When we had that bad hurricane a few years ago we were out of power around here for a week. My home and office continue to operate on the battery backup that we had built in, charged by the solar panels when the sun came back out.
This is the system that powers my house and office in Gaithersburg, just 30 minutes from here -- two kilowatts of solar panels manufactured here in Fredrick by the Solarex Company. To the right is the inverter that takes that energy and turns it into AC energy so it will go into the grid, and the battery pack.
This is another project in Darnestown, Maryland. This is a six-KW system done for a Buddhist temple, and this place was built as a refuge for people in case of hard times, whether that be disaster or economic problems.
These can also be built at the utility scale. At the utility scale � lots of utilities are working on these, particularly in the sunniest climates � Arizona and New Mexico and so on, either (portable takes ?) or sun concentrating to solar thermal system. This particular one, called Solar II is a 10-megawatt solar plant that uses melted salts to store the thermal energy for the night so the power plant continues running through the night. It is not just a daytime producer.
Mirrors focus the sunlight to a boiler at the top of that tower that produces steam and then generates electricity conventionally. These two systems use different types of focusing collectors � on the left one on a trough that makes the hot water, and on the right, those mirrors focus on what�s called a sterling engine that makes the power directly. The Pentagon has a number of these units on the right installed just a year or so ago.
Wind energy is another resource. The nice thing about wind energy, it�s actually cheaper to build a wind energy plant than any other kind of power plant. It�s cheaper to build a wind energy plant than a coal-fire power plant. It�s significantly cheaper than diesel or any other kind. The question is where are you putting them? You�ve got to put them where the wind is. You can�t put it someplace where there is no wind. So this is a map of the U.S. of the various areas where wind turbines make a lot of sense. This is a utility scale power system because they plug into the grid. But it is the fastest-growing energy technology today, growing at approximately 30 percent per year.
These are just some pictures of some large-scale wind turbines. They�re getting bigger and bigger every day. You can now put a megawatt power plant up in one wind turbine. And a lot of farmers like these because you can continue to farm underneath them. They don�t take up any real estate really.
Here�s a couple of local examples. The one on the right is � (unintelligible) � Foundation downtown Baltimore, and we did that back in the �80s, and the one on the left is a combined wind/solar system powering an island for a family on the eastern shore.
Buildings can be self-sufficient. Buildings can absolutely take care of all the life-support needs of the family. They can do that by providing power with solar, heating with passive solar, and active solar systems � hot water from solar. Water can be collected from rainwater and stored in a cistern. Waste can be completely processed in composting toilets and kitchen composters for use in fertilizing gardens for producing food, which can also be carried through the winter in solar greenhouses.
This is one of the first examples of a completely self-sufficient home that was built in Prince Edward Island, Canada � very, very harsh climate. This house combines a house, you�ll see on the right there � the house is on the left-hand side � and a very large commercial greenhouse, which grows food, both vegetables and fish in large fish tanks. The greenhouse also processes all the waste from the house. This house uses no external source of energy. It�s 100 percent self-sufficient for a family of four. Granted, it�s a bit extreme.
This is a smaller-scale model that is actually a small greenhouse that can be added to anybody�s house. It does all the same functions. With a composting toilet producing the fertilizer for the gardens and the gray water from the sinks and showers and so on to water the garden. And then the greenhouse also provides heat to the house.
This is one of the modern composting toilets we�re using in houses today. It uses one pint to flush toilets. The composter is in the basement. What comes out is about the same consistency as the bags of compost you buy at Home Depot to put on your garden, and you need to empty it out maybe once a year. These are very efficient, use no water. In Fredrick we�ve had severe water problems over the past three years that have stopped development. This is a solution to that.
This is a design of a system, a completely self-sufficient house, that I developed when I was the senior architect at the National Association of Home Builders Research Center in the early �80s. This house is a modern example of doing everything you just saw in a house that might look like a Ryan home in a development here in Fredrick. I won�t go through all of the details on it, but basically it�s got the greenhouse, it�s got the food production, it�s got complete waste processing. Heating and cooling is done by a geothermal heat pump, which is the most efficient source of heating and cooling you can do. It collects water, has battery backup. I could spend all day doing a workshop on just how this house is done, but it�s completely off-the-shelf stuff.
Here are some other examples. These are what they call zero-energy homes � homes that produce more energy than they use on an annual basis. They�re being built now all over the country. Examples: Colorado, Montana, Florida, Arizona. This one here, down in the lower-left-hand corner is in Virginia. They actually built that on the Mall first to show it off and then hauled it to the permanent site in Virginia.
These are some houses just locally that I�m currently working on. They�re built out of compressed earth bricks. We�re not even using lumber from Canada; we�re taking the dirt from the site, compressing it and making bricks and building the house from the material on the site to make houses that use no energy. That building on the right is my office, which by the way is on the solar home tour, which is next weekend. If any of you are interested, it�s free to the public, and there are homes all over the region that you can tour that are completely solar-powered.
This is a very exciting project that you�ll all get to participate in. Congressman Bartlett initiated this project to build a completely off-the-grid, self-sufficient building that everyone could see and understand the technology. This is a visitor�s center that�s being built on I-270 just south of here at the overlook, the scenic overlook. And this is � it was a competition from colleges all around the region, and this was the winning solution. It is currently in final design. It will be built starting, hopefully, this fall, and this time next year we�ll be giving tours of it. It is completely off the grid and self-sufficient. Again, we could do a whole day on just this wonderful building.
In two weeks you�ll have the opportunity to see many of these kinds of buildings built on the Mall by college students in schools of architecture from around the world, including Puerto Rico, Spain, and other countries, and Canada. The building on the lower left-hand corner is the University of Maryland entry. These buildings are completely self-sufficient, solar powered with all the features, maybe save the greenhouse that we discussed � on the Mall October 8th through the 16th. Don�t miss this one.
Communities are the next level. We can make the house self-sufficient. It�s actually probably better to think about the whole community as being self-sufficient � new way of development. I can�t get into too much detail here, but what I wan to show you, I want to get to, is a real example of 100 percent renewable energy. And it�s not just for the rich folks. These are low-income rehab projects. We�ve done Baltimore, $30,000 to build solar homes that use less than $100 a year for utility bill.
I�ve done a lot of work around the world designing and building communities. This is in South Africa. Did I just get cut off or � okay. The village plan � again, I�m going to skip through this rather quickly. You can see this stuff on my website so I won�t go into it in too much detail. Basically it�s based around community gardens where people can grow their own food, a town center where they can sell the food. The energy system is a completely � this is in a Chinese project � energy systems completely self-sufficient using the economic engine of a pig farm, using the waste from the pig farm to make methane gas. Methane gas then powers the homes. This is pictures of the gas holder, digesters, the engines and the generators. This community is 100 percent off the grid using waste from a pig farm.
Biofuels � we�ve heard something about that, but biofuels are homegrown energy. We absolutely can�t live without them. I�m having a little issue here; I �m going to skip through this. We can run vehicles on anything that contains carbon. We have the technology to convert just about anything to carbon, including waste. Municipal solid waste � where do I have to point this thing to make it work? Does anybody know?
MR. : (Off mike.)
MR. SPEARS: Okay, there we go.
Ethanol is about the cheapest thing. Right now we can produce ethanol at about $1.30 to $1.80 a gallon. We�re working with a company called Ekron (sp). It�s currently planning an $80 million gallon per year ethanol plant in Baltimore. Most of that�s going to come from corn, most of that from the state of Maryland, and also $30 million from a new process that takes cellulose or agricultural waste.
Municipal solid waste � Willie Nelson is a big biofuels � (audio break, tape change) -- if you own a Prius. Some people have modified the Prius with extra batteries, charged with solar panels. At the cost of solar panels today in California, this is cheaper than gasoline, charging an electric vehicle, driving it around with solar panels that can fit on the sides of a parking space. This is cheaper than gasoline.
Also one other point. I drive a Prius, 5.E85. That�s 85 percent ethanol. In my Prius I get the equivalent of 500 miles per gallon of gasoline on my Prius. All I did was buy the car and fill it up with a different fuel. You could do that, too.
Hydrogen, it is definitely the future. I am getting the stop sign so I�m going to skip through hydrogen. It is about 10 years out but we must make sure policy insists that it is generated by renewable sources.
All right, I�m going to leave you with this one. A study was done last year by these groups, mostly Germany and Japan, to look at the feasibility of turning an entire industrialized country into a 100 percent renewable based economy. This is their conclusion to that study. Energy-rich Japan report shows that the combination of best energy efficiency technologies available today and the massive investment in renewable energy could ultimately provide Japan with 100 percent of its energy needs from renewables, including transportation fuels without expensive, environmentally damaging imported fuels and nuclear fuels.
Rather than seeking energy security through its hugely expensive and polluting nuclear program, for example, Japan could instead build its own renewable energy industry. As an industry-hungry and supposedly resource poor country Japan could make this transition to clean renewable energy without sacrificing living standards or industrial capacity.
The technology is there to do it today. What is lacking is the will and commitment. I�m going to skip to this in just a second. It requires a robust mix of renewable sources and demand-side efficiency. We should not rule anything out. We should explore all options because it�s going to take all options working in cooperation to make it happen. Here�s just some examples of housing, solar, wind, solar-thermal and so on. Vehicles running on hydrogen, soybean oil, corn oil, any kind of oil.
This is a picture today in Nanjing, China -- southern China, where every rooftop, square foot is covered with solar panels making solar hot water, eliminating the need for coal.
We have the technology today, and it is good policy, as we�ve heard from the speakers this morning, it�s urgent. Energy independence is the best policy for national security. Homegrown energy is good economic policy, creating jobs, stopping the drain of U.S. dollars to import oil and to fund terrorists. Every dollar that we do not export in buying imported oil creates three dollars in economic activity domestically. That is good economic policy. Renewable energy is good environmental policy. Enough said there.
Sustainable communities are resistant to natural disasters, and we have to face this challenge sooner or later. Sooner is going to be a lot cheaper than later. We need to do it while we have cheap oil. We can�t wait until we�re in a disaster-recovery mode. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: There is a poem by Edgar Guest saying I�d rather see a sermon than hear one any day, and our next speaker must have read that book because he really practices what he preaches. John Howe is an engineer and author. He was an engineer with General Electric and Head Ski Company and division of AMF Corporation before heading his own company, Howe Engineering and Howe Winter Sports, Inc. He has written two books of note, �The End of Fossil Fuel Energy and a Plan for Sustainability,� and an updated version, �The End of Fossil Energy and the Last Chance for Sustainability.� Mr. Howe.
JOHN HOWE: Thank you. One thing about being the last performer in a gig is you throw away your set list and wing it. But anyway, I�m the maverick here. I don�t come from a corporation or a company. My wife and I are funding this effort on our own nickel, and because we�ve become so concerned with fossil energy. It�s just like a terminal illness. First there�s the denial, then the depression, then you say, well, what shall we do. Well, we�ll try to do something. We�ll try to be pro-active.
We tried to research, look for all the answers, find out what�s going on, and believe me, the answers and even the questions are not something that can be covered in a half hour or an hour or one session. It takes a semester course.
I thought that maybe the answer would be to write a book and try to digest all that�s happening, all the aspects of the subject into at least one understandable form. And my first book was called �The End of Fossil Energy and a Plan for Sustainability.� Fortunately my daughter is a publisher. She was able to put this together. We�re doing this on our own nickel, on Social Security, whatever, and because by self-publishing and printing a book we can get it out in a hurry.
The first book, 3,000 copies, went out like that. We gave them away � we give most of our books away. I�m going to talk about the book a little bit more. In the last couple of years since I started the first book in February 2003 things have changed so drastically. Things are moving so rapidly, and so many new books and people have come out, speaking about fossil energy. They talk about oil. Peak oil is the buzzword now, what�s the price of gas. But you�ve got to go further. You�ve got to peel away the layers of the onion. It�s not just oil. It�s natural gas. It�s coal. That�s 86 percent of our energy. What�s the rest of our energy? Where�s it coming from? Where�s it going? How good is it?
So like I say, I�m going to give you some different approaches, some different viewpoints of what�s happening here. But I want to get back to the book. The second book, I held this off � we just went to the printer in June, I guess. I held it off purposely because I wanted to get Matt Simmons� book, �Twilight in the Desert� in here because everybody was waiting for that to see what�s really happening in Saudi Arabia.
So the second book, called �The End of Fossil Energy and the Last Chance for Sustainability,� the last chance. The more you get into this, the more ominous the picture gets. Believe me, there are no simple answers. Again, this is self-funded, personal project. We don�t have the big corporations, I don�t have the PowerPoint, and if I did I�d have to change it. So what I suggest, I really offer to you, everyone of you, everybody here, write it down, send me your address on my e-mail address: howe@megalink.net. And I will personally send you a copy of the book within a week or two. We send these out all over the world.
MR. : We can�t hear you.
MR. HOWE: Okay, is that better? I need a monitor here.
MR. : Just say it more clearly � your e-mail address.
MR. HOWE: Okay, and I�ll tell you again at the end.
MR. : This is the only one.
MR. HOWE: Okay, this is the one that works, okay. I�ll talk like this. I need a monitor up here. (Chuckles.) This is better, okay.
It�s howe � H-O-W-E -- @megalink � M-E-G-A-L-I-N-K --.net. My name is John Howe, and my wife Debbie and I are doing this ourselves and we�re having a lot of fun. If nothing else, we find people all over the country that are also trying to make a difference, and we have a support group all over the world. We�re dealing with people all over the world now.
So to move ahead, it�s clear we have a terminal illness. We�ve heard that over and over again. It�s easy to define the problem. We have my mentors, Dick Heinberg and Matt Simmons, Kenneth Deffeyes telling us what the problem is. That�s easy, to define the problem. The solutions are much more difficult. The biggest problem we have right now is that, first off, the public does not hear this. Or the public is hearing mixed messages. The choir is not singing the same tune to the public. We�re squabbling amongst ourselves. This is confusing the media, confusing our leaders. So we have a terminal illness and we desperately need leadership.
Now we can deny that terminal illness, or our leaders can fail us and not give us the answers. Do we not want to hear that we have a terminal illness? And if our leaders don�t tell us we have a terminal illness, and it takes us prematurely when we had a chance for survival, then I would call that malpractice, big time. So we need leadership.
Now I�m going to jump around a little here but try to stick to some sort of format. I want to jump ahead because we�ve heard of the problems. That�s easy to define. I want to talk a little bit about what we in Yankee-speak call debunking dead-end delusions. Because the public is getting an incredibly mixed message. You�ve heard it right here today, this morning. How about this, how about that. This will save us, or that�s coming.
First off, the number one delusion is there�s not a problem. Believe me, it�s a huge problem. Whether we have 1 trillion barrels left or 2 trillion barrels left, I believe it�s even more serious than that. I kind of think we don�t even have the trillion barrels left because I think there�s a lot of phony business going on out there. The more you get into this, the more serious the problem gets. So first off we have a problem.
The second delusion is that � well, they�re not in any particular order, but I call them � I have my buzzwords � hydrogen hype. I agree with one sticker, not the other. There�s a book out called �The Hype about Hydrogen.� Hydrogen is not a fuel source unless you take a lot of energy to separate it, and about 97 percent of our hydrogen today comes from natural gas, and natural gas I believe if you read Julian Darley in �High Noon for Natural Gas,� natural gas is in even more dire straits than oil. Even though there may be a lot of it around the world, it�s a stranded resource and you just can�t ship it here and there and most of it that is available in the world is already spoken for. But tankers are contracted. The L&G ports are � shipping ports are contracted. And for us to build L&G ports to suddenly get hydrogen, get natural gas in USA will take a lot of time and it�s just a short stop solution.
So hydrogen, in all its problems, and I don�t want to go into the physics of storage and the cryogen � I�ll give you a little for instance. When we send a shuttle, wasting this tremendous amount of energy to send shuttles off into space � I see some nodding heads � we should be spending energy figuring out how we�re going to survive, but when we sent the shuttle up into space, it takes about 200,000 pounds of hydrogen. And when you see the pictures of Cape Canaveral, you see the fumes spewing out, it�s my understanding that it takes 300,000 pounds of hydrogen to be shipped from wherever they make it in Louisiana to get 200,000 into the shuttle. That�s at �460 degrees Fahrenheit. There are problems with hydrogen that you can�t imagine in storage and handling and energy to make it.
Now people in our own NERL, part of the National Energy Renewable Lab, they say, well, all we�ve got to do � and this is our administration teaching us � all we�ve got to do is spin a windmill and electrolyze hydrogen and put it in our SUV�s and we�re home free. They�ve even got pictures in the Solar Today issue of the National Society of Solar Engineering. These are our leaders, these are our teachers. But what they don�t tell you is that all the wind energy in USA Today, all the wind energy in one year is worth about one day�s worth of gasoline. And if you put it into hydrogen at 50 percent efficiency, it doesn�t work, folks. You�ve got to put numbers on these things. You can�t make a mountain out of a tiny speck, a little molehill. And yet there�s people touting this, that these are the answers are coming. That takes care of the hydrogen hype.
And the fool cells, we call them. (Laughter.) I hate to be derogatory but we have to get serious, deadly serious because the choir�s singing not a tune to the public. We�re arguing amongst ourselves and the public is not getting the right message. The media certainly won�t pick it up and get onto it unless it�s very isolated media.
Another one is the bio BS, okay. Sunlight is our source of energy, and to make the bio energy out of it, we�ve used bio energy for years and years. Otherwise our ancestors wouldn�t have been here to make it possible for us to be here. But we denuded the woods in the Middle Ages. Just look at Easter Island. If you take more bio energy than is coming in from that sunlight, and it�s very dilute, it takes a lot of area or a lot of time to concentrate bio energy. A tree does it for us, or Mother Nature did it for us millions of years ago and stored up this wonderful black stuff that we�re just blowing away right now, whether it�s oil or coal or whatever.
So you can�t take the energy from the sun and concentrate it into a fuel and use it at the rate that we would like to use fuels. For instance, let me give you one little factoid. If we were to make � and this irks me because in Maine our democratic leadership says we�re going to turn Aroostook County into a great soybean operation and make bio diesel and we�re home free. Well, let me tell you. Back of the envelope. I mean, this is not really complicated science or math. If you were to make soybeans on one acre into bio fuel, you�d get about 75 gallons, and that�s with a lot of fossil fuel input and a lot of deterioration of that soil. Seventy-five gallons of bio diesel. At that rate 5 percent, just 5 percent of our diesel fuel, or 5 percent of our heating fuel would take 30 million acres. Just 5 percent of our diesel fuel. Well, there�s only 300 million acres of arable land in the country today. I don�t think we�re going to take our food and turn it into fuel, especially as our system winds down and we need every bit of food we can get.
So another kind of delusion is that efficiency will save us. Well, there�s wonderful things about efficiency. I certainly defer to my co-speaker here. Efficiency, we have to get every bit of reduction of usage that we can find. But in the long run many times better efficiency has led to more consumption. This is called Jevan�s paradox. When we have better efficiency, the price goes down and people use more, and this is what�s happened time and time again. So efficiency is a tiny step in the right direction. You can�t argue with hybrids. They are more efficient, but they�re just a tiny step.
In the long run we�re going to run out, so what about the solutions? I�m going to jump ahead here to the solutions because that�s what we really want to hear. And believe me, they�re not very pretty or very easy. Again, be sure and get a book because this goes on and on and on.
First off, the number one solution, the metaphor I use is I�m sure many of you are familiar with the story of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance. The Endurance just is going down and we desperately need leadership. There�s not time for market forces or for individuals or whatever to � (applause) -- this is why it�s so � it just was an incredible spark for us who are in this field and studying it to have this champion here, who is a voice in Washington. (Applause.) There may be hope yet.
But another � and Representative Bartlett doesn�t know this, but just yesterday I was leaving the Common Ground Fair in Maine, our big fair, our big renewable, back-to-the-earth fair, whatever, and at that fair I was the keynote speaker Saturday. And I was leaving early yesterday in order to get a flight down here and Senator Kucinich was coming in and we kind of said hello. He has the book, by the way. The subject of his talk was sustainability.
In Maine we have different talks for different audiences. When I talk to the people of Maine, they know. They want to know what to do. They want to know the nuts and bolts and how to get off the grid and how big is your garden and so forth. But anyway, back to solutions. I tend to jump around here.
First off, we need the leadership. We need a Shackleton to guide us
First off, we need the leadership. We need a Shackleton to guide us to Elephant Island and he never lost a man because when the ship�s gone down and you�ve got to make it and you�ve just got so much provision to get from here to there, you can�t have four people taking all the goodies and letting market forces or superior size or whatever taking the goodies and the other 16 or whatever � none of you are going to make it. The ship�s going to go down. The life boat�s going to go down. So we desperately, desperately � we never � civilization has never needed leadership as much as we need it right now.
Getting back to solutions. The next obvious thing, taking all this into perspective, taking all you said, the next obvious thing, if you know you�re running out big time, Apollo 13 or the Shackleton�s lifeboat or whatever, you ration, you conserve, conserve, conserve what you get, and my answer is rationing. And I remember well World War II, when we had the coupons. People say, well, rationing won�t work. Well, I think rationing is infinitely better than letting market forces.
In Europe they let market forces take over and gas is $6 or $7 or $8 a gallon, and you know that the rich take it all and the poor ride their scooters. Now with rationing it doesn�t work that badly. Everybody gets their coupons and the poor can do what they want with it, the rich can do what they want with it, but the demand, overall demand is depressed on a knowledgeable, definitive scale. So guess what? The price starts to go down. At least it doesn�t go higher because the demand isn�t there, and the poor can sell their coupons on the black market to the rich for 10 times as much. So what? (Laughter, applause) It works. It�s human nature. And if you want to take a trip in your Winnebago, you can save up your coupons for two years and still do it. So my answer is conservation big time and rationing.
The second half of my book, the chance or the plan for sustainability, talks about all these issues. Three years ago I naively thought, well, we have 20 years to do this, if we took control of it now on a 5 percent per year basis, that we could pull this off and save so much fossil energy that would be distributed out over another 100 years and our kids could at least have a chance for a soft landing. I used to think that I was going to get out of this, it was going to be my kids� problem. Well, I don�t think the way the numbers are turning up now that it�s going to happen that long. We�re looking at this year, two, three five. We�re already seeing the problems right now.
I�m going to try to finish up here.
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/events/518
Roscoe Bartlett Energy Conference, Part 3
28 September 2005 Oil
In Brief: On September 26, 2005, Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett held an energy conference with participants Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, Matthew Simmons, Richard Heinberg, Donald Wulfinghoff, John Spears and John Howe. This is a transcript of that conference.
REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, MARYLAND 6TH DISTRICT, 2005 ENERGY CONFERENCE
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005, 9:00 A.M. - 12:00 NOON
FREDERICK COMMUNITY COLLEGE, FREDERICK, MARYLAND
PARTICIPANTS: DR. KENNETH DEFFEYES, MATTHEW SIMMONS, RICHARD HEINBERG, DONALD WULFINGHOFF, JOHN SPEARS, JOHN HOWE
Transcript by: Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.
previous section
What to do. I come right back to the basic renewable energy sources, solar and wind. I've had a lot of fun. First off, as an engineer I try to look at this problem and say, is there any hope? Is there a modern civilization without any fossil energy? But knowing the technology we have today. And I'm a product design engineer and this is my challenge, and I think it could be done if we started now. It has to come from solar and wind. That's where the energy comes from, not from all these other things.
So I've been building - there's a picture in the back of my book of my solar-powered tractor and we can't go back to our ancestors with horses and oxen because we've got too many people. We've got too many mouths to feed. And a horse or oxen takes - you've got to feed it all winter. It takes four or five acres just to heat it - by the way, I'm a farmer, I grew up on a farm, and we have a 175-acre farm that we part-time farm now.
So the solar-powered tractor works. We take it to the fair and wow, I mean, it draws people in so we can talk about the demise of fossil energy. So I built a solar-powered car. Now I took a little golf cart, a 48-volt club car golf cart, put some panels on it, put a chiller battery system on it. I got 10 kilowatt hours of batteries in there. That thing will go 100 miles without recharging, but only at 15 miles an hour because that's - (laughter). But this sounds ludicrous, and you go out there, and I flew down here last night and drive up here and I call it petro-insanity. The more you see what's going on around the world, and the gridlock and driving these 4,000-pound personal vehicles, any other time in history, any other time in space they would look at us and say, this is totally absurd. And we grew up with it, we think it's here as part of our life. But it's just a pippin in civilization. Petro-insanity.
People ask me about the tractor. The tractor works, by the way. The tractor works big-time because when you need the tractor is in the summer, you've got tremendous amounts of sunlight coming in. And also the weight of the batteries is good. It works find. I took the tractor in a pulling contest in a fair a year ago, and the front end came up in the air, the thing just kept going, and I got a standing ovation. The people loved it. It really works, although it only worked an hour or two a day for 8 or 10 hours of refueling, but it's refueling all the time. The sunlight's coming in and it's even refueling while it's working. Even work horses don't do that.
I would say in summary, on a scale of 1 to 10, if 10 is this wonderful fossil energy we've gotten used to but is going out of style very quickly - not going out of style, going out of sight - and one is doing it by hand, one is doing it by hand, 10 by fossil energy, I would say that these solar-powered vehicles are maybe a 2 or a 3, 3 or 4. But it's better than walking. By the way, with my solar-powered vehicle, my solar-powered golf cart is a 2,500 watt portable generator, power supply. That's big-time power. In the wintertime you take these solar-powered vehicles, bring them right up to your house and run your house with them. So they work. Solar power, wind power. Get the book.
I can go on and on and on and on. You can't even begin to scratch the surface. But let me tell you again howe, h-o-w-e, at megalink.net. We talk about all these things. And thanks very much for coming, and good luck to Congressman Bartlett.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you turning in questions. There were two questions directed at me and I will include them together because they're the same subject. I understand you recently had a meeting with President Bush about peak oil. Is he aware of the potential consequences? If so, why aren't we serious about this from a policy standpoint.
And the second question is, how can we convince the administration and Congress that the recently passed energy bill was woefully inadequate and misdirected? I thought it was. I voted against it.
I did talk to President Bush. He does understand the problem. I tell you, this is a very good example of the tyranny of the urgent. The urgent always takes precedence over the important, and the urgent thing today, those couple of hurricanes down there and the urgent things tend to push important things off the table.
What we need to do is just for the American citizens. That's why we're here today. American citizens need to go to elected representatives, we have a problem, you need to do something about it.
Okay, and one for Matt Simmons. If the peak is going to be soon, five years or less, does it make sense to the U.S. to build more refineries?
We need to limit our answers to a couple of minutes or we're not going to get through our questions.
MR. SIMMONS: The simple answer is that our refinery system is so old today that if we don't replace it then - peak load doesn't mean running out, but if we don't replace it, we don't need any more oil. I mean, there's a refinery that got hurt in the hurricane, the Motiva (ph) refinery that they're talking about expanding a base unit that was built in 1903 to refine spindle top oil. We can't go 30 or 40 more years with 100-year-old refineries. So the answer is we've got to rebuild the refineries.
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you very much. And another one for Matt Simmons. Why is nuclear power not getting more attention in the U.S. as it is in Europe? Although the building of nuclear power plants may not mitigate the adverse effects of the oil crisis, it could provide long-term energy.
MR. SIMMONS: I was in a program at the University of Wyoming this weekend and I heard the most articulate speaker on nuclear - on the benefits of nuclear power. This is hard to see, but this is basically one nuclear uranium pellet. And this uranium pellet is the equivalent of a ton of coal. And one pellet - five pellets this size heat a home for a year. So we have got to go back to nuclear energy. It just takes a long time. And we can basically tackle the spent waste. That's a military problem.
But we also have to remember that nuclear power is electricity. We're going to have to have electricity because of our natural gas problem, but it doesn't solve the oil problem, period.
MR. SPEARS: Do we know what the supply lifetime of uranium is? Some estimates are as short as 50 years for uranium, at our current consumption rate.
MR. SIMMONS: This guy was actually part of a company in Saskatoon, Canada, our largest supplier. The reality is we don't have a clue, but we haven't explored for uranium for about 40 years.
REP. BARTLETT: I get widely divergent estimates of how much fissionable uranium is left in the world, from 30 years to 200 years. Before we can really have an effective dialogue about how to address this problem, we need to have an agreement on what the problem is. And there is just so much difference of opinion out there, and I talked to the National Academy of Sciences. They would be delighted. We need to find the money for them. We need an honest broker somewhere that tells us roughly what the truth is because we have widely divergent opinions now as to how much fissionable uranium is out there.
MR. DEFFEYES: I suggest you look at the Scientific American for January 1980, Deffeyes and MacGregor, on the world uranium supply.
REP. BARTLETT: And how much is there, sir?
MR. DEFFEYES: Every time you drop the ore grade by a factor of 10, you find about 300 times as much uranium, so that going down to the ore grade of - going down through the ore grades continues to increase the supply. But just about the time we were writing that Scientific American article, these enormously rich deposits, and big deposits in Australia and Canada sort of blew away our early estimates and we had to quickly increase the estimates. There are deposits in Saskatchewan so rich that the miners can't be in the same room as the uranium, where the uranium is being mined. They mine it by remote control. So at the moment we're swimming in uranium, but the Deffeyes-MacGregor piece, which comes out with a Hubbard-like curve, says that, no, we can go on down, and specifically we don't need a breeder reactor.
REP. BARTLETT: If we don't need the breeder reactor, that's good news because if you had to go to the breeder reactor you would borrow some problems that you don't have with fissionable uranium.
MR. SPEARS: My concern is that the investment in nuclear power is huge, and we have a long history of massive investment in nuclear power. That same level of investment could also go towards completely safe renewable energy systems and technology development -- (applause) -- without the risks of nuclear power. And without the ultimate end of nuclear power, when the fissionable materials runs out, or we find that more Chernobyls and others have totally trumped that issue. (Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you. We have a question here directed to Mr. Wulfinghoff, but it could have been asked of any of the panelists. If energy consumption obviously is related to the number of people who are here, and the questioner asked, why haven't any of you mentioned population? I would like to note that if you want to listen to what I think is the most interesting one-hour lecture I ever heard - and he's no relative, he has my name - Dr. Albert Bartlett from the University of Colorado gives a - how many of you have heard his lecture? He's given it 1,600 times, I think. He's pretty good at it by now. But he gives a lecture on the failure of the industrial society to understand the exponential function, and it's a lecture on energy.
You can find it-do a Google search for Hubbert's peak, or a Google search for peak oil and I think that you'll find Albert Bartlett there, and he give you a very good introduction to this and the population effect.
MR. DEFFEYES: What we don't want to hear about, one fellow said we've got 6 billion people, we're headed for 9, we're going to wind up with too many people and not enough food. His answer was cannibalism. (Laughter.)
MR. WULFINHOFF: Just to answer the question, I'm no more expert on that question than anyone else here, but I think everyone would agree, population is the big driver. And so yes, intelligent, responsible control of having kids is obviously a big part of the picture. I think that's a truism that we can all agree to.
MR. SPEARS: I'd like to get my two cents worth in. I don't think population control is a very tenable solution. However, education is, and if we have a population of educated people that understand and take full responsibility for their own needs in a society, which is completely technically possible if our society allows it to be, then we have a population that uses a very, very small fraction of the footprint of the planet that we currently use, and we could support a much higher population.
REP. BARTLETT: I believe that every industrialized country in the world, if it weren't for immigration, has a negative population growth now. That's true in the United States. Were it not for immigration - I think if it weren't for illegal immigration, our population would be declining in this country. And that's true of most of the industrialized world.
Is there another comment on this? John?
MR. HOWE: I think we should not get off this population issue too quickly because you keep peeling away at the layers of the onion, the energy, where we go from here, remember that, like Dick Heinberg said, the population grows with the resources. Since the beginning of this country we've had unlimited resources and we pat ourselves on the back saying how wonderful we are. But there are tremendous resources there. And then especially when the fossil energy came on.
So population has increased, like any biological species, and right now we are in such dire straits, and this is why I tend to be more pessimistic than just going over and sliding down Hubbard's curve because population wants to continue to go up, just like any biological species, at a time when resources are not only leveling off, they're going down. So we have this double whammy, this diversion between population and demand and resource capability. So this is going to open up pretty quickly, very quickly, and the population issue is incredibly important.
Let me go one step further. Even when there's a horizontal level, plateau of resources, life is not very friendly because Mother Nature always wants to produce more than the resources can stand, so there's always this chaos, the die-off or cruel short life, whatever you want to call it, and the males of the species try to go out and get their neighbors' stuff and the other males try to defend it so that it leads to a lot of chaos. That's normal with any species. We see it with the mice in the barn. We call it the mice in the barn theory.
So we're reaching a double whammy. We're not only going to have horizontal population, we're going to go downhill in population, but we're going to go downhill in resources where population wants to continue to go up.
Now China's faced up to this problem for years and they've tried this one child per couple. It's been a very ugly situation in China. It has not worked very well. They've had midnight raids and abortions, and the women take the brunt of the problem. I'm going to go on record right here and you might want to throw me out, but I'm way out of my area. I don't know whether my area is as a philosopher or what. (Laughter) But rather than try and approach this the traditional way of the contraception or abortion or embryonic control or whatever, I think we should face up to the maleness of this issue. We're the trouble-makers. We're the ones that cause all the problems and don't want to admit it.
My solution to this, John Howe, Yankee solution, you heard this for the first time here, would be to one child - and this is the law of the land, by the way. Just like incest or murder or anything else. Every male. You have one child, you get a vasectomy, period. That's it. End of subject. (Applause.) It didn't hurt me a bit 20, 30 years ago. That's enough.
REP. BARTLETT: This next question deals with a subject that I had a question about. I called Mr. Simmons, he was gone, haven't had a chance to talk with him. So I'll now ask the question, along with the questioner from the audience. There was a recent article in one of the papers - was it the New York Times, the Washington Post? The Times, I think. About an experiment in Colorado where a plot of land 20 by 35 feet, and they got 1,500 barrels of oil from it, and I did some calculations that said there would be a hole in the ground 100 feet deep if that's true if they got that much oil out of that. They said they got 10 times as much out as if they mined it and cooked it on the surface. And that they put in one unit of energy, got out 3.5 units of energy. And if that's true, we're home free. What's wrong with this news story?
MR. SIMMONS: First, I think they're talking about the experiments that are going on in oil shale on the western -
REP. BARTLETT: That is correct.
MR. SIMMONS: And what it is is basically a return to a new concept that used to be called Project Rifle, which was effectively an experiment by Cosco (ph), which was the oil shale company, to bring a nuclear bomb into the oil shale and create an internal furnace there. What they're now doing is putting some electricity rods down. That's just very energy intensive, so they're ignoring the energy intensity to actually create a little bit of oil out of shale.
REP. BARTLETT: But they said in the article, at least the lady who wrote the article said that she was told that they put in one unit of energy and got out 3.5. They cooked it for two years, they froze all the ground around it to keep it from polluting ground water, and it was inconceivable to me that that could be energy-positive.
MR. SIMMONS: I just think those studies don't do a real honest energy count. And what we desperately need is a bureau of energy standards that take all the things that are required to make these things work and measure the energy. What they're doing is they're taking just one element. (Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Another one for Matt Simmons. Two-thirds of the oil that's still in the ground, why then are we not doing more to get it, and why are we not using renewable energy to power enhance oil recovery?
MR. SIMMONS: The whole two-thirds in the ground is an interesting concept because what's - that's probably a good number we think, but the third that's gone was the high quality useable oil. And what's left gets more and more energy intensive to be able to convert it into useable oil. I think one of the really terrible vocabulary words we created was tar sand, and we talk about it like it's useable oil. Tar sands are tar. They have to be melted by steam and then oozed out of the ground and then refined into heavy oil and then diluted with sweet oil to make synthetic crude.
Now it doesn't take rocket science to say that is really energy intensive. So we should call it coal. We shouldn't call it oil.
REP. BARTLETT: There are several other questions here that relate to some slides that I had for summing up, and maybe we'll go through those and answer those questions when it comes to that point in the slide. And we'd like the panel, too, and we'll just stop for comments as we run through this series of slides.
Okay, the next one. This one we've seen before. This is a typical bell-shaped curve, and the next one I think shows the break-out in this country. This was a very interesting one that shows where we've gotten our oil from from 1935 up until the present, and you see that we peaked in 1970 and one of the presenters noted the contribution of Prudhoe Bay, that's the Alaska oil there, and that was just a tiny blip in the slide down Hubbard's peak.
Now I'm opposed to drilling in ANWAR, not for environmental reasons (applause) -
MR. SIMMONS: Congressman, while you have that up, it's interesting basically, if you take the peak in 1970 and exclude the natural gas liquids in Alaska, and then you come down to where we are today, about 2 million barrels a day. About 40 percent of the two is our stripper wells, which are 2.2 barrels of oil a day. And we also strip out about 100 to 500 oils a day of brine.
My guess is that the energy used to pump the 500 barrels of brine is more energy than the 2.2 barrels. But luckily we have those stripper wells left or we'd be down to about 1 million barrels a day of conventional oil, excluding Alaska.
REP. BARTLETT: The reason I'm opposed to drilling in ANWAR is that Prudhoe Bay, which is much bigger than ANWAR will ever be, had very little effect on our downhill slide. I'm having a lot of trouble understanding, if we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, and use 25 percent of the world's oil, and import about two-thirds of what we use, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how it's in our national security interest to use up the little bit of oil we've got as quickly as we can. (Applause.)
This may be a rainy day. I think there's going to be a rainier day.
Mr. Wulfinghoff, you have a comment.
MR. WULFINGHOFF: In the '70s they called that strength through exhaustion.
REP. BARTLETT: Notice the yellow up there. Remember the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries, and they were going to save the world? That's the contribution they made. That's the contribution they made.
The next slide, please. This is the schematic I showed before, and this is just a 2 percent growth here. Now you can make that Hubbard's peak as steep as you want by simply changing the abscissa and changing the scale on the ordinate. This is a 2 percent growth curve. It doubles in 35 years, so from where that use line separates, the demand line separates from the available line, that yellow consumes - that's 35 years because that's the doubling time with 2 percent growth.
So we're going to have problems of supply and demand - 17 years, it says, 17.5 years before we actually reach peak. So those who say peak is in the future, yes, peak will be in the future but we could still be having problems now. The next slide, please.
Okay, this is one I mentioned, and these numbers prompted Boyden Gray and McFarland and Jim Woolsey and a lot of retired four-star admirals and generals to write the president a letter saying, Mr. President, these numbers represent a totally unacceptable national security risk. We have got to do something about that.
Matt, you mentioned our pumping. We have only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil, but we produce 8 percent of the world's oil from that. We're really very good at getting this oil out of the ground. What that means is that our 2 percent is going to run out more quickly, doesn't it? So we're going to face problems before others face problems. The next slide.
Okay, this is a really interesting one. The one at the bottom, by the way, is just a few years of the one above, and we separated out the gas and the oil. But this goes through - it begins back in the 1600's or something, I think. This looks at the industrial age, and first there's wood on the bottom, and that was stalling out and we found coal, and boy, we jumped with coal. Then we found oil, and look what happened. And if we were plotting the world's population, it would pretty much follow that oil curve. It has really been exploding.
When Malthus made his prediction that eventually population would outstrip our ability to provide food, we had less than a billion people. Now we're approaching 7 billion people. 5,000 years of recorded history. We're 100 years or so into the age of oil. In another 100 years or so we will be through the age of oil. What then?
By the way, we will transition to renewables. There is no question. There is no alternative. We will transition to renewables. The only question is how we do it, and the longer we wait, the longer we wait the more difficult the solution will be. The next chart.
This is a really interesting chart, and one of the presenters mentioned 86 percent - either 86 to 85 percent of all the energy we currently use comes from fossil fuels, and you see it up there in those three segments of natural gas, the petroleum and the coal. Of the 15 percent that is not fossil fuels, 8 percent of that is 20 percent of our electricity, 8 percent of our total energy comes from nuclear. That could grow. You need to determine whether the environmental penalties are worth the benefit you get from growing nuclear, but that certainly could and maybe should grow.
Now we've pulled out and expanded the renewable energy part of it there, which is 7 percent, and we've broken that down into 100 parts. Breaking that down into 100 parts solar is 1 percent of that 7 percent. That means it's .07 percent of our total energy production. Very attractive because it's non-polluting once you've made the cells. You could pollute while you're making them, but once it's in operation then it works. It really works.
Any by the way, it's kind of humbling. Two of those little 60-watt panels is all I'm worth in terms of energy, right? About 120 watts. You know, when the sun is shining, two of those panels put out more energy than I can put out - (audio break, tape change) -- geothermal is the one - that's true geothermal. That's tapping down into the hot core of the earth.
One of the presenters mentioned geothermal air conditioning and heating and so forth. That just wisely is coupling your heat pump - not to the air that you're trying to heat in the summertime and cool in the wintertime, which is really kind of stupid, isn't it - but it's coupling the heat and air conditioning to ground temperature where it's, here in Maryland, a constant 56 degree all year.
But true geothermal - and Iceland doesn't have a single chimney; it's all geothermal there, I think. We have some places in our country where you can get there.
Agriculture - about 0.14 percent - what this points out is that the sources that we're going to have to turn to in the future are now minuscule in terms of their contribution to our total energy supply. We have got a long way to go.
Conventional hydroelectric - that's almost half of all of these renewables. That's not going to grow much in our country. We've dammed up about everything we should have dammed up and maybe some things we shouldn't have, and we're breaching more dams now than we are making.
Wood - that's (not the ?) West Virginia hillbilly up there at 38 percent. That's the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product to produce energy.
The 8 percent there from waste - that's one that really needs to grow. If you do down here to Dickerson, they have a plant down there that is burning municipal waste, and you know, I'd be happy to have my church next to it because it looks like an office building from the front of it, and they bring the trash in in containers. You never even see it until it's dumped into a big pit that the crane lifts it out of. I mean, we really shouldn't be burying this stuff; we should be getting some energy from it.
But this presents the enormous challenge we have. The energy sources that we will need to turn to as we wind down the age of oil now represent tiny, tiny contributions to our energy supply.
We must invest three things to get there. One of them we won't worry about: we won't worry about money; we'd never do that in Washington. (Laughter.) We have, by the way, the most unique credit card in the world in Washington. It's my voting card. It's a card without limit. I can change anything, any amount. There is no limit to how much I can charge. And it's really unique because I'm charging it to somebody else's account. I'm never going to pay that back. My generation is not going to pay it back. My kids and my grandkids are going to pay it back, so that's a really - that's a really unique card, isn't it?
We need to invest money, but we will borrow that from our kids and our grandkids. We won't worry about that in Washington. But the two things we can't borrow from you is time and energy, and that schematic curve that we showed a little bit ago, we can't even use all of that oil that's available to us for our ordinary economic activities or we'll have nothing to invest in these alternatives, so we have got to embark on a very aggressive conservation program so we have something to invest.
We had a hand up here for a comment? Yes, sir.
Q: What's really important in this discussion is how we and the policymakers and the public and the citizens frame the discussion. Historically we have framed the discussion about renewables and conventional energy as if renewables will always only be a small minuscule fraction of the mix, and in fact, almost all the energy experts you hear touting the future talk about new technologies in sort of conventional technologies: new oil, nuclear power, more conventional approaches being the biggest part of that pie, and renewables still only being a small fraction. Everybody says renewables will never be able to meet the demand of a growing industrial country.
That is absolutely false. Over and over we've proven, every single day, that you can provide 100 percent of the demand of an industrialized country with 100 percent renewables, and unless we start the discussion where that's the goal - which inevitably, as you said, it will ultimately become that because everything else is going to run out - unless we start framing the discussion around that notion, we'll never get there. We'll only incrementally reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and never really give the focus on transitioning to a 100-percent-renewable economy that it needs to make it happen.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: A generation - thank you - a generation ago there was a scientist - C.P. Snow I think his name was - who made a statement that I wonder if you agree or disagree with. He says be optimistic about all of the alternatives - how much energy to get from them - add them all up, and you still come way short of both the quantity and quality of energy we're getting from fossil fuels. That's true?
MR. SPEARS: I don't deny that. One of the things I think we should all take a quick look at - that study I showed, "Energy-Rich Japan" is at energyrichjapan.org, or if you just Google energy rich Japan, you can get that study; it's available free on the Internet. And it shows what technology can do in an industrialized country.
I know what I can do with somebody's house or somebody's community. I can make that completely self-sufficient. I can't imagine why we can't build communities that are completely self-sufficient.
We're never going to run Hummers on renewable energy, and that's the fallacy, and we have to have deep, deep efficiency improvements. Efficiency is energy. It's the fastest developing energy supply we can have. If we want to immediately reduce our dependence on foreign oil, all we have to do is improve the efficiency of our existing infrastructure, and we can do it real quickly.
REP. BARTLETT: Yes, the cheapest oil you use is the oil you don't buy, isn't it - that you don't need to use because you've conserved.
The next chart, please. Okay, the upper one shows a controversy that's going on. I spent, about three weeks ago, a full day in Washington at the National Press Club. Dr. Pimental was there and his colleague from the West Coast, and they contend that more energy goes into producing ethanol - more fossil fuel energy goes into producing than you'll get from it. I hope they're not correct.
What I have up here is the data from the Department of Energy, which I am told by the experts is wildly optimistic, and on the left you will see that they believe that you can get a million BTUs with an input of about 750,000 BTUs from fossil fuel. But at the bottom is the one that I want to spend a couple of moments looking at because that's a really interesting one.
This is the energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. On the right over there, that purple one - almost half of the circle - is the energy from natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilizer. Before we learned how to do that, the only nitrogen fertilizers available for agriculture were barnyard manures and guano. Guano was the droppings of tropical birds and bats for hundreds of thousands of years, and we have an industry, ships going around the world.
The last time I was in Grand Canyon, there was still a rusty cable there for a cable car that went into a bat cave in the wall of the Grand Canyon to bring out guano. Without fossil fuels, we can't have nitrogen fertilizers in the quantity we have them today, and it's very energy intensive. Almost half of all the energy that goes into a bushel of corn comes from natural gas producing the nitrogen fertilizer.
By the way, you may have wondered why, if you water your lawn, it's never quite as green as after a thunderstorm, and that's because you get more than just water from a thunderstorm. We get what we call poor man's fertilizer because the lightening now combines nitrogen in a form that's carried down by the water into the soil and can be used by the plants. And we have learned to do that now with enormous energy.
Look at almost every other segment of that pie there, and it's fossil fuel energy. The production of these crops is very, very energy dependent.
The next slide. This is one that we've been talking about all day: potential alternative solutions, and we'll just start down those.
The tar sands and the oil shales - there's an incredible amount of oil there, but whether or not it is recoverable, both economically and energy-wise is debatable. The Canadians are now getting oil from their - what do they call them? Oil sands they call them, I think, there. They're getting it at about $30 a barrel. But I'm told that they're using more energy from natural gas - by the way, they're producing it at $30 a barrel so they make a big profit selling it at 65 (dollars), but I'm told that they are using more natural gas energy to produce the oil than you will get out of the oil. That's called energy profit ratio. Not only is there a dollar-and-cents profit ratio, there's an energy profit ratio you have to think of in these things. So although there's a great deal there, it's not going to be very energy positive if in fact it is energy positive, and you're going to pay a big environmental penalty because of all the energy you have to use to get some little net energy.
Coal - 250-year supply in our country. Many people will tell you not to worry; coal will take care of us. There is 250 year supply at current use rate, but if you increase the use of coal just 2 percent, compounded - which Albert Einstein says, by the way, is the most powerful force in the universe, the force of compound interest - if you have a 2-percent growth compounded, it shrinks from 250 years to 85 years, and then if you allow that you can't put coal in the trunk of your car, you're going to have to convert it to a gas or a liquid, you now use some energy to do that, so now you're down to 50 years. With a - either a big environmental penalty using that coal because all the coal that's in our country now is pretty dirty stuff with a lot of sulfur in it, or a big energy penalty in taking the pollutants out of the coal.
We talked about nuclear, and if in fact there is an essentially unlimited amount of fissionable uranium and you are willing to accept the environmental impacts of that, we could be producing - France is now -- what, 70, 80 percent of their electricity is produced by nuclear, and so that's something we really need to think about.
Nuclear fusion, by the way - I support all the money. About 300 million (dollars) a year goes into that. You know, I think our chances of getting nuclear fusion are about the same as my odds of solving my personal financial problems by winning the lottery. (Laughter.) Now if you think that's a good bet, well, you may think that nuclear fusion is a good bet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, and I support all the money that that sector of our technology can support.
Then we get down to the true renewables: solar and wind and they are now 0.07 percent each. They can grow, but it's going to take a big investment of time and energy, building the factories, making the solar panels, making the wind machines.
I've heard the wind machines make a lot of noise. My wife and I were coming back from West Virginia. We came by Thomas - Davis, West Virginia, where they have a whole string of them there. We pulled off of the road. I didn't need to turn off my engine - I'm in a Prius; when you stop, it stops - opened the windows. I didn't hear anything. These were the great, great, big machines out there. People don't think they're pretty. I don't think these scars through our forests - running these power lines through - are very pretty either, but somehow we've learned to live with those. To get to any meaningful amount of energy from solar and wind, we're going to have to make big, big investments of time and energy to get there.
Geothermal - where it's available, we really ought to be exploiting that. That's essentially forever. Once you get there it will just work and work and work.
Ocean energy - can you imagine how much energy it takes to lift the oceans two feet? That's what the tides do, that's what the moon does with the tides, but because it is so diffuse, we have a hard time harnessing that energy.
I used to be very optimistic about energy from agriculture, but I'll tell you, tonight a fifth of the world will go to be hungry. Our topsoils are not increasing in either quantity or quality; as a matter of fact, until we learned to no till, they were decreasing in both quantity and quality. So I have some concern about how much biomass we can take from our agricultural lands and still have good agricultural land. There's probably something, but I'm not sure it's all as much as we had thought before.
The soy, diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass - waste energy that we really should be doing. We really should be doing that. Hydrogen - we talked a lot about that. Hydrogen is not an energy source. Hydrogen is simply a convenient way of transporting energy when you finally use it. By the way, the battery in your car is totally non-polluting when you finally take the energy out of it, isn't it, and hydrogen is the same way. I mean, you get water out of it, which is pretty non-polluting. But you may have polluted when you make the hydrogen.
We have three experts down in Washington, and we're talking about the hydrogen economy in the future, and they all agreed that only one technology would get us there. Three ways to store hydrogen: one is to put it under pressure - the lightest element that we have; always wanting to expand and get out; big, thick vessels, very heavy. The second was to liquefy it; very, very cold; lots of insulation, lots of energy and liquefying it. And the third was the one that they thought would work, and that was some chemical combination - reversible chemical combination. That's a hydrogen battery.
I don't know if inherently the hydrogen battery is going to be that much better than the electron battery which we have today, but a lot of people believe that hydrogen is an energy source and it's the solution to our energy problems, and if we get there we're home free. We just aren't home free because you've got to make the hydrogen. You'll always use more energy making it than you get out of it. It's still a good idea, by the way, because it is transportable. Use it in a fuel cell where you have twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine.
Is there a last slide? Oh, the last slide is the challenge we have, and we now need to make - if we're going to have anywhere close to a soft landing, we have now got to be making some decisions equivalent to the kind of decisions they made in Apollo 13, so that - you know, they had a fairly narrow window, and if they'd hit that window, it was disaster.
Now we have a really rough ride - it's not a perfect analogy because we will get there; we will get to renewables. It's a question of how rough the ride is going to be.
Well, any comments or questions from our panel before we thank everybody for coming and thank our panel for their contributions?
MR. : Thank you.
REP. BARTLETT: Mr. Wulfinghoff?
MR. WULFINGHOFF: Yes, one of the points I didn't get to make because I was running overtime is that the single most important thing that we have to do right now to make this happen is to get the word out, and I want to thank you and your staff for doing that. You are doing the critical thing that we need to survive.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you. Thank you.
The questions we didn't get to - we'll try to answer those by mail. Just call our office - any of our offices and we'll be responsive to your questions. And we won't know the answers, perhaps, but we'll get them from the panel.
I want to thank the panel very, very much. I'm really honored they'd come. They've come from all over the country, they are the world's experts in this area. Thank you all very much for coming.
Audience, thank you for your participation. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
(END)
Getting back to solutions. The next obvious thing, taking all this into perspective, taking all you said, the next obvious thing, if you know you�re running out big time, Apollo 13 or the Shackleton�s lifeboat or whatever, you ration, you conserve, conserve, conserve what you get, and my answer is rationing. And I remember well World War II, when we had the coupons. People say, well, rationing won�t work. Well, I think rationing is infinitely better than letting market forces.
In Europe they let market forces take over and gas is $6 or $7 or $8 a gallon, and you know that the rich take it all and the poor ride their scooters. Now with rationing it doesn�t work that badly. Everybody gets their coupons and the poor can do what they want with it, the rich can do what they want with it, but the demand, overall demand is depressed on a knowledgeable, definitive scale. So guess what? The price starts to go down. At least it doesn�t go higher because the demand isn�t there, and the poor can sell their coupons on the black market to the rich for 10 times as much. So what? (Laughter, applause) It works. It�s human nature. And if you want to take a trip in your Winnebago, you can save up your coupons for two years and still do it. So my answer is conservation big time and rationing.
The second half of my book, the chance or the plan for sustainability, talks about all these issues. Three years ago I naively thought, well, we have 20 years to do this, if we took control of it now on a 5 percent per year basis, that we could pull this off and save so much fossil energy that would be distributed out over another 100 years and our kids could at least have a chance for a soft landing. I used to think that I was going to get out of this, it was going to be my kids� problem. Well, I don�t think the way the numbers are turning up now that it�s going to happen that long. We�re looking at this year, two, three five. We�re already seeing the problems right now.
I�m going to try to finish up here.
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/events/518
Roscoe Bartlett Energy Conference, Part 3
28 September 2005 Oil
In Brief: On September 26, 2005, Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett held an energy conference with participants Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, Matthew Simmons, Richard Heinberg, Donald Wulfinghoff, John Spears and John Howe. This is a transcript of that conference.
REPRESENTATIVE ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, MARYLAND 6TH DISTRICT, 2005 ENERGY CONFERENCE
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005, 9:00 A.M. - 12:00 NOON
FREDERICK COMMUNITY COLLEGE, FREDERICK, MARYLAND
PARTICIPANTS: DR. KENNETH DEFFEYES, MATTHEW SIMMONS, RICHARD HEINBERG, DONALD WULFINGHOFF, JOHN SPEARS, JOHN HOWE
Transcript by: Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.
previous section
What to do. I come right back to the basic renewable energy sources, solar and wind. I've had a lot of fun. First off, as an engineer I try to look at this problem and say, is there any hope? Is there a modern civilization without any fossil energy? But knowing the technology we have today. And I'm a product design engineer and this is my challenge, and I think it could be done if we started now. It has to come from solar and wind. That's where the energy comes from, not from all these other things.
So I've been building - there's a picture in the back of my book of my solar-powered tractor and we can't go back to our ancestors with horses and oxen because we've got too many people. We've got too many mouths to feed. And a horse or oxen takes - you've got to feed it all winter. It takes four or five acres just to heat it - by the way, I'm a farmer, I grew up on a farm, and we have a 175-acre farm that we part-time farm now.
So the solar-powered tractor works. We take it to the fair and wow, I mean, it draws people in so we can talk about the demise of fossil energy. So I built a solar-powered car. Now I took a little golf cart, a 48-volt club car golf cart, put some panels on it, put a chiller battery system on it. I got 10 kilowatt hours of batteries in there. That thing will go 100 miles without recharging, but only at 15 miles an hour because that's - (laughter). But this sounds ludicrous, and you go out there, and I flew down here last night and drive up here and I call it petro-insanity. The more you see what's going on around the world, and the gridlock and driving these 4,000-pound personal vehicles, any other time in history, any other time in space they would look at us and say, this is totally absurd. And we grew up with it, we think it's here as part of our life. But it's just a pippin in civilization. Petro-insanity.
People ask me about the tractor. The tractor works, by the way. The tractor works big-time because when you need the tractor is in the summer, you've got tremendous amounts of sunlight coming in. And also the weight of the batteries is good. It works find. I took the tractor in a pulling contest in a fair a year ago, and the front end came up in the air, the thing just kept going, and I got a standing ovation. The people loved it. It really works, although it only worked an hour or two a day for 8 or 10 hours of refueling, but it's refueling all the time. The sunlight's coming in and it's even refueling while it's working. Even work horses don't do that.
I would say in summary, on a scale of 1 to 10, if 10 is this wonderful fossil energy we've gotten used to but is going out of style very quickly - not going out of style, going out of sight - and one is doing it by hand, one is doing it by hand, 10 by fossil energy, I would say that these solar-powered vehicles are maybe a 2 or a 3, 3 or 4. But it's better than walking. By the way, with my solar-powered vehicle, my solar-powered golf cart is a 2,500 watt portable generator, power supply. That's big-time power. In the wintertime you take these solar-powered vehicles, bring them right up to your house and run your house with them. So they work. Solar power, wind power. Get the book.
I can go on and on and on and on. You can't even begin to scratch the surface. But let me tell you again howe, h-o-w-e, at megalink.net. We talk about all these things. And thanks very much for coming, and good luck to Congressman Bartlett.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you turning in questions. There were two questions directed at me and I will include them together because they're the same subject. I understand you recently had a meeting with President Bush about peak oil. Is he aware of the potential consequences? If so, why aren't we serious about this from a policy standpoint.
And the second question is, how can we convince the administration and Congress that the recently passed energy bill was woefully inadequate and misdirected? I thought it was. I voted against it.
I did talk to President Bush. He does understand the problem. I tell you, this is a very good example of the tyranny of the urgent. The urgent always takes precedence over the important, and the urgent thing today, those couple of hurricanes down there and the urgent things tend to push important things off the table.
What we need to do is just for the American citizens. That's why we're here today. American citizens need to go to elected representatives, we have a problem, you need to do something about it.
Okay, and one for Matt Simmons. If the peak is going to be soon, five years or less, does it make sense to the U.S. to build more refineries?
We need to limit our answers to a couple of minutes or we're not going to get through our questions.
MR. SIMMONS: The simple answer is that our refinery system is so old today that if we don't replace it then - peak load doesn't mean running out, but if we don't replace it, we don't need any more oil. I mean, there's a refinery that got hurt in the hurricane, the Motiva (ph) refinery that they're talking about expanding a base unit that was built in 1903 to refine spindle top oil. We can't go 30 or 40 more years with 100-year-old refineries. So the answer is we've got to rebuild the refineries.
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you very much. And another one for Matt Simmons. Why is nuclear power not getting more attention in the U.S. as it is in Europe? Although the building of nuclear power plants may not mitigate the adverse effects of the oil crisis, it could provide long-term energy.
MR. SIMMONS: I was in a program at the University of Wyoming this weekend and I heard the most articulate speaker on nuclear - on the benefits of nuclear power. This is hard to see, but this is basically one nuclear uranium pellet. And this uranium pellet is the equivalent of a ton of coal. And one pellet - five pellets this size heat a home for a year. So we have got to go back to nuclear energy. It just takes a long time. And we can basically tackle the spent waste. That's a military problem.
But we also have to remember that nuclear power is electricity. We're going to have to have electricity because of our natural gas problem, but it doesn't solve the oil problem, period.
MR. SPEARS: Do we know what the supply lifetime of uranium is? Some estimates are as short as 50 years for uranium, at our current consumption rate.
MR. SIMMONS: This guy was actually part of a company in Saskatoon, Canada, our largest supplier. The reality is we don't have a clue, but we haven't explored for uranium for about 40 years.
REP. BARTLETT: I get widely divergent estimates of how much fissionable uranium is left in the world, from 30 years to 200 years. Before we can really have an effective dialogue about how to address this problem, we need to have an agreement on what the problem is. And there is just so much difference of opinion out there, and I talked to the National Academy of Sciences. They would be delighted. We need to find the money for them. We need an honest broker somewhere that tells us roughly what the truth is because we have widely divergent opinions now as to how much fissionable uranium is out there.
MR. DEFFEYES: I suggest you look at the Scientific American for January 1980, Deffeyes and MacGregor, on the world uranium supply.
REP. BARTLETT: And how much is there, sir?
MR. DEFFEYES: Every time you drop the ore grade by a factor of 10, you find about 300 times as much uranium, so that going down to the ore grade of - going down through the ore grades continues to increase the supply. But just about the time we were writing that Scientific American article, these enormously rich deposits, and big deposits in Australia and Canada sort of blew away our early estimates and we had to quickly increase the estimates. There are deposits in Saskatchewan so rich that the miners can't be in the same room as the uranium, where the uranium is being mined. They mine it by remote control. So at the moment we're swimming in uranium, but the Deffeyes-MacGregor piece, which comes out with a Hubbard-like curve, says that, no, we can go on down, and specifically we don't need a breeder reactor.
REP. BARTLETT: If we don't need the breeder reactor, that's good news because if you had to go to the breeder reactor you would borrow some problems that you don't have with fissionable uranium.
MR. SPEARS: My concern is that the investment in nuclear power is huge, and we have a long history of massive investment in nuclear power. That same level of investment could also go towards completely safe renewable energy systems and technology development -- (applause) -- without the risks of nuclear power. And without the ultimate end of nuclear power, when the fissionable materials runs out, or we find that more Chernobyls and others have totally trumped that issue. (Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you. We have a question here directed to Mr. Wulfinghoff, but it could have been asked of any of the panelists. If energy consumption obviously is related to the number of people who are here, and the questioner asked, why haven't any of you mentioned population? I would like to note that if you want to listen to what I think is the most interesting one-hour lecture I ever heard - and he's no relative, he has my name - Dr. Albert Bartlett from the University of Colorado gives a - how many of you have heard his lecture? He's given it 1,600 times, I think. He's pretty good at it by now. But he gives a lecture on the failure of the industrial society to understand the exponential function, and it's a lecture on energy.
You can find it-do a Google search for Hubbert's peak, or a Google search for peak oil and I think that you'll find Albert Bartlett there, and he give you a very good introduction to this and the population effect.
MR. DEFFEYES: What we don't want to hear about, one fellow said we've got 6 billion people, we're headed for 9, we're going to wind up with too many people and not enough food. His answer was cannibalism. (Laughter.)
MR. WULFINHOFF: Just to answer the question, I'm no more expert on that question than anyone else here, but I think everyone would agree, population is the big driver. And so yes, intelligent, responsible control of having kids is obviously a big part of the picture. I think that's a truism that we can all agree to.
MR. SPEARS: I'd like to get my two cents worth in. I don't think population control is a very tenable solution. However, education is, and if we have a population of educated people that understand and take full responsibility for their own needs in a society, which is completely technically possible if our society allows it to be, then we have a population that uses a very, very small fraction of the footprint of the planet that we currently use, and we could support a much higher population.
REP. BARTLETT: I believe that every industrialized country in the world, if it weren't for immigration, has a negative population growth now. That's true in the United States. Were it not for immigration - I think if it weren't for illegal immigration, our population would be declining in this country. And that's true of most of the industrialized world.
Is there another comment on this? John?
MR. HOWE: I think we should not get off this population issue too quickly because you keep peeling away at the layers of the onion, the energy, where we go from here, remember that, like Dick Heinberg said, the population grows with the resources. Since the beginning of this country we've had unlimited resources and we pat ourselves on the back saying how wonderful we are. But there are tremendous resources there. And then especially when the fossil energy came on.
So population has increased, like any biological species, and right now we are in such dire straits, and this is why I tend to be more pessimistic than just going over and sliding down Hubbard's curve because population wants to continue to go up, just like any biological species, at a time when resources are not only leveling off, they're going down. So we have this double whammy, this diversion between population and demand and resource capability. So this is going to open up pretty quickly, very quickly, and the population issue is incredibly important.
Let me go one step further. Even when there's a horizontal level, plateau of resources, life is not very friendly because Mother Nature always wants to produce more than the resources can stand, so there's always this chaos, the die-off or cruel short life, whatever you want to call it, and the males of the species try to go out and get their neighbors' stuff and the other males try to defend it so that it leads to a lot of chaos. That's normal with any species. We see it with the mice in the barn. We call it the mice in the barn theory.
So we're reaching a double whammy. We're not only going to have horizontal population, we're going to go downhill in population, but we're going to go downhill in resources where population wants to continue to go up.
Now China's faced up to this problem for years and they've tried this one child per couple. It's been a very ugly situation in China. It has not worked very well. They've had midnight raids and abortions, and the women take the brunt of the problem. I'm going to go on record right here and you might want to throw me out, but I'm way out of my area. I don't know whether my area is as a philosopher or what. (Laughter) But rather than try and approach this the traditional way of the contraception or abortion or embryonic control or whatever, I think we should face up to the maleness of this issue. We're the trouble-makers. We're the ones that cause all the problems and don't want to admit it.
My solution to this, John Howe, Yankee solution, you heard this for the first time here, would be to one child - and this is the law of the land, by the way. Just like incest or murder or anything else. Every male. You have one child, you get a vasectomy, period. That's it. End of subject. (Applause.) It didn't hurt me a bit 20, 30 years ago. That's enough.
REP. BARTLETT: This next question deals with a subject that I had a question about. I called Mr. Simmons, he was gone, haven't had a chance to talk with him. So I'll now ask the question, along with the questioner from the audience. There was a recent article in one of the papers - was it the New York Times, the Washington Post? The Times, I think. About an experiment in Colorado where a plot of land 20 by 35 feet, and they got 1,500 barrels of oil from it, and I did some calculations that said there would be a hole in the ground 100 feet deep if that's true if they got that much oil out of that. They said they got 10 times as much out as if they mined it and cooked it on the surface. And that they put in one unit of energy, got out 3.5 units of energy. And if that's true, we're home free. What's wrong with this news story?
MR. SIMMONS: First, I think they're talking about the experiments that are going on in oil shale on the western -
REP. BARTLETT: That is correct.
MR. SIMMONS: And what it is is basically a return to a new concept that used to be called Project Rifle, which was effectively an experiment by Cosco (ph), which was the oil shale company, to bring a nuclear bomb into the oil shale and create an internal furnace there. What they're now doing is putting some electricity rods down. That's just very energy intensive, so they're ignoring the energy intensity to actually create a little bit of oil out of shale.
REP. BARTLETT: But they said in the article, at least the lady who wrote the article said that she was told that they put in one unit of energy and got out 3.5. They cooked it for two years, they froze all the ground around it to keep it from polluting ground water, and it was inconceivable to me that that could be energy-positive.
MR. SIMMONS: I just think those studies don't do a real honest energy count. And what we desperately need is a bureau of energy standards that take all the things that are required to make these things work and measure the energy. What they're doing is they're taking just one element. (Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Another one for Matt Simmons. Two-thirds of the oil that's still in the ground, why then are we not doing more to get it, and why are we not using renewable energy to power enhance oil recovery?
MR. SIMMONS: The whole two-thirds in the ground is an interesting concept because what's - that's probably a good number we think, but the third that's gone was the high quality useable oil. And what's left gets more and more energy intensive to be able to convert it into useable oil. I think one of the really terrible vocabulary words we created was tar sand, and we talk about it like it's useable oil. Tar sands are tar. They have to be melted by steam and then oozed out of the ground and then refined into heavy oil and then diluted with sweet oil to make synthetic crude.
Now it doesn't take rocket science to say that is really energy intensive. So we should call it coal. We shouldn't call it oil.
REP. BARTLETT: There are several other questions here that relate to some slides that I had for summing up, and maybe we'll go through those and answer those questions when it comes to that point in the slide. And we'd like the panel, too, and we'll just stop for comments as we run through this series of slides.
Okay, the next one. This one we've seen before. This is a typical bell-shaped curve, and the next one I think shows the break-out in this country. This was a very interesting one that shows where we've gotten our oil from from 1935 up until the present, and you see that we peaked in 1970 and one of the presenters noted the contribution of Prudhoe Bay, that's the Alaska oil there, and that was just a tiny blip in the slide down Hubbard's peak.
Now I'm opposed to drilling in ANWAR, not for environmental reasons (applause) -
MR. SIMMONS: Congressman, while you have that up, it's interesting basically, if you take the peak in 1970 and exclude the natural gas liquids in Alaska, and then you come down to where we are today, about 2 million barrels a day. About 40 percent of the two is our stripper wells, which are 2.2 barrels of oil a day. And we also strip out about 100 to 500 oils a day of brine.
My guess is that the energy used to pump the 500 barrels of brine is more energy than the 2.2 barrels. But luckily we have those stripper wells left or we'd be down to about 1 million barrels a day of conventional oil, excluding Alaska.
REP. BARTLETT: The reason I'm opposed to drilling in ANWAR is that Prudhoe Bay, which is much bigger than ANWAR will ever be, had very little effect on our downhill slide. I'm having a lot of trouble understanding, if we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, and use 25 percent of the world's oil, and import about two-thirds of what we use, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how it's in our national security interest to use up the little bit of oil we've got as quickly as we can. (Applause.)
This may be a rainy day. I think there's going to be a rainier day.
Mr. Wulfinghoff, you have a comment.
MR. WULFINGHOFF: In the '70s they called that strength through exhaustion.
REP. BARTLETT: Notice the yellow up there. Remember the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries, and they were going to save the world? That's the contribution they made. That's the contribution they made.
The next slide, please. This is the schematic I showed before, and this is just a 2 percent growth here. Now you can make that Hubbard's peak as steep as you want by simply changing the abscissa and changing the scale on the ordinate. This is a 2 percent growth curve. It doubles in 35 years, so from where that use line separates, the demand line separates from the available line, that yellow consumes - that's 35 years because that's the doubling time with 2 percent growth.
So we're going to have problems of supply and demand - 17 years, it says, 17.5 years before we actually reach peak. So those who say peak is in the future, yes, peak will be in the future but we could still be having problems now. The next slide, please.
Okay, this is one I mentioned, and these numbers prompted Boyden Gray and McFarland and Jim Woolsey and a lot of retired four-star admirals and generals to write the president a letter saying, Mr. President, these numbers represent a totally unacceptable national security risk. We have got to do something about that.
Matt, you mentioned our pumping. We have only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil, but we produce 8 percent of the world's oil from that. We're really very good at getting this oil out of the ground. What that means is that our 2 percent is going to run out more quickly, doesn't it? So we're going to face problems before others face problems. The next slide.
Okay, this is a really interesting one. The one at the bottom, by the way, is just a few years of the one above, and we separated out the gas and the oil. But this goes through - it begins back in the 1600's or something, I think. This looks at the industrial age, and first there's wood on the bottom, and that was stalling out and we found coal, and boy, we jumped with coal. Then we found oil, and look what happened. And if we were plotting the world's population, it would pretty much follow that oil curve. It has really been exploding.
When Malthus made his prediction that eventually population would outstrip our ability to provide food, we had less than a billion people. Now we're approaching 7 billion people. 5,000 years of recorded history. We're 100 years or so into the age of oil. In another 100 years or so we will be through the age of oil. What then?
By the way, we will transition to renewables. There is no question. There is no alternative. We will transition to renewables. The only question is how we do it, and the longer we wait, the longer we wait the more difficult the solution will be. The next chart.
This is a really interesting chart, and one of the presenters mentioned 86 percent - either 86 to 85 percent of all the energy we currently use comes from fossil fuels, and you see it up there in those three segments of natural gas, the petroleum and the coal. Of the 15 percent that is not fossil fuels, 8 percent of that is 20 percent of our electricity, 8 percent of our total energy comes from nuclear. That could grow. You need to determine whether the environmental penalties are worth the benefit you get from growing nuclear, but that certainly could and maybe should grow.
Now we've pulled out and expanded the renewable energy part of it there, which is 7 percent, and we've broken that down into 100 parts. Breaking that down into 100 parts solar is 1 percent of that 7 percent. That means it's .07 percent of our total energy production. Very attractive because it's non-polluting once you've made the cells. You could pollute while you're making them, but once it's in operation then it works. It really works.
Any by the way, it's kind of humbling. Two of those little 60-watt panels is all I'm worth in terms of energy, right? About 120 watts. You know, when the sun is shining, two of those panels put out more energy than I can put out - (audio break, tape change) -- geothermal is the one - that's true geothermal. That's tapping down into the hot core of the earth.
One of the presenters mentioned geothermal air conditioning and heating and so forth. That just wisely is coupling your heat pump - not to the air that you're trying to heat in the summertime and cool in the wintertime, which is really kind of stupid, isn't it - but it's coupling the heat and air conditioning to ground temperature where it's, here in Maryland, a constant 56 degree all year.
But true geothermal - and Iceland doesn't have a single chimney; it's all geothermal there, I think. We have some places in our country where you can get there.
Agriculture - about 0.14 percent - what this points out is that the sources that we're going to have to turn to in the future are now minuscule in terms of their contribution to our total energy supply. We have got a long way to go.
Conventional hydroelectric - that's almost half of all of these renewables. That's not going to grow much in our country. We've dammed up about everything we should have dammed up and maybe some things we shouldn't have, and we're breaching more dams now than we are making.
Wood - that's (not the ?) West Virginia hillbilly up there at 38 percent. That's the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product to produce energy.
The 8 percent there from waste - that's one that really needs to grow. If you do down here to Dickerson, they have a plant down there that is burning municipal waste, and you know, I'd be happy to have my church next to it because it looks like an office building from the front of it, and they bring the trash in in containers. You never even see it until it's dumped into a big pit that the crane lifts it out of. I mean, we really shouldn't be burying this stuff; we should be getting some energy from it.
But this presents the enormous challenge we have. The energy sources that we will need to turn to as we wind down the age of oil now represent tiny, tiny contributions to our energy supply.
We must invest three things to get there. One of them we won't worry about: we won't worry about money; we'd never do that in Washington. (Laughter.) We have, by the way, the most unique credit card in the world in Washington. It's my voting card. It's a card without limit. I can change anything, any amount. There is no limit to how much I can charge. And it's really unique because I'm charging it to somebody else's account. I'm never going to pay that back. My generation is not going to pay it back. My kids and my grandkids are going to pay it back, so that's a really - that's a really unique card, isn't it?
We need to invest money, but we will borrow that from our kids and our grandkids. We won't worry about that in Washington. But the two things we can't borrow from you is time and energy, and that schematic curve that we showed a little bit ago, we can't even use all of that oil that's available to us for our ordinary economic activities or we'll have nothing to invest in these alternatives, so we have got to embark on a very aggressive conservation program so we have something to invest.
We had a hand up here for a comment? Yes, sir.
Q: What's really important in this discussion is how we and the policymakers and the public and the citizens frame the discussion. Historically we have framed the discussion about renewables and conventional energy as if renewables will always only be a small minuscule fraction of the mix, and in fact, almost all the energy experts you hear touting the future talk about new technologies in sort of conventional technologies: new oil, nuclear power, more conventional approaches being the biggest part of that pie, and renewables still only being a small fraction. Everybody says renewables will never be able to meet the demand of a growing industrial country.
That is absolutely false. Over and over we've proven, every single day, that you can provide 100 percent of the demand of an industrialized country with 100 percent renewables, and unless we start the discussion where that's the goal - which inevitably, as you said, it will ultimately become that because everything else is going to run out - unless we start framing the discussion around that notion, we'll never get there. We'll only incrementally reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and never really give the focus on transitioning to a 100-percent-renewable economy that it needs to make it happen.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: A generation - thank you - a generation ago there was a scientist - C.P. Snow I think his name was - who made a statement that I wonder if you agree or disagree with. He says be optimistic about all of the alternatives - how much energy to get from them - add them all up, and you still come way short of both the quantity and quality of energy we're getting from fossil fuels. That's true?
MR. SPEARS: I don't deny that. One of the things I think we should all take a quick look at - that study I showed, "Energy-Rich Japan" is at energyrichjapan.org, or if you just Google energy rich Japan, you can get that study; it's available free on the Internet. And it shows what technology can do in an industrialized country.
I know what I can do with somebody's house or somebody's community. I can make that completely self-sufficient. I can't imagine why we can't build communities that are completely self-sufficient.
We're never going to run Hummers on renewable energy, and that's the fallacy, and we have to have deep, deep efficiency improvements. Efficiency is energy. It's the fastest developing energy supply we can have. If we want to immediately reduce our dependence on foreign oil, all we have to do is improve the efficiency of our existing infrastructure, and we can do it real quickly.
REP. BARTLETT: Yes, the cheapest oil you use is the oil you don't buy, isn't it - that you don't need to use because you've conserved.
The next chart, please. Okay, the upper one shows a controversy that's going on. I spent, about three weeks ago, a full day in Washington at the National Press Club. Dr. Pimental was there and his colleague from the West Coast, and they contend that more energy goes into producing ethanol - more fossil fuel energy goes into producing than you'll get from it. I hope they're not correct.
What I have up here is the data from the Department of Energy, which I am told by the experts is wildly optimistic, and on the left you will see that they believe that you can get a million BTUs with an input of about 750,000 BTUs from fossil fuel. But at the bottom is the one that I want to spend a couple of moments looking at because that's a really interesting one.
This is the energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. On the right over there, that purple one - almost half of the circle - is the energy from natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilizer. Before we learned how to do that, the only nitrogen fertilizers available for agriculture were barnyard manures and guano. Guano was the droppings of tropical birds and bats for hundreds of thousands of years, and we have an industry, ships going around the world.
The last time I was in Grand Canyon, there was still a rusty cable there for a cable car that went into a bat cave in the wall of the Grand Canyon to bring out guano. Without fossil fuels, we can't have nitrogen fertilizers in the quantity we have them today, and it's very energy intensive. Almost half of all the energy that goes into a bushel of corn comes from natural gas producing the nitrogen fertilizer.
By the way, you may have wondered why, if you water your lawn, it's never quite as green as after a thunderstorm, and that's because you get more than just water from a thunderstorm. We get what we call poor man's fertilizer because the lightening now combines nitrogen in a form that's carried down by the water into the soil and can be used by the plants. And we have learned to do that now with enormous energy.
Look at almost every other segment of that pie there, and it's fossil fuel energy. The production of these crops is very, very energy dependent.
The next slide. This is one that we've been talking about all day: potential alternative solutions, and we'll just start down those.
The tar sands and the oil shales - there's an incredible amount of oil there, but whether or not it is recoverable, both economically and energy-wise is debatable. The Canadians are now getting oil from their - what do they call them? Oil sands they call them, I think, there. They're getting it at about $30 a barrel. But I'm told that they're using more energy from natural gas - by the way, they're producing it at $30 a barrel so they make a big profit selling it at 65 (dollars), but I'm told that they are using more natural gas energy to produce the oil than you will get out of the oil. That's called energy profit ratio. Not only is there a dollar-and-cents profit ratio, there's an energy profit ratio you have to think of in these things. So although there's a great deal there, it's not going to be very energy positive if in fact it is energy positive, and you're going to pay a big environmental penalty because of all the energy you have to use to get some little net energy.
Coal - 250-year supply in our country. Many people will tell you not to worry; coal will take care of us. There is 250 year supply at current use rate, but if you increase the use of coal just 2 percent, compounded - which Albert Einstein says, by the way, is the most powerful force in the universe, the force of compound interest - if you have a 2-percent growth compounded, it shrinks from 250 years to 85 years, and then if you allow that you can't put coal in the trunk of your car, you're going to have to convert it to a gas or a liquid, you now use some energy to do that, so now you're down to 50 years. With a - either a big environmental penalty using that coal because all the coal that's in our country now is pretty dirty stuff with a lot of sulfur in it, or a big energy penalty in taking the pollutants out of the coal.
We talked about nuclear, and if in fact there is an essentially unlimited amount of fissionable uranium and you are willing to accept the environmental impacts of that, we could be producing - France is now -- what, 70, 80 percent of their electricity is produced by nuclear, and so that's something we really need to think about.
Nuclear fusion, by the way - I support all the money. About 300 million (dollars) a year goes into that. You know, I think our chances of getting nuclear fusion are about the same as my odds of solving my personal financial problems by winning the lottery. (Laughter.) Now if you think that's a good bet, well, you may think that nuclear fusion is a good bet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, and I support all the money that that sector of our technology can support.
Then we get down to the true renewables: solar and wind and they are now 0.07 percent each. They can grow, but it's going to take a big investment of time and energy, building the factories, making the solar panels, making the wind machines.
I've heard the wind machines make a lot of noise. My wife and I were coming back from West Virginia. We came by Thomas - Davis, West Virginia, where they have a whole string of them there. We pulled off of the road. I didn't need to turn off my engine - I'm in a Prius; when you stop, it stops - opened the windows. I didn't hear anything. These were the great, great, big machines out there. People don't think they're pretty. I don't think these scars through our forests - running these power lines through - are very pretty either, but somehow we've learned to live with those. To get to any meaningful amount of energy from solar and wind, we're going to have to make big, big investments of time and energy to get there.
Geothermal - where it's available, we really ought to be exploiting that. That's essentially forever. Once you get there it will just work and work and work.
Ocean energy - can you imagine how much energy it takes to lift the oceans two feet? That's what the tides do, that's what the moon does with the tides, but because it is so diffuse, we have a hard time harnessing that energy.
I used to be very optimistic about energy from agriculture, but I'll tell you, tonight a fifth of the world will go to be hungry. Our topsoils are not increasing in either quantity or quality; as a matter of fact, until we learned to no till, they were decreasing in both quantity and quality. So I have some concern about how much biomass we can take from our agricultural lands and still have good agricultural land. There's probably something, but I'm not sure it's all as much as we had thought before.
The soy, diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass - waste energy that we really should be doing. We really should be doing that. Hydrogen - we talked a lot about that. Hydrogen is not an energy source. Hydrogen is simply a convenient way of transporting energy when you finally use it. By the way, the battery in your car is totally non-polluting when you finally take the energy out of it, isn't it, and hydrogen is the same way. I mean, you get water out of it, which is pretty non-polluting. But you may have polluted when you make the hydrogen.
We have three experts down in Washington, and we're talking about the hydrogen economy in the future, and they all agreed that only one technology would get us there. Three ways to store hydrogen: one is to put it under pressure - the lightest element that we have; always wanting to expand and get out; big, thick vessels, very heavy. The second was to liquefy it; very, very cold; lots of insulation, lots of energy and liquefying it. And the third was the one that they thought would work, and that was some chemical combination - reversible chemical combination. That's a hydrogen battery.
I don't know if inherently the hydrogen battery is going to be that much better than the electron battery which we have today, but a lot of people believe that hydrogen is an energy source and it's the solution to our energy problems, and if we get there we're home free. We just aren't home free because you've got to make the hydrogen. You'll always use more energy making it than you get out of it. It's still a good idea, by the way, because it is transportable. Use it in a fuel cell where you have twice the efficiency of the reciprocating engine.
Is there a last slide? Oh, the last slide is the challenge we have, and we now need to make - if we're going to have anywhere close to a soft landing, we have now got to be making some decisions equivalent to the kind of decisions they made in Apollo 13, so that - you know, they had a fairly narrow window, and if they'd hit that window, it was disaster.
Now we have a really rough ride - it's not a perfect analogy because we will get there; we will get to renewables. It's a question of how rough the ride is going to be.
Well, any comments or questions from our panel before we thank everybody for coming and thank our panel for their contributions?
MR. : Thank you.
REP. BARTLETT: Mr. Wulfinghoff?
MR. WULFINGHOFF: Yes, one of the points I didn't get to make because I was running overtime is that the single most important thing that we have to do right now to make this happen is to get the word out, and I want to thank you and your staff for doing that. You are doing the critical thing that we need to survive.
(Applause.)
REP. BARTLETT: Thank you. Thank you.
The questions we didn't get to - we'll try to answer those by mail. Just call our office - any of our offices and we'll be responsive to your questions. And we won't know the answers, perhaps, but we'll get them from the panel.
I want to thank the panel very, very much. I'm really honored they'd come. They've come from all over the country, they are the world's experts in this area. Thank you all very much for coming.
Audience, thank you for your participation. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
(END)
http://www.monoculartimes.co.uk/architexts...culture_1.shtml
||| Car culture and the landscape of subtraction |||
Philip Goff
||| [part 1] ||| [part 2] ||| [part 3] |||
The hit foreign film of the late 1980's, Cinema Paradiso, provides a marvelous metaphor for our current international predicament. The movie wonderfully demonstrates how our collective obsession with automobiles has savaged our cities and diminished our sense of place and community. The central character within the movie is the "Paradiso" cinema, located on a generous piazza in a small town in Sicily. The movie house, along with the church, provide, not only the dominant architectural features of the piazza, but also provide the heart and soul, respectively, of the community. The piazza of 1954 existed as the hierarchical gathering space for the town, with its open market, cultural festivals, and even an outdoor movie screening space. In the movie, people continually traverse the space by foot, bicycle, and horse-drawn cart. Upon the protagonists return to the town in the 1980's, the once glorious urban space had been usurped by modern progress. Pedestrians are scarce as cars speed across the piazza dodging the multitude of parked vehicles. The former projectionist, turned famous movie director, appears devastated to see the "Paradiso" condemned for demolition, only to be replaced with a parking lot. In the final scene, we see the theater blasted to smithereens in the background, the weeping nostalgic crowds in the middle ground, and, in the foreground, the rooftops of Fiats and Volkswagons.
Although the film ostensibly presents a general critique of modern industrial society, in the forefront is the burgeoning obsession with the machina. The Sicilian town's identity and sense of community was lost with the compromise of the piazza.. Crucial public space had been handed over, free of charge, to the priviledged few who could afford an automobile. Unfortunately, this is the typical state of affairs in America's cities. This (de)evolution in transportation was not a natural progression. The rise of the automobile's popularity was greatly encouraged by obstinate politicians and profit-motivated corporations. Additionally, the complicity of modernist urban planners and architects, dehumanized traffic engineers, and demagogue developers cannot be ignored. Their collective post-war creation has left us with a mountain of debt, a sprawling suburban ooze, polluted and crumbling inner cities, and a landscape devoid of farmland and forests. All in all, ours is the landscape of subtraction. Cars have contributed nothing to our urban condition, our communities, and our environment. They have only taken away. What started out as a promise for a better life based on unlimited mobility, has become a modern day obsession, as solitary commuters idle in endless traffic jams wondering where all of the cars came from.
Indoctrinating the compromise of public space
Owning and driving an automobile has become a prerequisite for conformity in our popular culture. To not drive in America is seen as aberrant behavior. Using mass transit is for people too poor to own an automobile, or for big city dwellers who deem the auto commute inefficient. Riding a bicycle is seen as either a recreational act, or only as a method for children and pre-teens to get around. Walking on a country road or a suburban strip, where seldom doth a sidewalk appear, immediately elicits suspicion. Surely only a lunatic or a criminal would do such a thing. In the land of apple pie, every "normal" citizen gets around by car. After World War II, buying a suburban bungalow was even considered a patriotic act. William Levitt, the Long Island developer for whom Levittown was named said, "The suburban homeowner could never be a communist . . . He has too much to do!" The aphorisms, "no one messes with a man's set of wheels", or "what's good for GM is good for America" has incredible power in our culture.
The indoctrination into our auto-dominated culture begins at very early age. Children play with toy cars and trucks. They build miniature suburbs with Tonka trucks and cranes. Every Barbie doll or G.I. Joe figurine needs the accompanying vehicle to be a complete set. Many children's toy vehicles are ornamented to appear like cars, even though mechanically, they are similar to bicycles. Many young boys build miniature race tracks of plastic, emulating the stock-car racers seen on T.V. By the time these children become teenagers, they will have their sights set on that 16th birthday with the driver's license soon to follow. Who can blame them? With many living in suburbs spread so thinly, bicycle trips become impractical, and mass transit is non-existent. Those priviledged enough, will receive a car from their parents as a gift. Most others though, will need to work to support their new, used cars. Surely, some will argue that they need a car to get to work... so that they can have money in order to maintain their cars... so that they can get to work...etc.
From there, one's adult life becomes a constant barrage of images to reinforce the "normalcy" of car ownership and use. Psychological reinforcement comes heavily from our media sources. One third of all T.V. advertisements are for automobiles and a great deal of newspaper space, including the weekly "automotive section", is appropriated to present images, statistics, and commentary based on cars. This prohibits a reasonable debate on our collective auto obsession, since the media's finances are so tied in with the auto industry. The government, too, is saturated with lobbyists representing the interests of the auto, oil, tire, and road construction industries, thus prohibiting major promulgation of alternative transportation funding. Subtle apparitions also occur in other ways, e.g. the glorification of winning a "new car" as the top prize in a T.V. game show or at the New York Marathon, auto company sponsorship of bicycle races, etc.
While the media continue to glorify accidents involving airplanes, trains, subways or buses, over 40,000 people a year - a Vietnam War total -die in car accidents. 1 According to the U.S. National Safety Council, the death rate per mile travelled in a car is 18 times greater than in a train and 97 times greater than in a bus. 2 This does not include pedestrians; in New York City alone, 283 pedestrians were killed and 15,600 were injured by motorists in 1993. 3 Within the developing world's chaotic mix of motorized and non-motorized vehicles, the driver and pedestrian fatality rate is close to 20 times greater than in the United States. 4 Car use also adversely affects human health by promoting a more sedentary lifestyle than, say, someone who gets around by bicycle. The ethos of the car oriented suburbs, says the social critic Lewis Mumford, "creates an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before the television set." Urban commuters who drive to and from work increase their levels of stress and hypertension, as they long to escape traffic and arrive at work or at home. Being stuck in traffic will subsequently affect worker's morale and productivity, and, along with delayed delivery of goods, costs the American economy $100 billion a year, according to the General Accounting Office. 5
The subsidizing of the American motorist
The promotion of car culture is clearly evident in the massive subsidies bestowed upon motorists to enable them to drive almost anywhere as cheaply and efficiently as possible. The true costs of driving an automobile are obfuscated, for their disclosure would certainly reduce auto use and make alternative means more attractive. This would not be compatible with the interests of the oil, car, road construction, or development industries, all of whom contribute heavily to politicians on the local and national levels.
Ample cheap and free parking is a significant way in which motorists are subsidized. Real estate values in urban areas are costly, yet motorist are allowed to use up to 100 square feet of public space for the storage of their vehicles. What reserves the side of the street to be used for the sole purpose of parking cars? Could one use the space for storage instead? To put a trampoline, maybe? Could one open up a futon in a parking space and sleep overnight? What privileges car owners to eat up such valuable urban space, when others pay hundreds of dollars for apartments hardly bigger than a parking space?
The allotment of public space is just one of the many ways in which motorists are heavily subsidized in our country. Charlie Komanoff, an energy consultant in New York, calculates a total subsidy of $700 billion per year, averaging out to about $5.50 per gallon, through the federal and state government levels. He estimates that this is roughly equivalent to what the individual motorist pays for upkeep, fuel, insurance, taxes, etc. Therefore, he reasons, driving in the U.S. is done at half price. The other half is provided for by the taxpayer. This puts those who do not drive: the elderly, poor people, or those who choose not to, at a severe financial disadvantage.
According to the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, taxes from gas, new car purchases, and registration, cover only 2/3 of the costs of building and maintaining highways and roads. 6 The remaining costs arrive via the general tax fund. To cover the myriad of costs associated with driving, gas would have to be between $3-$4 per gallon. 7 This is closer to the rate found in European countries, where gas tax is 5x greater than in the U.S. (Additionally, taxes on new car purchases overseas are close to 50% of the cost, where here, the rate is 5-10% of the total cost of the new car.) Considering the uproar over President Clinton's 1993 request for a 10 cent increase in gas taxes, it is easy to see why hidden subsidies need to replace a system of direct taxation.
The primary cost of a car dependant transportation system is the construction and maintenance of highways, roads, and bridges, to the tune of $200 million a day. 8 However, there are many other ways in which motorists are getting a "free ride". A significant portion of our security forces are utilized in automobile related issues: accidents, thefts, traffic control, and parking enforcement. These police officers could be much better utilized going after true criminals, rather than waving rush-hour traffic along, or investigating a minor traffic accident. Many of these accidents expound yet another burden on the taxpayer by disabling expensive pieces of public infrastructure. Destroyed fire hydrants, light poles, mailboxes, street signs, guardrails, planters, etc. become financial burdens that would be mitigated in a society less reliant on automobiles for transportation. Besides municipal police, State Police units are an enormous public expense, and apprehending highway speeders seems to be their raison d'etre.
Additionally, a large portion of health care costs are related to car accidents. Oil and car companies get large public subsidies, ranging from tax breaks to oil exploration permits on public lands. Employers are allowed to deduct from their taxes the expense of providing parking for their workers, and receive tax benefits for providing company cars. They are more strictly limited when it comes to tax incentives for mass transit or bicycle use. 9 The environmental damage due to car use: dirty air, dirty water, deforestation, etc., is impossible to calculate, but certainly not insignificant.
Perhaps the most expensive endowment of all, lies within the tangled fabric of our foreign policy. Every year, we spend billions of dollars to protect our oil tankers travelling through the Persian Gulf, as well troops for foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia. We even went to war to preserve our "right" to drive wherever, and whenever, we saw fit. This prompted Senator Bob Dole to say: "We are there for 3 letters: O-I-L. That is why we are in the Gulf. We are not there to save democracy. Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, and neither is Kuwait." Meanwhile, if we had continued conserving oil after 1985 at the same rate as before, we would have eliminated the need for any oil from the gulf. 10 The industrialized world's thirst for oil has allowed it to become pawns in international politics by their intense reliance on petroleum. This dependence plays right into the hands of dictators like Saddam Hussein, who know exactly how to provoke our enmity.
The great suburban build out
Government and corporate encouragement of car use, and suburban sprawl as a support structure for our fallacious economic "growth" is nothing new. It began in earnest in 1936 with the creation of the National City Lines Company, a corporate front group representing General Motors, Standard Oil, Firestone Tire, and Mack Trucks. For the next 15 years, this powerful company bought out 45 street car and trolley systems throughout the country. By the 1950's, all 45 transit systems were completely dismantled, opening the way for private car use and increased bus service, a demand that GM was all too happy to supply. This was the sad fate of public transportation in Los Angeles, a system nearly as extensive as New York's. Eventually, National City Lines was found guilty of criminal antitrust violations, but the verdict was moot, for the great suburban build out was in full throttle.
Meanwhile, in the 1930's, Roosevelt's Federal Housing Authority (FHA) was created to put the post-depression construction industry back on its feet, and to improve the housing stock for Americans. The FHA subsidized banks through the federal treasury, and therefore allowed for reduced downpayments, and extended mortgages. Unfortunately, the FHA did not guarantee new loans for those who wanted to build or renovate in the inner cities. Maybe this should come as no surprise considering that one its commissioners happened to be on the Board of Directors of the Standard Oil Company. After WWII, the government allowed the millions of returning G.I.'s to own homes without any necessary downpayment, and mortgage interests were made tax deductible. Thus ownership was made less expensive than renting, and with the planned system of new highways, white veterans flocked to the burgeoning suburbs.
As farmland and forests were being paved over with housing developments in the 1950's, the county and state road systems were becoming overburdened. Our economy demanded more growth, and the Federal Government began the largest public works project in our history, the Interstate Highway System. President Eisenhower began funding the highways after a hearty recommendation by his self appointed commission, chaired by Lucius D. Clay, on the Board of Directors of General Motors. 41,000 miles of new expressways spread over the country like a complex of veins and arteries. 11 Apologists for the vast new highway system insisted that they would quicken urban evacuation in the case of a Soviet nuclear attack, and, that they would provide enormous expanses of pavement and concrete to act as firebreaks, allowing sectors to remain unscathed.
Many companies had enormous profits to make through suburban expansion. The obvious beneficiaries were the oil and car companies, but many others which produced appliances, lawn mowers, lawn care products, etc. stood to cash in also. A major player was General Electric, who realized that every new home was certain to need a new washer and dryer, refrigerator, stove, blender, and other convenience items. GE knew that their fortunes lay within the increased unpopularity of urban apartment living. To encourage this, they sponsored many exhibitions and architectural competitions to glorify the modern suburban house. Famous architects normally won the competitions, bringing with them the legitimacy, and press coverage, of the single family suburban home.
While large sums of money funded the creation of highways and airports, rail improvements were all but forgotten. Sustainable, non-polluting alternatives have never been encouraged by our government except in emergency situations such as oil embargoes. The sprawling suburbs came to a crawl after the 1973 oil embargo, and subsequently President Carter sought alternative energy sources and decreased automobile reliance. After the election of Ronald Reagan, the oil cartel weakened, Iran and Iraq were soon to be engaged in a long and brutal war, and the oil market was flooded. With cheap gas, bank deregulation, and Reagan's tax policies, suburban development and car-use went back into high gear throughout the 1980's. During this time period, Federal funding for highways nearly doubled while the funding for mass transit was actually reduced by 10%. 12 In 1994, $20.3 billion was assigned to roads and highways while only $1 billion was allocated for rail improvements. 13
Continued
||| [part 1] ||| [part 2] ||| [part 3] ||| References
1. "Mobilopathy", Ralph Slovenko, Journal of Psychiatric Law, Summer 1984.
2. "Accident Facts", National Safety Council, 1993.
3. New York City Dept. of Transportation Safety Division.
4. "Rethinking the role of the Automobile", Michael Renner, Worldwatch Report #84, 6/88.
5. "Smart Highways: An Assessment of their potential to Improve Travel", U. S. General Accounting Office, 1991.
6. "Highway Statistics", U.S. Federal Highway Administration, 1992.
7. "The Real Cost of Energy", Harold M. Hubbard, Scientific American, 4/91.
8. A.P.M. Newsletter, 8/93.
9. "Cars are Evil: Automobiles and the Environment", Stefanie Pollack, Conservation Law Foundation, 7/90.
10. Rocky Mt. Institute, Amory Lovins, at the First International Conference on Auto-Free Cities, New York, 1991.
11. The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler, 1993, p.106-107.
12. "Acting in the National Interest: the Transportation Agenda", the Surface Transportation Policy Project.
13. National Association of Railroad Passengers, 2/94.
A critique of suburban culture
It was the promise of open space which initially lead many people to the suburban frontier. Paradoxically, suburbs have been allowed to sprawl unchecked for so long that very little of this open space or nature exists anymore. People are now either moving back into the city, or moving further and further into exurbia. The pace of this exodus has been exascerbated by advances in computers and the burgeoning "information superhighway". Advances in high technology have rendered the proximity to the city as insignificant for some, and has allowed them to create home offices on the fringes of the wilderness. These "pioneers" are increasing the extirpation of forests and farmland by building structures and roads into areas where none belong.
Where half a century ago, most people lived in a city or a rural location, the post-war blossoming of our car culture has allowed the typical American to now live in a suburban housing development. Ostensibly designed to preserve open space, these communities lack public open space and, due to dysfunctional zoning regulations, are spread so thinly that public transportation becomes ellusive. Therefore, a car trip is the required method of transportation for every task; it is no wonder that the average American motorist drives 10,000 miles a year. 14
The need to drive everywhere increases social fragmentation and is most detrimental to those who cannot drive: the elderly, the sick, children, and the poor, all of whom become completely dependant on the car driver for mobility. Ironically, many families initially relocate to suburbs for the "good" of their children, yet their children are stuck in virtual isolation and dependence, for their communities are designed not for them, but instead for cars. Thus, they spend a great deal of their time in front of the television for this becomes the prime atraction in many suburbs whose landscape is defined by housing developments, parking lots, fast food joints, and expressway off-ramps. The suburban landscape that most politicians would proudly call "growth", has greatly contributed to the deterioration of community and culture, for community has been substituted with shopping malls, and culture has been replaced by television.
Much of the reason why suburbs look the way they do is because of zoning laws. Drafted by planning boards often representing development and business interests, many of the codes are provided for the convenience of automobiles as if they were the dominant life form on the planet. The main premise behind our current zoning codes is the complete and distanced seperation of homes and jobs, as if we still inhabited cities of smokestacked factories and revolting slaughterhouses. With segregation rather than mixed-use, the ability to perform daily errands or go to work becomes impossible by walking or biking, and with poor mass transit, a motor vehicle becomes a necessity. Additionally, it creates the dysfunctional hierarchy of the commercial strip, the destination for so many who simply need a soda or a newspaper. Corner stores are not allowed in most suburban residential neighborhoods, nor are apartments allowed above shops and restaurants, denying mixed use buildings, and keeping density at a minimum.
Zoning laws regarding street design contribute to the lack of community in most suburbs. These laws deny enclosure, so necessary in making quality street spaces. The comforting feeling of enclosure is what makes 19th century brownstone-lined streets so charming. Compare a street in old-world Brooklyn or Boston to one that has a wide paved surface, no sidewalk, facades comprised of garages, and houses setback from the street and spaced at large intervals. Requirements for wide streets make speeds in excess of 35 m.p.h. possible, and, street trees and sharp curves are heartily discouraged for fear of prompting traffic accidents. Towering alien-like street lamps block out the stars and exist so that late night motorist can negociate the street at higher speeds. All told, suburban zoning laws mandate an environment designed for automobile driving, and with zero regard for the public realm. 15
On the commercial boulevards, zoning requires that buildings be set back certain distances and provide vast parking lots. The amalgamation of these structures resembles a gridded archipelago within a vast sea of pavement. Architecturally, these areas are as cheaply constructed as they are unsightly, and many design elements are at a scale not commiserate to pedestrians. The attempt to lure motorists comes to its utter perversion as gas stations and restaurants float their signs hundreds of feet in the air, begging for the attention of the speeding motorist. The suburban strip has also created its own building and spacial typologies: the drive-in restaurant, enormous billboards, car washes, gas stations, drive-in movie theaters, and of course, the ubiqutous used car lot.
Car culture's invasion of the metropolis
The automobile's infusion into our cities has had a major impact on urban architecture likewise. Car culture has created the "architecture of subtraction", as pieces and parts of towns and cities have been eviscerated to make room for automobiles. This has excised portions of urban fabric, taking away street definition, so important in civic space making. Buildings and entire blocks have been removed to make parking lots. Gas stations become instant eyesores, and usurp large areas of space potentially used for public plazas, parks, or buildings. Both take away from the pedestrian experience of movement through a city, and abate the visual and cultural stimulation. Instead of strolling along a well defined street with interesting shop display windows and greenery, a bleak landscape of cars is considered.
Never before has an invention that so many people consider a necessity taken up so much space. In older cities such as Boston or New York, close to 1/2 of the ground space is reserved for the sole purpose of moving and storing cars, and in newer cities such as Los Angeles or Pheonix, it is closer to 2/3. 16 These inequities become quite obvious by simply walking the streets of Manhattan, for example. The distrubution of pedestrian space compared to automobile space is heavily weighed towards the motorist, even in midtown Manhattan, where millions work, or Greenwich Village where thousands socialize. Hundreds of people can be jammed onto narrow sidewalks, while cars stream by on four and five lane avenues. In the battle for urban turf, the clear winner is the automobile.
Few civic interventions compare to the destruction wrought by urban expressways, which functionally, have done nothing that commuter rail lines couldn't do. From the beginning, expressways were ostensibly built to bring commuters into the city more easily, but, what they have really done is to drain the city of its middle class by providing a very compelling reason to leave. As highways plowed through cities in the 1950's and 1960's, dense urban neighborhoods of different ethnicities were removed and highrise housing projects took their place. The government, sensing the surge in black migration north, built these projects to house them and simultaneously provided urban highways to allow the white middle class to escape, encouraging segregation. Highways were not so much built to ameliorate traffic congestion, instead they created traffic congestion by decentralizing urban areas.
Urban expressways fracture neighborhoods and are accompanied by a host of subsequent urban predicaments. Besides the introduction of air and noise pollution, the highways are like stakes driven through the hearts of intact neighborhoods. Geographically, they are often constructed along natural boundaries and edges resulting in the seperation of the urban realm from rivers, lakes, bays, and oceans. Not only does this deny the heritage of a city, whos economy may have been based on a local body of water, but it also prohibits public access to natural open spaces. Highways built above grade are like massive fortress walls of noise and smog, and built below grade they resemble moats, often with infrequent overpasses to further divide the community. From an economic point of view, they are quite detrimental, for the dense urban fabric cleared for the widened road subtracts formerly taxable land. The maligning effects of the highway reverberate from block to block, and quickly property values plummet, and a once middle class neighborhood turns to squalor as residents flee to the suburbs on the very highway that destroyed their neighborhoods. The void is soon filled with the economically disadvantaged immigrants, and the municipality, loathing the loss of property taxes, allows the area to crumble. This scenario has played a major role in the disintegration of many of America's cities from Los Angeles, to Detroit, to the South Bronx.
Culturally, the ubiquity of cars has had the largest impact on our street culture, the common bond of communities. The "public space" of the urban and suburban street has, for the most part, been compromised for the singular purpose of moving and storing automobiles. This relinquishes public space to the favored car owners of our society. Street space incubates social interactions, and these become much more difficult when streets are filled with noisy, polluting, and speeding motor vehicles. According to the late architectural historian Spiro Kostoff, "the street stands as the burial place of a chance to learn from one another, the burial place of unrehearsed excitement, of the cumulative knowledge of human ways. We lose this because we would rather keep to ourselves, avoid social tension by escaping it, schedule encounters with friends, and happily travel alone in climate controlled and music injected glossy metal boxes." 17
In some large cities, streets have become so chaotic and polluted that separate planes of pedestrian movement have developed. Rather than confronting the real epidemic, cities and private sources have built extensive systems of bridges and underground concourses, keeping the public off of the ground plane, where social intercourse traditionally occurred. These ersatz public spaces fail to bring together urban society in all of its diversity. The quasi-public nature of the bridges and concourses are undemocratic, in that they allow the often private controlling body to eliminate certain undesirable elements, such as the homeless or demonstrations.
Sadly, many have forgotten or may never know the true vitality of an authentic street culture. Disneyland's Main Street or the local mall will never be appropriate substitutes. Instead, much of the built landscape is a pathetic malaise of squalor and dysfunctional planning, yet most of us feel that it was an organic process that could not be ameliorated.
Car cultures affect on crime in this country cannot be ignored. Auto usage results directly in many violent crimes such as car jackings and drive-by shootings, and is often an integral part of much gang activity and violence. Interestingly, it is in large cities that rely most heavily on automobile transportation where major gang problems are most prevalent. Compare gang activity in Los Angeles to New York's, for example. Many criminals rely on a getaway car, for the multitude of roads and expressways provide a convenient means of escape. The ubiquity of roads make it easy to buy drugs, pick up a prostitute, rob a store, or blow up an office building. These criminal acts become more difficult in a society whose transportation needs are met with mass transit and bicycles.
The issue of access to terrorism has finally met the attention of our federal government. After months of deliberation President Clinton ordered the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue, just weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing. Although the three block stretch of road has been reclaimed as public space, filled with hundreds of tourists and roller skaters, the need to "apologize" was still pervasive. Quoted in The New York Times, the President said that the street closing was "seen as a responsible security step necessary to preserve our freedom, not part of a long term restriction of our freedom." To equate automobile access of a section of street with freedom is absolutely ludicrious, but, in a car dominant society, many motorists feel that they have the "right" to drive anywhere, whether that be deep into a National Park, or directly in front of the White House. Maybe the President's attitude comes as no surprise to those who remember his valiant appeals to the American psyche by declaring, after the 1993 Los Angeles earthquake, that, "freeway reconstruction will be the most urgent need."
Some cities are finally coming to terms with the cars-and-crime reality, and have begun programs to limit automobiles in neighborhoods vulnerable to lawbreaking. In Dayton, Ohio, the mixed income racially diverse neighborhood of 5 Oaks recently gated its through streets, allowing access only to residents' automobiles, and foot and bicycle traffic. According to The New York Times, overall crime went down by 25% after the change and violent crime was reduced by 50%. Additionally, neighborhoods in Coconut Grove, Florida, Austin, Texas, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Los Angeles, have all had success with physical prohibition of thru-traffic. These neighborhoods have experience rebirth as drug dealing and prostitution have been severely limited, although critics say that the deviant behavior has simply moved elsewhere. Nonetheless, these examples show the potential of retaking public space away from the influx of automobiles and returning it to the community.
Based upon car culture's incorrigible impact on North America, one shudders to think of this becoming an international precedent. Sadly, it is already happening. Since the collapse of the Soviet monolith and the opening of the Far-Eastern markets, multi-national auto makers and oil companies have been drooling over their prospects. According to The New York Times, Hungary and Poland already have 50% more cars than before the end of the cold-war, and government support for mass transit has waned. The Chinese government, while vigorously pushing to modernize their country, have begun enormous road building projects, hoping to encourage tens of millions to buy cars. Like post-war America, China seems to be blinded by the fallacious aura surrounding the automobile, and have failed to consider the consequences. Recently,The Beijing Review stated in the purest of Orwellian doublespeak, that, "vigorous development of private cars will effectively help ease the strain on urban traffic…as the replacement of bicycles with cars will enable Chineese cities to realize traffic modernization." Perhaps Chinese officials should try driving an L.A. freeway at rushhour, or biking up 6th Avenue in Manhattan before they make such hasty decisions for their country.
Continued
||| [part 1] ||| [part 2] ||| [part 3] ||| References
14. International Road Federation, U.N. Economic Committee for Europe
15. The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler, 1993, p.113-118.
16. "Automobile Index", Conservation Law Index of New England
17. The City Assembled, Spiro Kostov, 1992, p.243
The destruction of farmland, forests and wildlife
The constantly expanding suburban malaise is inexoribly connected with cheap gas, the lack of mass transit, and an obdurate government nearly bought and paid for by lobbyists from the development, oil, automobile, and paving industries. The natural desire to live "out in the country" brings meddlesome human beings closer and closer to our dwindling wildlands. In the last forty years, we have destroyed more land than in the 300 years before, this is due not so much to population growth, but to the natural properties of car culture. The environmental damage has been unprecedented: the dwindling quality of the air and water, the loss of natural resources, and the destruction of farmland, forests, and wildlife. The omeba-like suburbs, left unchecked, will sprawl further into the deserts of the Southwest, the forests of Pacific Northwest, the mountains of Colorado, the farmlands of the midwest, and the last few remaining wild places in the Northeast.
From the perspective of the use of natural resources, the automobile oriented suburbs are perniciously inefficient. Consider the environment impact of a car-oriented suburban style community of 500 households, and an urban community for the same 500 households. The land use requirements for the former are enormous as each house occupies a 1/4 or 1/2 acre lot and is connected by wide roads. The 500 individual homes require vast amounts of materials to build and must be connected by a myriad of power, water, and sewer lines, putting a strain on our dwindling natural resources. Although urban communities are not perfect, they have a much lower ecological impact considering their compact land use, efficiency of materials and infrastructure, and maintained distance from wilderness and wildlife. Additionally, each house in the suburban community becomes but an island within the paradigmatic lush green lawn. Forget the fact that grass is not native to many areas of our country, every homeowner demands one, whether living in lush New England, or the Arizona desert. American lawns total 20 million acres, quadruple the size of Washington state, and require enormous amounts of water and chemicals to keep green. Lawns and their required mowers have become totems of our fetishism with grass, resulting in polluted water tables, noisy neighborhoods, and vast amounts of ecologically useless land.
The common piece of infrastructure that is necessary for all suburban and exurban developments is the paved road. Every square foot of pavement represents an ecological dead zone, a completely sterilized environment that allows the runoff of oil, antifreeze, and brake fluids into the water table. When a road is built in a remote area close to wilderness, it not only brings polluting and dangerous cars, but also brings with it the constant pressure of continued development. The close proximity to nature brings in items not native to a bioregion such as noise, garbage, dogs, vehicles, and guns. Roads also allow the hordes of hunters, poachers, and trappers to drive into remote areas to exterminate wildlife.
The recent rise in popularity of campers and four wheel drive vehicles have accelerated the complete commodification of the natural world. Now we can all have a packaged environment, seen from the safety of mobile fortresses as if the planet were one big theme park. Television advertisements convince viewers that the appropriate 4-wheel drive vehicle will allow them to cross rivers, blaze through forests, and drive to remote mountain vista points. Car culture has clearly brought too many people to places that they do not necessarily belong.
A great tragedy is the quantity of wild animals that are struck and killed every year by speeding automobiles. More than half a billion animals, including 1/4 of a million people, are killed every year on the planet's roads and highways. 18 This is 10 times more creatures killed by cars than by the American pork industry, for comparison. 19 The average American's car kills 3 to 4 vertebrate animals per year and have contributed to the endangerment of some species, most notably the Florida panther, 65% of whose documented deaths have been at the hands of motorists travelling through the Ocala National Forest. In Pennsylvania alone in 1985, 26,180 deer and 90 bears were slaughtered by automobiles. 20 In the Mikumi National Park in Tanzania, more animals, including baboons, wildebeest, zebras, antelopes, jackals, and even elephants, have been killed by cars than by poachers since the1991 road improvements increased the maximum speed from 20 m.p.h. to 60 m.p.h. 21
Some species are attracted to roads, while others are averted, both of which have disastrous implications for the animals forced to deal with the intrusion. Animals averted to roads run the risk of genetic deterioration due to inbreeding. This is created by the fragmentation of their populations, hemmed in by roads on all sides. This also affects the healthy migration of animals, and forces them to stay in unnatural climates. The noises due to road construction and the resulting traffic can alter an animal's pattern of activity, and raises their stress levels. This is especially true of birds who rely heavily on auditory signals.
Exacerbating the quantity of roadkill is the unfortunate fact that many animals are attracted to the typography of a road. The dense vegetation at road side attracts grazing deer and a multitude of rodents. The proliferation of rodents, along with previously killed animals attracts scavengers such as coyote and racoon, who in turn are often struck by cars. Other large mammals also come to the roadway to innocently use it as a travel corridor. The proximity of the large mammals attracts curious and naive onlookers who frequently harass the animals or try to feed them human food. Wild animals also come to the road to eat de-icing salts in the winter season, increasing the potential of a collision, but also poisoning the animal due to the sodium and calcium chlorides present in the salt. 20
Another way in which automobile ownership and use is detrimental to the environment is the vast quantities of natural resources required to sustain a transportation mode. Besides the seemingly infinite amalgam of wood, gravel, asphalt, and steel used to build and maintain the Earth's roads and highways, the world's 400 million cars requires excessive amounts of resources and energy to create. In a culture less reliant on automobiles, the inner city street's ubiquitous abandoned car, the monumentalized pile of worn tires, or the junkyard cache of flattened cars would be greatly lessened.
Although most cars can last much longer, many are passed on after only a few years. This keeps car companies profits rolling in. Complicit designers are all too happy to continually churn out the latest models with improved aerodynamics, racier colors, and the newest gizmos of convenience. In 1955, Harvey Earl, the head of the GM styling division said, "Our biggest job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934, the average car ownership span was five years; now it is two years. When it is one year, we will have a perfect score."
The environmental problem most apparent to the public is air pollution. Within urban areas, cars are the single largest source of air pollution, and create 13% of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, 28% of Chlorofluorocarbons, and between 30-40% of nitrogen oxides, the primary chemical responsible for acid rain, according to the Marland Energy Magazine in 1983. The E.P.A. reports that automobile air conditioners are the single largest source of ozone depleting chemical. Despite the fact that these days cars produce 1/2 as much carbon monoxide as they did twenty years ago, this has only had beneficial results within the purlieus of urban smog quantity. At the same time, the amount of carbon dioxide released from cars is the same and will always be the same, for it is the inevitable byproduct of fossil fuel consumption. The invisible and odorless CO2 cannot be reduced no matter the filter or cat. converter on the newest, most aerodynamic car, and it is this insidious CO2 gas which is contributing greatly to the greenhouse effect. 22 Despite the fact that presently cars produce 1/2 as much carbon monoxide as they did twenty years ago, this has only had beneficial results within the confines of urban smog quantity. At the same time, the amount of carbon dioxide released from cars is the same and will always be the same, for it is the inevitable byproduct of fossil fuel consumption. The invisible and odorless CO2 cannot be reduced no matter the filter or cat. converter on the newest, most aerodynamic car, and it is this insidious CO2 gas which is contributing greatly to the greenhouse effect. 22
Air pollution also accelerates the deterioration of a city's infrastructure and buildings, especially those of historic value. Buildings in many cities have been severely discolored due to polluted air, and those lying on busy streets and thoroughfares need facade renovation much more frequently than those on calmer streets. Some structures even experience structural damage due to heavy, rumbling trucks. Cleopatra's Needle, an Egyptian obelisk in New York's Central Park, a weekday speedway, has degenerated more in the 35 years since its been in Manhattan, than in the previous 3500 years in the harsh desert climate of Egypt.
It is the profligate use of oil, in many ways, that may contain the most ecological destructive component of all: the ubiquitous oil spill. Ubiquitous in a sense that the Exxon Valdez disaster was not an anomaly; spills of that magnitude occur quite often, and have disastrous implications on the ecology of the world's oceans. Greenpeace estimates that one billion gallons of oil are directly spilled into the oceans every year. Valdez was only the 14th largest spill in history, but, because most others occurred off shore and did not directly reach a populated land mass, their was a dearth of media coverage. Accidental spills only represent 17% of the total oil which enters the marine environment. The rest, enters the oceans via the routine flushing of carrier tanks, and the daily byproducts of the petroleum industry. Another 50 million gallons of gallons of petroleum seeps into the world's fresh water supply through the daily run-off from roads and do-it-yourself mechanics. 23 Although the estimation of the total death of sea creatures and birds due to oil spillage is incalculable, the toll from the Alaska Valdez incident, according to Greenpeace, led to the deaths of 5000 otters, 200 harbor seals, and perhaps 1/2 a million birds.
The demand for petroleum constantly pressures the oil industry to search for oil in more and more remote places. The oil companies' thirst for profit leaves them with no concern for the consequences of their actions. They would drill in the Grand Canyon or sink a derelict oil platform in a whale sanctuary if they thought they could get away with it. Their powerful lobbyists are constantly persuading the U.S. and other governments to open up fragile wilderness and marine habitats for oil exploration, whether it be in a tropical rainforest, a spectacular mountain range, or the Arctic tundra. When habitats are opened up for exploration, great damage is done even if oil is not found in sufficient quantities to warrant refining. Seismic studies destroy habitat and terrify wildlife, and the myriad of abandoned roads are often subsequently used by logging companies to get to areas that were initially off limits to them. The predicament can only get worse, for as Asia, especially China, developes its system of roads and opens its markets, the numbers of cars are expected to double globally by 2010.
The ultimate fallacy of an economy and lifestyle dependent upon cheap and plentiful oil is that it is not sustainable. According to the Hubbert Curve on oil production, an industry forecasting standard, the world is expected to run out of its oil by 2040, at the present rate of use. Petroleum depletion could be mitigated if motorists would pay for the true costs of driving, thus making alternatives, such as trains and bicycles, more attractive. Higher taxes must be levied upon gas, registration, and new car purchases, and tolls need to be increased, especially for solitary commuters. This would not only offset the many subsidized costs of auto transit, but would also create capital for rail improvements. The discouragement of automobile use must begin today, or we run the risk of being unprepared when the pumps run dry and "carmaggedon" day is upon us.
Conclusion
Many of humanity's most pressing problems such as deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, the dwindling of native cultures, global warming, the loss of communties, and water pollution, can be traced to the overuse of automobiles, and unchecked suburban development. Cars are here to stay and they certainly have their uses, but, too many people have deemed these uses to mean every single trip, whether one mile or one hundred miles. We have been brainwashed into demanding a table in the non-smoking section of a restaurant and then, after the meal, either driving home, or walking along noisy, chaotic, and polluted streets. The daily bombardment of automobile images and our government's obstinate attitude towards alternatives has allowed us to accept the auto-dominated landscape that surrounds us all. Until this type of behavior is curbed, our decadent lifestyle will continue to decimate communities and cities, and precipitate the ongoing destruction of the natural world. ||| [part 1] ||| [part 2] ||| [part 3] ||| References
18. "Rethinking the role of the Automobile", Michael Renner, Worldwatch Report #84, 6/88.
19. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
20. "The Ecological Effects of Roads", Reed Noss, Wild Earth Magazine
21. "Eco-mole", Carlos Drew, Earth Island Institute Journal, Spring 1995.
22. "Not So Fast", Bill Mckibben, New York Times Magazine, 7/23/95.
23. "Oil in the Sea: Inputs, Fates, and Effects", National Academy Press, 1985
||| Car culture and the landscape of subtraction |||
Philip Goff
||| [part 1] ||| [part 2] ||| [part 3] |||
The hit foreign film of the late 1980's, Cinema Paradiso, provides a marvelous metaphor for our current international predicament. The movie wonderfully demonstrates how our collective obsession with automobiles has savaged our cities and diminished our sense of place and community. The central character within the movie is the "Paradiso" cinema, located on a generous piazza in a small town in Sicily. The movie house, along with the church, provide, not only the dominant architectural features of the piazza, but also provide the heart and soul, respectively, of the community. The piazza of 1954 existed as the hierarchical gathering space for the town, with its open market, cultural festivals, and even an outdoor movie screening space. In the movie, people continually traverse the space by foot, bicycle, and horse-drawn cart. Upon the protagonists return to the town in the 1980's, the once glorious urban space had been usurped by modern progress. Pedestrians are scarce as cars speed across the piazza dodging the multitude of parked vehicles. The former projectionist, turned famous movie director, appears devastated to see the "Paradiso" condemned for demolition, only to be replaced with a parking lot. In the final scene, we see the theater blasted to smithereens in the background, the weeping nostalgic crowds in the middle ground, and, in the foreground, the rooftops of Fiats and Volkswagons.
Although the film ostensibly presents a general critique of modern industrial society, in the forefront is the burgeoning obsession with the machina. The Sicilian town's identity and sense of community was lost with the compromise of the piazza.. Crucial public space had been handed over, free of charge, to the priviledged few who could afford an automobile. Unfortunately, this is the typical state of affairs in America's cities. This (de)evolution in transportation was not a natural progression. The rise of the automobile's popularity was greatly encouraged by obstinate politicians and profit-motivated corporations. Additionally, the complicity of modernist urban planners and architects, dehumanized traffic engineers, and demagogue developers cannot be ignored. Their collective post-war creation has left us with a mountain of debt, a sprawling suburban ooze, polluted and crumbling inner cities, and a landscape devoid of farmland and forests. All in all, ours is the landscape of subtraction. Cars have contributed nothing to our urban condition, our communities, and our environment. They have only taken away. What started out as a promise for a better life based on unlimited mobility, has become a modern day obsession, as solitary commuters idle in endless traffic jams wondering where all of the cars came from.
Indoctrinating the compromise of public space
Owning and driving an automobile has become a prerequisite for conformity in our popular culture. To not drive in America is seen as aberrant behavior. Using mass transit is for people too poor to own an automobile, or for big city dwellers who deem the auto commute inefficient. Riding a bicycle is seen as either a recreational act, or only as a method for children and pre-teens to get around. Walking on a country road or a suburban strip, where seldom doth a sidewalk appear, immediately elicits suspicion. Surely only a lunatic or a criminal would do such a thing. In the land of apple pie, every "normal" citizen gets around by car. After World War II, buying a suburban bungalow was even considered a patriotic act. William Levitt, the Long Island developer for whom Levittown was named said, "The suburban homeowner could never be a communist . . . He has too much to do!" The aphorisms, "no one messes with a man's set of wheels", or "what's good for GM is good for America" has incredible power in our culture.
The indoctrination into our auto-dominated culture begins at very early age. Children play with toy cars and trucks. They build miniature suburbs with Tonka trucks and cranes. Every Barbie doll or G.I. Joe figurine needs the accompanying vehicle to be a complete set. Many children's toy vehicles are ornamented to appear like cars, even though mechanically, they are similar to bicycles. Many young boys build miniature race tracks of plastic, emulating the stock-car racers seen on T.V. By the time these children become teenagers, they will have their sights set on that 16th birthday with the driver's license soon to follow. Who can blame them? With many living in suburbs spread so thinly, bicycle trips become impractical, and mass transit is non-existent. Those priviledged enough, will receive a car from their parents as a gift. Most others though, will need to work to support their new, used cars. Surely, some will argue that they need a car to get to work... so that they can have money in order to maintain their cars... so that they can get to work...etc.
From there, one's adult life becomes a constant barrage of images to reinforce the "normalcy" of car ownership and use. Psychological reinforcement comes heavily from our media sources. One third of all T.V. advertisements are for automobiles and a great deal of newspaper space, including the weekly "automotive section", is appropriated to present images, statistics, and commentary based on cars. This prohibits a reasonable debate on our collective auto obsession, since the media's finances are so tied in with the auto industry. The government, too, is saturated with lobbyists representing the interests of the auto, oil, tire, and road construction industries, thus prohibiting major promulgation of alternative transportation funding. Subtle apparitions also occur in other ways, e.g. the glorification of winning a "new car" as the top prize in a T.V. game show or at the New York Marathon, auto company sponsorship of bicycle races, etc.
While the media continue to glorify accidents involving airplanes, trains, subways or buses, over 40,000 people a year - a Vietnam War total -die in car accidents. 1 According to the U.S. National Safety Council, the death rate per mile travelled in a car is 18 times greater than in a train and 97 times greater than in a bus. 2 This does not include pedestrians; in New York City alone, 283 pedestrians were killed and 15,600 were injured by motorists in 1993. 3 Within the developing world's chaotic mix of motorized and non-motorized vehicles, the driver and pedestrian fatality rate is close to 20 times greater than in the United States. 4 Car use also adversely affects human health by promoting a more sedentary lifestyle than, say, someone who gets around by bicycle. The ethos of the car oriented suburbs, says the social critic Lewis Mumford, "creates an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before the television set." Urban commuters who drive to and from work increase their levels of stress and hypertension, as they long to escape traffic and arrive at work or at home. Being stuck in traffic will subsequently affect worker's morale and productivity, and, along with delayed delivery of goods, costs the American economy $100 billion a year, according to the General Accounting Office. 5
The subsidizing of the American motorist
The promotion of car culture is clearly evident in the massive subsidies bestowed upon motorists to enable them to drive almost anywhere as cheaply and efficiently as possible. The true costs of driving an automobile are obfuscated, for their disclosure would certainly reduce auto use and make alternative means more attractive. This would not be compatible with the interests of the oil, car, road construction, or development industries, all of whom contribute heavily to politicians on the local and national levels.
Ample cheap and free parking is a significant way in which motorists are subsidized. Real estate values in urban areas are costly, yet motorist are allowed to use up to 100 square feet of public space for the storage of their vehicles. What reserves the side of the street to be used for the sole purpose of parking cars? Could one use the space for storage instead? To put a trampoline, maybe? Could one open up a futon in a parking space and sleep overnight? What privileges car owners to eat up such valuable urban space, when others pay hundreds of dollars for apartments hardly bigger than a parking space?
The allotment of public space is just one of the many ways in which motorists are heavily subsidized in our country. Charlie Komanoff, an energy consultant in New York, calculates a total subsidy of $700 billion per year, averaging out to about $5.50 per gallon, through the federal and state government levels. He estimates that this is roughly equivalent to what the individual motorist pays for upkeep, fuel, insurance, taxes, etc. Therefore, he reasons, driving in the U.S. is done at half price. The other half is provided for by the taxpayer. This puts those who do not drive: the elderly, poor people, or those who choose not to, at a severe financial disadvantage.
According to the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, taxes from gas, new car purchases, and registration, cover only 2/3 of the costs of building and maintaining highways and roads. 6 The remaining costs arrive via the general tax fund. To cover the myriad of costs associated with driving, gas would have to be between $3-$4 per gallon. 7 This is closer to the rate found in European countries, where gas tax is 5x greater than in the U.S. (Additionally, taxes on new car purchases overseas are close to 50% of the cost, where here, the rate is 5-10% of the total cost of the new car.) Considering the uproar over President Clinton's 1993 request for a 10 cent increase in gas taxes, it is easy to see why hidden subsidies need to replace a system of direct taxation.
The primary cost of a car dependant transportation system is the construction and maintenance of highways, roads, and bridges, to the tune of $200 million a day. 8 However, there are many other ways in which motorists are getting a "free ride". A significant portion of our security forces are utilized in automobile related issues: accidents, thefts, traffic control, and parking enforcement. These police officers could be much better utilized going after true criminals, rather than waving rush-hour traffic along, or investigating a minor traffic accident. Many of these accidents expound yet another burden on the taxpayer by disabling expensive pieces of public infrastructure. Destroyed fire hydrants, light poles, mailboxes, street signs, guardrails, planters, etc. become financial burdens that would be mitigated in a society less reliant on automobiles for transportation. Besides municipal police, State Police units are an enormous public expense, and apprehending highway speeders seems to be their raison d'etre.
Additionally, a large portion of health care costs are related to car accidents. Oil and car companies get large public subsidies, ranging from tax breaks to oil exploration permits on public lands. Employers are allowed to deduct from their taxes the expense of providing parking for their workers, and receive tax benefits for providing company cars. They are more strictly limited when it comes to tax incentives for mass transit or bicycle use. 9 The environmental damage due to car use: dirty air, dirty water, deforestation, etc., is impossible to calculate, but certainly not insignificant.
Perhaps the most expensive endowment of all, lies within the tangled fabric of our foreign policy. Every year, we spend billions of dollars to protect our oil tankers travelling through the Persian Gulf, as well troops for foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia. We even went to war to preserve our "right" to drive wherever, and whenever, we saw fit. This prompted Senator Bob Dole to say: "We are there for 3 letters: O-I-L. That is why we are in the Gulf. We are not there to save democracy. Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, and neither is Kuwait." Meanwhile, if we had continued conserving oil after 1985 at the same rate as before, we would have eliminated the need for any oil from the gulf. 10 The industrialized world's thirst for oil has allowed it to become pawns in international politics by their intense reliance on petroleum. This dependence plays right into the hands of dictators like Saddam Hussein, who know exactly how to provoke our enmity.
The great suburban build out
Government and corporate encouragement of car use, and suburban sprawl as a support structure for our fallacious economic "growth" is nothing new. It began in earnest in 1936 with the creation of the National City Lines Company, a corporate front group representing General Motors, Standard Oil, Firestone Tire, and Mack Trucks. For the next 15 years, this powerful company bought out 45 street car and trolley systems throughout the country. By the 1950's, all 45 transit systems were completely dismantled, opening the way for private car use and increased bus service, a demand that GM was all too happy to supply. This was the sad fate of public transportation in Los Angeles, a system nearly as extensive as New York's. Eventually, National City Lines was found guilty of criminal antitrust violations, but the verdict was moot, for the great suburban build out was in full throttle.
Meanwhile, in the 1930's, Roosevelt's Federal Housing Authority (FHA) was created to put the post-depression construction industry back on its feet, and to improve the housing stock for Americans. The FHA subsidized banks through the federal treasury, and therefore allowed for reduced downpayments, and extended mortgages. Unfortunately, the FHA did not guarantee new loans for those who wanted to build or renovate in the inner cities. Maybe this should come as no surprise considering that one its commissioners happened to be on the Board of Directors of the Standard Oil Company. After WWII, the government allowed the millions of returning G.I.'s to own homes without any necessary downpayment, and mortgage interests were made tax deductible. Thus ownership was made less expensive than renting, and with the planned system of new highways, white veterans flocked to the burgeoning suburbs.
As farmland and forests were being paved over with housing developments in the 1950's, the county and state road systems were becoming overburdened. Our economy demanded more growth, and the Federal Government began the largest public works project in our history, the Interstate Highway System. President Eisenhower began funding the highways after a hearty recommendation by his self appointed commission, chaired by Lucius D. Clay, on the Board of Directors of General Motors. 41,000 miles of new expressways spread over the country like a complex of veins and arteries. 11 Apologists for the vast new highway system insisted that they would quicken urban evacuation in the case of a Soviet nuclear attack, and, that they would provide enormous expanses of pavement and concrete to act as firebreaks, allowing sectors to remain unscathed.
Many companies had enormous profits to make through suburban expansion. The obvious beneficiaries were the oil and car companies, but many others which produced appliances, lawn mowers, lawn care products, etc. stood to cash in also. A major player was General Electric, who realized that every new home was certain to need a new washer and dryer, refrigerator, stove, blender, and other convenience items. GE knew that their fortunes lay within the increased unpopularity of urban apartment living. To encourage this, they sponsored many exhibitions and architectural competitions to glorify the modern suburban house. Famous architects normally won the competitions, bringing with them the legitimacy, and press coverage, of the single family suburban home.
While large sums of money funded the creation of highways and airports, rail improvements were all but forgotten. Sustainable, non-polluting alternatives have never been encouraged by our government except in emergency situations such as oil embargoes. The sprawling suburbs came to a crawl after the 1973 oil embargo, and subsequently President Carter sought alternative energy sources and decreased automobile reliance. After the election of Ronald Reagan, the oil cartel weakened, Iran and Iraq were soon to be engaged in a long and brutal war, and the oil market was flooded. With cheap gas, bank deregulation, and Reagan's tax policies, suburban development and car-use went back into high gear throughout the 1980's. During this time period, Federal funding for highways nearly doubled while the funding for mass transit was actually reduced by 10%. 12 In 1994, $20.3 billion was assigned to roads and highways while only $1 billion was allocated for rail improvements. 13
Continued
||| [part 1] ||| [part 2] ||| [part 3] ||| References
1. "Mobilopathy", Ralph Slovenko, Journal of Psychiatric Law, Summer 1984.
2. "Accident Facts", National Safety Council, 1993.
3. New York City Dept. of Transportation Safety Division.
4. "Rethinking the role of the Automobile", Michael Renner, Worldwatch Report #84, 6/88.
5. "Smart Highways: An Assessment of their potential to Improve Travel", U. S. General Accounting Office, 1991.
6. "Highway Statistics", U.S. Federal Highway Administration, 1992.
7. "The Real Cost of Energy", Harold M. Hubbard, Scientific American, 4/91.
8. A.P.M. Newsletter, 8/93.
9. "Cars are Evil: Automobiles and the Environment", Stefanie Pollack, Conservation Law Foundation, 7/90.
10. Rocky Mt. Institute, Amory Lovins, at the First International Conference on Auto-Free Cities, New York, 1991.
11. The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler, 1993, p.106-107.
12. "Acting in the National Interest: the Transportation Agenda", the Surface Transportation Policy Project.
13. National Association of Railroad Passengers, 2/94.
A critique of suburban culture
It was the promise of open space which initially lead many people to the suburban frontier. Paradoxically, suburbs have been allowed to sprawl unchecked for so long that very little of this open space or nature exists anymore. People are now either moving back into the city, or moving further and further into exurbia. The pace of this exodus has been exascerbated by advances in computers and the burgeoning "information superhighway". Advances in high technology have rendered the proximity to the city as insignificant for some, and has allowed them to create home offices on the fringes of the wilderness. These "pioneers" are increasing the extirpation of forests and farmland by building structures and roads into areas where none belong.
Where half a century ago, most people lived in a city or a rural location, the post-war blossoming of our car culture has allowed the typical American to now live in a suburban housing development. Ostensibly designed to preserve open space, these communities lack public open space and, due to dysfunctional zoning regulations, are spread so thinly that public transportation becomes ellusive. Therefore, a car trip is the required method of transportation for every task; it is no wonder that the average American motorist drives 10,000 miles a year. 14
The need to drive everywhere increases social fragmentation and is most detrimental to those who cannot drive: the elderly, the sick, children, and the poor, all of whom become completely dependant on the car driver for mobility. Ironically, many families initially relocate to suburbs for the "good" of their children, yet their children are stuck in virtual isolation and dependence, for their communities are designed not for them, but instead for cars. Thus, they spend a great deal of their time in front of the television for this becomes the prime atraction in many suburbs whose landscape is defined by housing developments, parking lots, fast food joints, and expressway off-ramps. The suburban landscape that most politicians would proudly call "growth", has greatly contributed to the deterioration of community and culture, for community has been substituted with shopping malls, and culture has been replaced by television.
Much of the reason why suburbs look the way they do is because of zoning laws. Drafted by planning boards often representing development and business interests, many of the codes are provided for the convenience of automobiles as if they were the dominant life form on the planet. The main premise behind our current zoning codes is the complete and distanced seperation of homes and jobs, as if we still inhabited cities of smokestacked factories and revolting slaughterhouses. With segregation rather than mixed-use, the ability to perform daily errands or go to work becomes impossible by walking or biking, and with poor mass transit, a motor vehicle becomes a necessity. Additionally, it creates the dysfunctional hierarchy of the commercial strip, the destination for so many who simply need a soda or a newspaper. Corner stores are not allowed in most suburban residential neighborhoods, nor are apartments allowed above shops and restaurants, denying mixed use buildings, and keeping density at a minimum.
Zoning laws regarding street design contribute to the lack of community in most suburbs. These laws deny enclosure, so necessary in making quality street spaces. The comforting feeling of enclosure is what makes 19th century brownstone-lined streets so charming. Compare a street in old-world Brooklyn or Boston to one that has a wide paved surface, no sidewalk, facades comprised of garages, and houses setback from the street and spaced at large intervals. Requirements for wide streets make speeds in excess of 35 m.p.h. possible, and, street trees and sharp curves are heartily discouraged for fear of prompting traffic accidents. Towering alien-like street lamps block out the stars and exist so that late night motorist can negociate the street at higher speeds. All told, suburban zoning laws mandate an environment designed for automobile driving, and with zero regard for the public realm. 15
On the commercial boulevards, zoning requires that buildings be set back certain distances and provide vast parking lots. The amalgamation of these structures resembles a gridded archipelago within a vast sea of pavement. Architecturally, these areas are as cheaply constructed as they are unsightly, and many design elements are at a scale not commiserate to pedestrians. The attempt to lure motorists comes to its utter perversion as gas stations and restaurants float their signs hundreds of feet in the air, begging for the attention of the speeding motorist. The suburban strip has also created its own building and spacial typologies: the drive-in restaurant, enormous billboards, car washes, gas stations, drive-in movie theaters, and of course, the ubiqutous used car lot.
Car culture's invasion of the metropolis
The automobile's infusion into our cities has had a major impact on urban architecture likewise. Car culture has created the "architecture of subtraction", as pieces and parts of towns and cities have been eviscerated to make room for automobiles. This has excised portions of urban fabric, taking away street definition, so important in civic space making. Buildings and entire blocks have been removed to make parking lots. Gas stations become instant eyesores, and usurp large areas of space potentially used for public plazas, parks, or buildings. Both take away from the pedestrian experience of movement through a city, and abate the visual and cultural stimulation. Instead of strolling along a well defined street with interesting shop display windows and greenery, a bleak landscape of cars is considered.
Never before has an invention that so many people consider a necessity taken up so much space. In older cities such as Boston or New York, close to 1/2 of the ground space is reserved for the sole purpose of moving and storing cars, and in newer cities such as Los Angeles or Pheonix, it is closer to 2/3. 16 These inequities become quite obvious by simply walking the streets of Manhattan, for example. The distrubution of pedestrian space compared to automobile space is heavily weighed towards the motorist, even in midtown Manhattan, where millions work, or Greenwich Village where thousands socialize. Hundreds of people can be jammed onto narrow sidewalks, while cars stream by on four and five lane avenues. In the battle for urban turf, the clear winner is the automobile.
Few civic interventions compare to the destruction wrought by urban expressways, which functionally, have done nothing that commuter rail lines couldn't do. From the beginning, expressways were ostensibly built to bring commuters into the city more easily, but, what they have really done is to drain the city of its middle class by providing a very compelling reason to leave. As highways plowed through cities in the 1950's and 1960's, dense urban neighborhoods of different ethnicities were removed and highrise housing projects took their place. The government, sensing the surge in black migration north, built these projects to house them and simultaneously provided urban highways to allow the white middle class to escape, encouraging segregation. Highways were not so much built to ameliorate traffic congestion, instead they created traffic congestion by decentralizing urban areas.
Urban expressways fracture neighborhoods and are accompanied by a host of subsequent urban predicaments. Besides the introduction of air and noise pollution, the highways are like stakes driven through the hearts of intact neighborhoods. Geographically, they are often constructed along natural boundaries and edges resulting in the seperation of the urban realm from rivers, lakes, bays, and oceans. Not only does this deny the heritage of a city, whos economy may have been based on a local body of water, but it also prohibits public access to natural open spaces. Highways built above grade are like massive fortress walls of noise and smog, and built below grade they resemble moats, often with infrequent overpasses to further divide the community. From an economic point of view, they are quite detrimental, for the dense urban fabric cleared for the widened road subtracts formerly taxable land. The maligning effects of the highway reverberate from block to block, and quickly property values plummet, and a once middle class neighborhood turns to squalor as residents flee to the suburbs on the very highway that destroyed their neighborhoods. The void is soon filled with the economically disadvantaged immigrants, and the municipality, loathing the loss of property taxes, allows the area to crumble. This scenario has played a major role in the disintegration of many of America's cities from Los Angeles, to Detroit, to the South Bronx.
Culturally, the ubiquity of cars has had the largest impact on our street culture, the common bond of communities. The "public space" of the urban and suburban street has, for the most part, been compromised for the singular purpose of moving and storing automobiles. This relinquishes public space to the favored car owners of our society. Street space incubates social interactions, and these become much more difficult when streets are filled with noisy, polluting, and speeding motor vehicles. According to the late architectural historian Spiro Kostoff, "the street stands as the burial place of a chance to learn from one another, the burial place of unrehearsed excitement, of the cumulative knowledge of human ways. We lose this because we would rather keep to ourselves, avoid social tension by escaping it, schedule encounters with friends, and happily travel alone in climate controlled and music injected glossy metal boxes." 17
In some large cities, streets have become so chaotic and polluted that separate planes of pedestrian movement have developed. Rather than confronting the real epidemic, cities and private sources have built extensive systems of bridges and underground concourses, keeping the public off of the ground plane, where social intercourse traditionally occurred. These ersatz public spaces fail to bring together urban society in all of its diversity. The quasi-public nature of the bridges and concourses are undemocratic, in that they allow the often private controlling body to eliminate certain undesirable elements, such as the homeless or demonstrations.
Sadly, many have forgotten or may never know the true vitality of an authentic street culture. Disneyland's Main Street or the local mall will never be appropriate substitutes. Instead, much of the built landscape is a pathetic malaise of squalor and dysfunctional planning, yet most of us feel that it was an organic process that could not be ameliorated.
Car cultures affect on crime in this country cannot be ignored. Auto usage results directly in many violent crimes such as car jackings and drive-by shootings, and is often an integral part of much gang activity and violence. Interestingly, it is in large cities that rely most heavily on automobile transportation where major gang problems are most prevalent. Compare gang activity in Los Angeles to New York's, for example. Many criminals rely on a getaway car, for the multitude of roads and expressways provide a convenient means of escape. The ubiquity of roads make it easy to buy drugs, pick up a prostitute, rob a store, or blow up an office building. These criminal acts become more difficult in a society whose transportation needs are met with mass transit and bicycles.
The issue of access to terrorism has finally met the attention of our federal government. After months of deliberation President Clinton ordered the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue, just weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing. Although the three block stretch of road has been reclaimed as public space, filled with hundreds of tourists and roller skaters, the need to "apologize" was still pervasive. Quoted in The New York Times, the President said that the street closing was "seen as a responsible security step necessary to preserve our freedom, not part of a long term restriction of our freedom." To equate automobile access of a section of street with freedom is absolutely ludicrious, but, in a car dominant society, many motorists feel that they have the "right" to drive anywhere, whether that be deep into a National Park, or directly in front of the White House. Maybe the President's attitude comes as no surprise to those who remember his valiant appeals to the American psyche by declaring, after the 1993 Los Angeles earthquake, that, "freeway reconstruction will be the most urgent need."
Some cities are finally coming to terms with the cars-and-crime reality, and have begun programs to limit automobiles in neighborhoods vulnerable to lawbreaking. In Dayton, Ohio, the mixed income racially diverse neighborhood of 5 Oaks recently gated its through streets, allowing access only to residents' automobiles, and foot and bicycle traffic. According to The New York Times, overall crime went down by 25% after the change and violent crime was reduced by 50%. Additionally, neighborhoods in Coconut Grove, Florida, Austin, Texas, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Los Angeles, have all had success with physical prohibition of thru-traffic. These neighborhoods have experience rebirth as drug dealing and prostitution have been severely limited, although critics say that the deviant behavior has simply moved elsewhere. Nonetheless, these examples show the potential of retaking public space away from the influx of automobiles and returning it to the community.
Based upon car culture's incorrigible impact on North America, one shudders to think of this becoming an international precedent. Sadly, it is already happening. Since the collapse of the Soviet monolith and the opening of the Far-Eastern markets, multi-national auto makers and oil companies have been drooling over their prospects. According to The New York Times, Hungary and Poland already have 50% more cars than before the end of the cold-war, and government support for mass transit has waned. The Chinese government, while vigorously pushing to modernize their country, have begun enormous road building projects, hoping to encourage tens of millions to buy cars. Like post-war America, China seems to be blinded by the fallacious aura surrounding the automobile, and have failed to consider the consequences. Recently,The Beijing Review stated in the purest of Orwellian doublespeak, that, "vigorous development of private cars will effectively help ease the strain on urban traffic…as the replacement of bicycles with cars will enable Chineese cities to realize traffic modernization." Perhaps Chinese officials should try driving an L.A. freeway at rushhour, or biking up 6th Avenue in Manhattan before they make such hasty decisions for their country.
Continued
||| [part 1] ||| [part 2] ||| [part 3] ||| References
14. International Road Federation, U.N. Economic Committee for Europe
15. The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler, 1993, p.113-118.
16. "Automobile Index", Conservation Law Index of New England
17. The City Assembled, Spiro Kostov, 1992, p.243
The destruction of farmland, forests and wildlife
The constantly expanding suburban malaise is inexoribly connected with cheap gas, the lack of mass transit, and an obdurate government nearly bought and paid for by lobbyists from the development, oil, automobile, and paving industries. The natural desire to live "out in the country" brings meddlesome human beings closer and closer to our dwindling wildlands. In the last forty years, we have destroyed more land than in the 300 years before, this is due not so much to population growth, but to the natural properties of car culture. The environmental damage has been unprecedented: the dwindling quality of the air and water, the loss of natural resources, and the destruction of farmland, forests, and wildlife. The omeba-like suburbs, left unchecked, will sprawl further into the deserts of the Southwest, the forests of Pacific Northwest, the mountains of Colorado, the farmlands of the midwest, and the last few remaining wild places in the Northeast.
From the perspective of the use of natural resources, the automobile oriented suburbs are perniciously inefficient. Consider the environment impact of a car-oriented suburban style community of 500 households, and an urban community for the same 500 households. The land use requirements for the former are enormous as each house occupies a 1/4 or 1/2 acre lot and is connected by wide roads. The 500 individual homes require vast amounts of materials to build and must be connected by a myriad of power, water, and sewer lines, putting a strain on our dwindling natural resources. Although urban communities are not perfect, they have a much lower ecological impact considering their compact land use, efficiency of materials and infrastructure, and maintained distance from wilderness and wildlife. Additionally, each house in the suburban community becomes but an island within the paradigmatic lush green lawn. Forget the fact that grass is not native to many areas of our country, every homeowner demands one, whether living in lush New England, or the Arizona desert. American lawns total 20 million acres, quadruple the size of Washington state, and require enormous amounts of water and chemicals to keep green. Lawns and their required mowers have become totems of our fetishism with grass, resulting in polluted water tables, noisy neighborhoods, and vast amounts of ecologically useless land.
The common piece of infrastructure that is necessary for all suburban and exurban developments is the paved road. Every square foot of pavement represents an ecological dead zone, a completely sterilized environment that allows the runoff of oil, antifreeze, and brake fluids into the water table. When a road is built in a remote area close to wilderness, it not only brings polluting and dangerous cars, but also brings with it the constant pressure of continued development. The close proximity to nature brings in items not native to a bioregion such as noise, garbage, dogs, vehicles, and guns. Roads also allow the hordes of hunters, poachers, and trappers to drive into remote areas to exterminate wildlife.
The recent rise in popularity of campers and four wheel drive vehicles have accelerated the complete commodification of the natural world. Now we can all have a packaged environment, seen from the safety of mobile fortresses as if the planet were one big theme park. Television advertisements convince viewers that the appropriate 4-wheel drive vehicle will allow them to cross rivers, blaze through forests, and drive to remote mountain vista points. Car culture has clearly brought too many people to places that they do not necessarily belong.
A great tragedy is the quantity of wild animals that are struck and killed every year by speeding automobiles. More than half a billion animals, including 1/4 of a million people, are killed every year on the planet's roads and highways. 18 This is 10 times more creatures killed by cars than by the American pork industry, for comparison. 19 The average American's car kills 3 to 4 vertebrate animals per year and have contributed to the endangerment of some species, most notably the Florida panther, 65% of whose documented deaths have been at the hands of motorists travelling through the Ocala National Forest. In Pennsylvania alone in 1985, 26,180 deer and 90 bears were slaughtered by automobiles. 20 In the Mikumi National Park in Tanzania, more animals, including baboons, wildebeest, zebras, antelopes, jackals, and even elephants, have been killed by cars than by poachers since the1991 road improvements increased the maximum speed from 20 m.p.h. to 60 m.p.h. 21
Some species are attracted to roads, while others are averted, both of which have disastrous implications for the animals forced to deal with the intrusion. Animals averted to roads run the risk of genetic deterioration due to inbreeding. This is created by the fragmentation of their populations, hemmed in by roads on all sides. This also affects the healthy migration of animals, and forces them to stay in unnatural climates. The noises due to road construction and the resulting traffic can alter an animal's pattern of activity, and raises their stress levels. This is especially true of birds who rely heavily on auditory signals.
Exacerbating the quantity of roadkill is the unfortunate fact that many animals are attracted to the typography of a road. The dense vegetation at road side attracts grazing deer and a multitude of rodents. The proliferation of rodents, along with previously killed animals attracts scavengers such as coyote and racoon, who in turn are often struck by cars. Other large mammals also come to the roadway to innocently use it as a travel corridor. The proximity of the large mammals attracts curious and naive onlookers who frequently harass the animals or try to feed them human food. Wild animals also come to the road to eat de-icing salts in the winter season, increasing the potential of a collision, but also poisoning the animal due to the sodium and calcium chlorides present in the salt. 20
Another way in which automobile ownership and use is detrimental to the environment is the vast quantities of natural resources required to sustain a transportation mode. Besides the seemingly infinite amalgam of wood, gravel, asphalt, and steel used to build and maintain the Earth's roads and highways, the world's 400 million cars requires excessive amounts of resources and energy to create. In a culture less reliant on automobiles, the inner city street's ubiquitous abandoned car, the monumentalized pile of worn tires, or the junkyard cache of flattened cars would be greatly lessened.
Although most cars can last much longer, many are passed on after only a few years. This keeps car companies profits rolling in. Complicit designers are all too happy to continually churn out the latest models with improved aerodynamics, racier colors, and the newest gizmos of convenience. In 1955, Harvey Earl, the head of the GM styling division said, "Our biggest job is to hasten obsolescence. In 1934, the average car ownership span was five years; now it is two years. When it is one year, we will have a perfect score."
The environmental problem most apparent to the public is air pollution. Within urban areas, cars are the single largest source of air pollution, and create 13% of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, 28% of Chlorofluorocarbons, and between 30-40% of nitrogen oxides, the primary chemical responsible for acid rain, according to the Marland Energy Magazine in 1983. The E.P.A. reports that automobile air conditioners are the single largest source of ozone depleting chemical. Despite the fact that these days cars produce 1/2 as much carbon monoxide as they did twenty years ago, this has only had beneficial results within the purlieus of urban smog quantity. At the same time, the amount of carbon dioxide released from cars is the same and will always be the same, for it is the inevitable byproduct of fossil fuel consumption. The invisible and odorless CO2 cannot be reduced no matter the filter or cat. converter on the newest, most aerodynamic car, and it is this insidious CO2 gas which is contributing greatly to the greenhouse effect. 22 Despite the fact that presently cars produce 1/2 as much carbon monoxide as they did twenty years ago, this has only had beneficial results within the confines of urban smog quantity. At the same time, the amount of carbon dioxide released from cars is the same and will always be the same, for it is the inevitable byproduct of fossil fuel consumption. The invisible and odorless CO2 cannot be reduced no matter the filter or cat. converter on the newest, most aerodynamic car, and it is this insidious CO2 gas which is contributing greatly to the greenhouse effect. 22
Air pollution also accelerates the deterioration of a city's infrastructure and buildings, especially those of historic value. Buildings in many cities have been severely discolored due to polluted air, and those lying on busy streets and thoroughfares need facade renovation much more frequently than those on calmer streets. Some structures even experience structural damage due to heavy, rumbling trucks. Cleopatra's Needle, an Egyptian obelisk in New York's Central Park, a weekday speedway, has degenerated more in the 35 years since its been in Manhattan, than in the previous 3500 years in the harsh desert climate of Egypt.
It is the profligate use of oil, in many ways, that may contain the most ecological destructive component of all: the ubiquitous oil spill. Ubiquitous in a sense that the Exxon Valdez disaster was not an anomaly; spills of that magnitude occur quite often, and have disastrous implications on the ecology of the world's oceans. Greenpeace estimates that one billion gallons of oil are directly spilled into the oceans every year. Valdez was only the 14th largest spill in history, but, because most others occurred off shore and did not directly reach a populated land mass, their was a dearth of media coverage. Accidental spills only represent 17% of the total oil which enters the marine environment. The rest, enters the oceans via the routine flushing of carrier tanks, and the daily byproducts of the petroleum industry. Another 50 million gallons of gallons of petroleum seeps into the world's fresh water supply through the daily run-off from roads and do-it-yourself mechanics. 23 Although the estimation of the total death of sea creatures and birds due to oil spillage is incalculable, the toll from the Alaska Valdez incident, according to Greenpeace, led to the deaths of 5000 otters, 200 harbor seals, and perhaps 1/2 a million birds.
The demand for petroleum constantly pressures the oil industry to search for oil in more and more remote places. The oil companies' thirst for profit leaves them with no concern for the consequences of their actions. They would drill in the Grand Canyon or sink a derelict oil platform in a whale sanctuary if they thought they could get away with it. Their powerful lobbyists are constantly persuading the U.S. and other governments to open up fragile wilderness and marine habitats for oil exploration, whether it be in a tropical rainforest, a spectacular mountain range, or the Arctic tundra. When habitats are opened up for exploration, great damage is done even if oil is not found in sufficient quantities to warrant refining. Seismic studies destroy habitat and terrify wildlife, and the myriad of abandoned roads are often subsequently used by logging companies to get to areas that were initially off limits to them. The predicament can only get worse, for as Asia, especially China, developes its system of roads and opens its markets, the numbers of cars are expected to double globally by 2010.
The ultimate fallacy of an economy and lifestyle dependent upon cheap and plentiful oil is that it is not sustainable. According to the Hubbert Curve on oil production, an industry forecasting standard, the world is expected to run out of its oil by 2040, at the present rate of use. Petroleum depletion could be mitigated if motorists would pay for the true costs of driving, thus making alternatives, such as trains and bicycles, more attractive. Higher taxes must be levied upon gas, registration, and new car purchases, and tolls need to be increased, especially for solitary commuters. This would not only offset the many subsidized costs of auto transit, but would also create capital for rail improvements. The discouragement of automobile use must begin today, or we run the risk of being unprepared when the pumps run dry and "carmaggedon" day is upon us.
Conclusion
Many of humanity's most pressing problems such as deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, the dwindling of native cultures, global warming, the loss of communties, and water pollution, can be traced to the overuse of automobiles, and unchecked suburban development. Cars are here to stay and they certainly have their uses, but, too many people have deemed these uses to mean every single trip, whether one mile or one hundred miles. We have been brainwashed into demanding a table in the non-smoking section of a restaurant and then, after the meal, either driving home, or walking along noisy, chaotic, and polluted streets. The daily bombardment of automobile images and our government's obstinate attitude towards alternatives has allowed us to accept the auto-dominated landscape that surrounds us all. Until this type of behavior is curbed, our decadent lifestyle will continue to decimate communities and cities, and precipitate the ongoing destruction of the natural world. ||| [part 1] ||| [part 2] ||| [part 3] ||| References
18. "Rethinking the role of the Automobile", Michael Renner, Worldwatch Report #84, 6/88.
19. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
20. "The Ecological Effects of Roads", Reed Noss, Wild Earth Magazine
21. "Eco-mole", Carlos Drew, Earth Island Institute Journal, Spring 1995.
22. "Not So Fast", Bill Mckibben, New York Times Magazine, 7/23/95.
23. "Oil in the Sea: Inputs, Fates, and Effects", National Academy Press, 1985
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/globaltrends2015/index.html
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/globaltrend...ltrends2015.pdf
Global Trends 2015:
A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/globaltrend...ltrends2015.pdf
Global Trends 2015:
A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20...13695_1,00.html
The Sunday Times Magazine
The Sunday Times October 16, 2005
Waiting for the lights to go out
We've taken the past 200 years of prosperity for granted. Humanity's progress is stalling, we are facing a new era of decay, and nobody is clever enough to fix it. Is the future really that black, asks Bryan Appleyard
The greatest getting-and-spending spree in the history of the world is about to end. The 200-year boom that gave citizens of the industrial world levels of wealth, health and longevity beyond anything previously known to humanity is threatened on every side. Oil is running out; the climate is changing at a potentially catastrophic rate; wars over scarce resources are brewing; finally, most shocking of all, we don't seem to be having enough ideas about how to fix any of these things.
It's been said before, of course: people are always saying the world will end and it never does. Maybe it won't this time, either. But, frankly, it's not looking good. Almost daily, new evidence is emerging that progress can no longer be taken for granted, that a new Dark Age is lying in wait for ourselves and our children.
To understand how this could happen, it is necessary to grasp just how extraordinary, how utterly unprecedented are the privileges we in the developed world enjoy now. Born today, you could expect to live 25 to 30 years longer than your Victorian forebears, up to 45 years longer than your medieval ancestors and at least 55 years longer than your Stone Age precursors. It is highly unlikely that your birth will kill you or your mother or that, in later life, you will suffer typhoid, plague, smallpox, dysentery, polio, or dentistry without anaesthetic. You will enjoy a standard of living that would have glazed the eyes of the Emperor Nero, thanks to the 2% annual economic growth rate sustained by the developed world since the industrial revolution. You will have access to greater knowledge than Aristotle could begin to imagine, and to technical resources that would stupefy Leonardo da Vinci. You will know a world whose scale and variety would induce agoraphobia in Alexander the Great. You should experience relative peace thanks to the absolute technological superiority of the industrialised world over its enemies and, with luck and within reason, you should be able to write and say anything you like, a luxury denied to almost all other human beings, dead or alive. Finally, as this artificially extended sojourn in paradise comes to a close, you will attain oblivion in the certain knowledge that, for your children, things can only get better.
Such staggering developments have convinced us that progress is a new law of nature, something that happens to everything all the time. Microsoft is always working on a better version of Windows. Today's Nokia renders yesterday's obsolete, as does today's Apple, Nike or Gillette. Life expectancy continues to rise. Cars go faster, planes fly further, and one day, we are assured, cancer must yield. Whatever goes wrong in our lives or the world, the march of progress continues regardless. Doesn't it?
Almost certainly not. The first big problem is our insane addiction to oil. It powers everything we do and determines how we live. But, on the most optimistic projections, there are only 30 to 40 years of oil left. One pessimistic projection, from Sweden's Uppsala University, is that world reserves are massively overstated and the oil will start to run out in 10 years. That makes it virtually inconceivable that there will be kerosene-powered planes or petroleum-powered cars for much longer. Long before the oil actually runs out, it will have become far too expensive to use for such frivolous pursuits as flying and driving. People generally assume that we will find our way round this using hydrogen, nuclear, wave or wind power. In reality, none of these technologies are being developed anything like quickly enough to take over from oil. The great nations just aren't throwing enough money at the problem. Instead, they are preparing to fight for the last drops of oil. China has recently started making diplomatic overtures to Saudi Arabia, wanting to break America's grip on that nation's 262 billion barrel reserve.
Even if we did throw money at the problem, it's not certain we could fix it. One of the strangest portents of the end of progress is the recent discovery that humans are losing their ability to come up with new ideas.
Jonathan Huebner is an amiable, very polite and very correct physicist who works at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He took the job in 1985, when he was 26. An older scientist told him how lucky he was. In the course of his career, he could expect to see huge scientific and technological advances. But by 1990, Huebner had begun to suspect the old man was wrong. "The number of advances wasn't increasing exponentially, I hadn't seen as many as I had expected — not in any particular area, just generally."
Puzzled, he undertook some research of his own. He began to study the rate of significant innovations as catalogued in a standard work entitled The History of Science and Technology. After some elaborate mathematics, he came to a conclusion that raised serious questions about our continued ability to sustain progress. What he found was that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. In fact, our current rate of innovation — which Huebner puts at seven important technological developments per billion people per year — is about the same as it was in 1600. By 2024 it will have slumped to the same level as it was in the Dark Ages, the period between the end of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.
The calculations are based on innovations per person, so if we could keep growing the human population we could, in theory, keep up the absolute rate of innovation. But in practice, to do that, we'd have to swamp the world with billions more people almost at once. That being neither possible nor desirable, it seems we'll just have to accept that progress, at least on the scientific and technological front, is slowing very rapidly indeed.
Huebner offers two possible explanations: economics and the size of the human brain. Either it's just not worth pursuing certain innovations since they won't pay off — one reason why space exploration has all but ground to a halt — or we already know most of what we can know, and so discovering new things is becoming increasingly difficult. We have, for example, known for over 20 years how cancer works and what needs to be done to prevent or cure it. But in most cases, we still have no idea how to do it, and there is no likelihood that we will in the foreseeable future.
Huebner's insight has caused some outrage. The influential scientist Ray Kurzweil has criticised his sample of innovations as "arbitrary"; K Eric Drexler, prophet of nanotechnology, has argued that we should be measuring capabilities, not innovations. Thus we may travel faster or access more information at greater speeds without significant innovations as such.
Huebner has so far successfully responded to all these criticisms. Moreover, he is supported by the work of Ben Jones, a management professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. Jones has found that we are currently in a quandary comparable to that of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Basically, two centuries of economic growth in the industrialised world has been driven by scientific and technological innovation. We don't get richer unaided or simply by working harder: we get richer because smart people invent steam engines, antibiotics and the internet. What Jones has discovered is that we have to work harder and harder to sustain growth through innovation. More and more money has to be poured into research and development and we have to deploy more people in these areas just to keep up. "The result is," says Jones, "that the average individual innovator is having a smaller and smaller impact."
Like Huebner, he has two theories about why this is happening. The first is the "low-hanging fruit" theory: early innovators plucked the easiest-to-reach ideas, so later ones have to struggle to crack the harder problems. Or it may be that the massive accumulation of knowledge means that innovators have to stay in education longer to learn enough to invent something new and, as a result, less of their active life is spent innovating. "I've noticed that Nobel-prize winners are getting older," he says. "That's a sure sign it's taking longer to innovate." The other alternative is to specialise — but that would mean innovators would simply be tweaking the latest edition of Windows rather than inventing the light bulb. The effect of their innovations would be marginal, a process of making what we already have work slightly better. This may make us think we're progressing, but it will be an illusion.
If Huebner and Jones are right, our problem goes way beyond Windows. For if innovation is the engine of economic progress — and almost everybody agrees it is — growth may be coming to an end. Since our entire financial order — interest rates, pension funds, insurance, stock markets — is predicated on growth, the social and economic consequences may be cataclysmic.
Is it really happening? Will progress grind to a halt? The long view of history gives conflicting evidence. Paul Ormerod, a London-based economist and author of the book Why Most Things Fail, is unsure. "I am in two minds about this. Biologists have abandoned the idea of progress — we just are where we are. But humanity is so far in advance of anything that has gone before that it seems to be a qualitative leap."
For Ormerod, there may be very rare but similar qualitative leaps in the organisation of society. The creation of cities, he believes, is one. Cities emerged perhaps 10,000 years ago, not long after humanity ceased being hunter-gatherers and became farmers. Other apparently progressive developments cannot compete. The Roman empire, for example, once seemed eternal, bringing progress to the world. But then, one day, it collapsed and died. The question thus becomes: is our liberal-democratic-capitalist way of doing things, like cities, an irreversible improvement in the human condition, or is it like the Roman empire, a shooting star of wealth and success, soon to be extinguished?
Ormerod suspects that capitalism is indeed, like cities, a lasting change in the human condition. "Immense strides forward have been taken," he says. It may be that, after millennia of striving, we have found the right course. Capitalism may be the Darwinian survivor of a process of natural selection that has seen all other systems fail.
Ormerod does acknowledge, however, that the rate of innovation may well be slowing — "All the boxes may be ticked," as he puts it — and that progress remains dependent on contingencies far beyond our control. An asteroid strike or super-volcanic eruption could crush all our vanities in an instant. But in principle, Ormerod suspects that our 200-year spree is no fluke.
This is heartily endorsed by the Dutch-American Joel Mokyr, one of the most influential economic historians in the world today. Mokyr is the author of The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena, two books that support the progressive view that we are indeed doing something right, something that makes our liberal-democratic civilisation uniquely able to generate continuous progress. The argument is that, since the 18th-century Enlightenment, a new term has entered the human equation. This is the accumulation of and a free market in knowledge. As Mokyr puts it, we no longer behead people for saying the wrong thing — we listen to them. This "social knowledge" is progressive because it allows ideas to be tested and the most effective to survive. This knowledge is embodied in institutions, which, unlike individuals, can rise above our animal natures. Because of the success of these institutions, we can reasonably hope to be able, collectively, to think our way around any future problems. When the oil runs out, for example, we should have harnessed hydrogen or fusion power. If the environment is being destroyed, then we should find ways of healing it. "If global warming is happening," says Mokyr, "and I increasingly am persuaded that it is, then we will have the technology to deal with it."
But there are, as he readily admits, flies in the ointment of his optimism. First, he makes the crucial concession that, though a society may progress, individuals don't. Human nature does not progress at all. Our aggressive, tribal nature is hard-wired, unreformed and unreformable. Individually we are animals and, as animals, incapable of progress. The trick is to cage these animal natures in effective institutions: education, the law, government. But these can go wrong. "The thing that scares me," he says, "is that these institutions can misfire."
Big institutions, deeply entrenched within ancient cultures, misfired in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933, producing years of slaughter on a scale previously unseen in human history. For Mokyr, those misfirings produced not an institutionalism of our knowledge but of our aggressive, animal natures. The very fact that such things can happen at all is a warning that progress can never be taken for granted.
Some suggest that this institutional breakdown is now happening in the developed world, in the form of a "democratic deficit". This is happening at a number of levels. There is the supranational. In this, either large corporations or large institutions — the EU, the World Bank — gradually remove large areas of decision-making from the electorate, hollowing out local democracies. Or there is the national level. Here, massively increased political sophistication results in the manipulation, almost hypnotising, of electorates. This has been particularly true in Britain, where politics has been virtualised by new Labour into a series of presentational issues. Such developments show that merely calling a system "democratic" does not necessarily mean it will retain the progressive virtues that have seemed to arise from democracy. Democracy can destroy itself. In addition, with the rise of an unquantifiable global terrorist threat producing defensive transformations of legal systems designed to limit freedom and privacy, the possibility arises of institutional breakdown leading to a new, destructive social order. We are not immune from the totalitarian faults of the past.
The further point is that capitalism is one thing, globalisation another. The current globalisation wave was identified in the 1970s.
It was thought to represent the beginning of a process whereby the superior performance of free-market economics would lead a worldwide liberalisation process. Everybody, in effect, would be drawn into the developed world's 200-year boom. Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that it hasn't happened as planned. The prominent Canadian thinker John Ralston Saul argues in his book The Collapse of Globalism that globalisation is, in fact, over and is being replaced by a series of competing local and national interests. Meanwhile, in his book Why They Don't Hate Us, the Californian academic Mark LeVine shows that the evidence put forward by globalisation's fans, such as the World Trade Organization, conceals deep divisions and instabilities in countries like China and regions like the Middle East. Globalisation, he argues, is often just making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It is also destroying local culture and inspiring aggressive resistance movements, from student demonstrators in the West to radical Islamicists in the Middle East. Progress is built on very fragile foundations.
Or perhaps it never happens at all. John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, is the most lucid advocate of the view that progress is an illusion. People, he says, are "overimpressed by present reality" and assume, on the basis of only a couple of centuries of history, that progress is eternal. In his book Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, he argues that human nature is flawed and incorrigible, and its flaws will be embodied in whatever humans make. Joel Mokyr's institutions, therefore, do not rise above human nature: they embody it. Science, for Gray, does indeed accumulate knowledge. But that has the effect of empowering human beings to do at least as much damage as good. His book argues that, far from being a medieval institution as many have suggested, Al-Qaeda is a supremely modern organisation, using current technology and management theory to spread destruction. Modernity does not make us better, it just makes us more effective. We may have anaesthetic dentistry, but we also have nuclear weapons. We may or may not continue to innovate. It doesn't matter, because innovation will only enable us to do more of what humans do. In this view, all progress will be matched by regress. In our present condition, this can happen in two ways. Either human conflict will produce a new ethical decline, as it did in Germany and Russia, or our very commitment to growth will turn against us.
On the ethical front, Gray's most potent contemporary example is torture. For years we thought the developed world had banished torture for ever or that, if it occasionally happened here, it was an error or oversight, a crime to be punished at once. Not being torturers was a primary indicator of our civilised, progressive condition. But now suicide terrorism has posed a terrible question. If we have a prisoner who knows where a suitcase nuclear weapon is planted and refuses to talk, do we not have the right to torture him into revealing the information? Many now reluctantly admit that we would. Even the means of his torture has been discussed: a sterilised needle inserted beneath the fingernail. Having suffered this pain for a few seconds when having an anaesthetic injection prior to the removal of a nail, I can personally attest that it would work.
The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is now arguing for giving proper legal status to torture. "Torture is a matter that has always been unacceptable, beyond discussion. Let's not pretend, those days are passed. We now have ticking-bomb terrorists and it's an empirical fact that every civilised democracy would use torture in those circumstances." Dershowitz doesn't like the "surreptitious hypocrisy" that allows torture but pretends it doesn't. Look, he says, at the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda planner captured in 2003 in Pakistan. American interrogators subjected him to "water-boarding", effectively threatening him with drowning. This wasn't classified as torture because he wasn't hurt, but of course it was.
Dershowitz thinks a legal basis for torture would prevent abuses like the horrors perpetrated in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. If, for example, Tony Blair or George Bush had to sign a torture warrant, the whole business would be kept visible and legal. For Gray, torture represents obvious regress. Dershowitz partly agrees but argues that progressives must be ready to do deals. "Terrorism is a major step backwards in civilisation. Hitler was a major step backwards. Sometimes we have to step backwards too to combat such things. But progress happens in other areas. A generation now growing up may have to accept more security measures and less privacy, but in other areas like sexual conduct we are making progress. I don't think overall we are making a step back."
Progress, therefore, is faltering but, on aggregate, it moves in the right direction. Hitler was defeated and judicial torture may, in time, defeat terrorism. We just have to accept that three steps forward also involves two steps back. The point is to keep the faith.
But what if it is just faith? What if the very "fact" of progress is ultimately self-destructive? There are many ways in which this might turn out to be true. First, the human population is continuing to rise exponentially. It is currently approaching 6.5 billion, in 1900 it was 1.65 billion, in 1800 it was around a billion, in 1500 it was 500m. The figures show that economic and technological progress is loading the planet with billions more people. By keeping humans alive longer and by feeding them better, progress is continually pushing population levels. With population comes pollution. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming caused by human activity is happening. According to some estimates, we will pass the point of no return within a decade. Weather systems will change, huge flooding will occur, and human civilisation if not existence will be at risk. This can be avoided if the US and China cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by 50% at once. This won't happen, as they are fighting an economic war with progress as the prize. There are many other progress-created threats. Oil is one diminishing resource, and fresh water is another, even more vital one. Wars are virtually certain to be fought to gain control of these precious liquids.
In addition, antibiotic drugs are currently failing through overuse. No new generation of medicines is likely to be available to replace them in the near future. People may soon be dying again from sore throats and minor cuts. The massive longevity increase in the 20th century may soon begin to reverse itself.
Joel Mokyr's response to all this is that our open-knowledge societies will enable these problems to be solved. John Gray replies: "This is faith, not science." We believe we can fix things, but we can't be sure. And if we can't, then the Earth will fix them herself, flicking the human species into oblivion in the process.
Of course, the end of the world has been promised by Jews, Christians, Muslims and assorted crazies with sandwich boards for as long as there has been a human world to end. But those doomsdays were the product of faith; reason always used to say the world will continue. The point about the new apocalypse is that this situation has reversed. Now faith tells us we will be able to solve our problems; reason says we have no answers now and none are likely in the future. Perhaps we can't cure cancer because the problem is simply beyond our intellects. Perhaps we haven't flown to the stars because our biology and God's physics mean we never can. Perhaps we are close to the limit and the time of plenty is over.
The evidence is mounting that our two sunny centuries of growth and wealth may end in a new Dark Age in which ignorance will replace knowledge, war will replace peace, sickness will replace health and famine will replace obesity. You don't think so? It's always happened in the past. What makes us so different? Nothing, I'm afraid.
WHY I AM SAVING THE WORLD
So, as a new Dark Age approaches, are you just going to carry on living your life as if nothing has changed? John-Paul Flintoff, for one, decided he couldn't bury his head in the sand. He explains how he went on a one-man crusade to show that humanity can adapt and survive
I had just dropped my daughter at the nursery when I began to save the world. I mention this detail because it's important to emphasise that Nancy loves her nursery. If she didn't, I wouldn't drive four miles from home — into London's congestion zone, at a cost of £8 a day. I wouldn't have found myself in Connaught Square that morning, fretting about newspaper stories suggesting the price of petrol was going up. I wouldn't have seen a woman sitting inside a peculiar car parked beside me. Nor would I have noticed, on returning to my VW Golf from the nursery, that the car had moved some yards away and the woman had disappeared.
Intrigued, I wandered over and scribbled in my notebook. When I got home I began to investigate what I had seen. It may seem grandiose to describe my actions that morning, and in the days that followed, as "saving the world". It may be factually incorrect, because I may not have averted global catastrophe after all. You decide — but first get your head round the following, rather terrifying background information. A barrel of oil contains the equivalent of almost 25,000 hours of human labour. A gallon of petrol contains the energy equivalent of 500 hours — enough to propel a three-ton 4x4 along 10 miles; to push it yourself would take nearly three weeks. To support economic growth, the world currently requires more than 30 billion barrels of oil a year. That requirement is constantly increasing, owing to population growth, debt-servicing, and the rapid industrialisation of developing countries such as India and China. But we are about to enter an era in which less oil will be available each year. And many believe that industrial society is doomed. Are we really running out?
Well, half of all supplies come from "giant" oilfields, of which 95% are at least 25 years old; 50% have been producing for 40 years or more. In the North Sea, production peaked in 1999. Late last year, Britain began to import more oil than we export. Worldwide, discoveries of new oilfields peaked in the 1960s; and despite technological advances, new discoveries are at an all-time low. A recent story in The New York Times suggested that oil companies are failing to recoup exploration costs: significant discoveries are so scarce that looking for them is a monetary loser. Not that I normally read The New York Times' coverage of the oil business — like most people, I have tended to consider news about the oil industry to be extremely dull. That started to change when it crept out of the business pages and into the general news, and into advertisements. Practically every day, it seemed, a big oil company took a whole page to promote the fact that we are facing a crisis. One, paid for by Chevron, called on readers to help find a solution. I visited Chevron's website, www.willyoujoinus.com, where a whirring clock monitored worldwide oil consumption: nearly 1,500 barrels a second. The more I read, the scarier it became. Michael Meacher, who was Britain's environment minister for six years, is plainly terrified. "The implications are mind-blowing... Civilisation faces the sharpest and perhaps most violent dislocation in recent history."
Matthew Simmons, a Houston-based energy-industry financier and adviser to George Bush and Dick Cheney, was asked in 2003 if there is a solution. He replied: "The solution is to pray."
These people are not loonies. Optimists believe that the market — the law of supply and demand — will solve the problem. As oil becomes more expensive, we'll shift to some other energy source. But do high prices really cut demand? Since early 1999, oil prices have risen by about 350%. Meanwhile, demand growth in 2004 was the highest in 25 years. That's bad news, because the market won't push energy companies into pursuing alternative sources of energy until oil reaches considerably higher prices. And then it will be too late to make the switch.
The former oil-industry executive Jan Lundberg reckons the crisis will be sudden. "Market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices skyward," he says. "And the market will become paralysed at prices too high for the wheels of commerce and daily living." So forget the price at the pump: when oil becomes truly unaffordable, you will be more worried about the collapse of distribution networks, and the absence of food from local shops.
Ecologists use a technical term, "die-off", to describe what happens when a population grows too big for the resources that sustain it. Where will die-off occur this time? Everywhere. By some estimates, 5 billion of the world's 6½ billion population would never have been able to live without the blessed effects of fossil fuels, and oil in particular: oil powered the pumps that drained the land, and from oil came the chemicals that made intensive farming possible.
If oil dries up, we can assume, those 5 billion must starve. And they won't all be in Africa this time. You too may be fighting off neighbours to protect a shrinking stash of canned food, and, when that runs out, foraging for insects in suburban gardens.
Dr Richard Duncan, of the Institute on Energy and Man, has monitored the issue for years. "I became deeply depressed," he notes, "when I first concluded that our greatest scientific achievements will soon be forgotten and our most cherished monuments will crumble to dust." Of course, this isn't the first time people have predicted imminent apocalypse. During the late 19th century, Londoners feared they would all be killed by the methane in horse manure. But oil is certain to run out eventually, and most experts believe that will happen during the lifetimes of people now living. Pollyannas point out that the size of official oil reserves went up dramatically in the 1980s, and the same will happen again as oil companies discover new oilfields. But geologists say the world has been thoroughly searched already.
Not everyone believes we're doomed. Cheerier prognostications suggest that our future will more closely resemble 1990s Cuba. The American trade embargo, combined with the collapse of Cuba's communist allies in eastern Europe, suddenly deprived the island of imports. Without oil, public transport shut down and TV broadcasts finished early in the evening to save power. Industrial farms needed fuel and spare parts, pesticides and fertiliser — none of which were available. Consequently, the average Cuban diet dropped from about 3,000 calories per day in 1989 to 1,900 calories four years later. In effect, Cubans were skipping a meal a day, every day, week after month after year. Of necessity, the country converted to sustainable farming techniques, replacing artificial fertiliser with ecological alternatives, rotating crops to keep soil rich, and using teams of oxen instead of tractors. There are still problems supplying meat and milk, but over time Cubans regained the equivalent of that missing meal. And ecologists hailed their achievement in creating the world's largest working model of largely sustainable agriculture, largely independent of oil.
Can we steer ourselves towards the Cuban ideal? If so, how?
Well, let me tell you what I did. First I switched exclusively to wind power as the source of my domestic electricity, through a company called Ecotricity, which promises the price will not differ significantly from what I paid before. Then I got a man round to give us a quote for installing double-glazed sash windows. The latest, high-specification glass, I was told, traps domestic heat but allows sunlight to pass through, which means you can turn the thermostat right down in winter. I contacted a company that specialises in solar power. If I acted quickly, I could get government subsidies. I put my name down for a domestic wind turbine — apparently, traffic at the end of my street makes a greater racket, but I would need planning permission. The turbine would cover roughly a third of my electricity needs. The cost: £1,500.
I bought a tray for sprouting seeds (highly nutritious, apparently) and started the long process, as yet unresolved, of persuading my wife that we must dig up our flowerbeds and turn the garden into an allotment. I even got in touch with a local vicar who keeps chickens in his garden, and asked how I might do the same.
Does this really amount to "saving the world"? I've saved the best till last. Remember Nancy's nursery, and the peculiar car I saw in Connaught Square? The car is called a G-Wiz; it runs entirely on electricity, has four seats and storage in the bonnet, and is no bigger than a Smart car. A G-Wiz costs as little as £7,000. It does not incur road tax. It's in the cheapest insurance bracket, and exempt from the congestion charge. In Westminster you can park for nothing in pay-and-display spaces, or in your local car park, with free electricity to charge the batteries.
The downside? It can't go faster than 40mph, and the batteries go flat after about 40 miles. That didn't bother me: we'd use it in London, and for trips further afield we could hire a car. There was one problem. Unless local councils install a socket on the pavement, the only people who can run an electric car are the lucky few with off-street parking.
So I started a campaign. I wrote a letter to drop through my neighbours' doors, explaining about the coming oil crisis and describing the electric car. I promised to write to the council urging it to install electric sockets if at least a few of my neighbours would do the same. Within hours, two names appeared. Over the next couple of weeks, eight others had joined them. With this support, I wrote to my local councillors. For good measure, I sent through government proposals to subsidise that kind of installation by up to 60%. Placing my order for the G-Wiz, I popped a non-refundable cheque for £1,250 in the post. I would just have to hope Barnet council comes through before the car arrives.
I felt proud to belong to a district that was saving the world. And, to be honest, I felt rather pleased with myself. I sent for some fake parking tickets to leave on the windows of petrol-guzzling 4x4s. And I wrote a letter to the Saudi oil minister, urging him to invest in alternative energy technology before it's too late.
It has been a long and tiring campaign. I realise it may not work. I don't honestly believe most people will be motivated to match my shining example. Eventually, the government will impose the kind of restrictions normally used in wartime. When that happens, we'll move out of London to begin a new life of genuine self-sufficiency.
Oil isn't only useful as fuel
Most oil we consume is burnt as fuel. But hundreds of everyday objects are made from petrochemicals. We take them for granted now, but to drive your car, or fly away on a holiday that might just as well have taken place near home, is to burn a valuable resource that can be used to make products like these:
Household: Ballpoint pens, battery cases, bin bags, candles, carpets, curtains, detergents, drinking cups, dyes, enamel, lino, paint, brushes and rollers, pillows, refrigerants, refrigerator linings, roofing, safety glass, shower curtains, telephones, toilet seats, water pipes.
Personal: Cold cream, hair colour, lipstick, shampoo, shaving cream, combs, dentures, denture adhesive, deodorant, glasses, sunglasses, contact lenses, hand lotion, insect repellent, shoes, shoe polish, tights, toothbrushes, toothpaste, vitamin capsules.
Medical: Anaesthetics, antihistamines, antiseptics, artificial limbs, aspirin, bandages, cortisone, hearing aids, heart valves.
Leisure: cameras, fishing rods, footballs, golf balls, skis, stereos, tennis rackets, tents.
Agriculture: Fertilisers, insecticides, preservatives.
Other: Antifreeze, boats, lifejackets, glue, solvents, motorcycle helmets, parachutes, tyres.
How to survive when the oil runs out
Living without oil, if we don't start to prepare for it, will not be like returning to the late 1700s, because we have now lost the infrastructure that made 18th-century life possible. We have also lost our basic survival skills. Dr Richard Duncan, of the Institute on Energy and Man, believes that we will return to living in essentially Stone Age conditions. Here is a taste of how to deal with the essentials.
Water: Animal trails lead to water. Watch the direction in which bees fly. Make containers from animal bladders and gourds.
Food: To remove the bitterness from acorns, soak them in a running stream for a few days. The common dandelion is a versatile and delicious plant. Open pine cones in the heat of a fire to release the nuts inside.
Luxuries: Make soap using lye (from hardwood ash) and animal fat. For candles, sheep fat is best, followed by beef. (Pork fat is very smelly and burns with thick smoke.)
Medicine: Use hypnosis for pain control. Frame suggestions positively. Use the present tense. Be specific and use repetition. Keep it simple.
Develop a survivor personality: Survivors spend almost no time getting upset. They have a good sense of humour and laugh at mistakes.
From: When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance and Planetary Survival, by Matthew Stein
The Sunday Times Magazine
The Sunday Times October 16, 2005
Waiting for the lights to go out
We've taken the past 200 years of prosperity for granted. Humanity's progress is stalling, we are facing a new era of decay, and nobody is clever enough to fix it. Is the future really that black, asks Bryan Appleyard
The greatest getting-and-spending spree in the history of the world is about to end. The 200-year boom that gave citizens of the industrial world levels of wealth, health and longevity beyond anything previously known to humanity is threatened on every side. Oil is running out; the climate is changing at a potentially catastrophic rate; wars over scarce resources are brewing; finally, most shocking of all, we don't seem to be having enough ideas about how to fix any of these things.
It's been said before, of course: people are always saying the world will end and it never does. Maybe it won't this time, either. But, frankly, it's not looking good. Almost daily, new evidence is emerging that progress can no longer be taken for granted, that a new Dark Age is lying in wait for ourselves and our children.
To understand how this could happen, it is necessary to grasp just how extraordinary, how utterly unprecedented are the privileges we in the developed world enjoy now. Born today, you could expect to live 25 to 30 years longer than your Victorian forebears, up to 45 years longer than your medieval ancestors and at least 55 years longer than your Stone Age precursors. It is highly unlikely that your birth will kill you or your mother or that, in later life, you will suffer typhoid, plague, smallpox, dysentery, polio, or dentistry without anaesthetic. You will enjoy a standard of living that would have glazed the eyes of the Emperor Nero, thanks to the 2% annual economic growth rate sustained by the developed world since the industrial revolution. You will have access to greater knowledge than Aristotle could begin to imagine, and to technical resources that would stupefy Leonardo da Vinci. You will know a world whose scale and variety would induce agoraphobia in Alexander the Great. You should experience relative peace thanks to the absolute technological superiority of the industrialised world over its enemies and, with luck and within reason, you should be able to write and say anything you like, a luxury denied to almost all other human beings, dead or alive. Finally, as this artificially extended sojourn in paradise comes to a close, you will attain oblivion in the certain knowledge that, for your children, things can only get better.
Such staggering developments have convinced us that progress is a new law of nature, something that happens to everything all the time. Microsoft is always working on a better version of Windows. Today's Nokia renders yesterday's obsolete, as does today's Apple, Nike or Gillette. Life expectancy continues to rise. Cars go faster, planes fly further, and one day, we are assured, cancer must yield. Whatever goes wrong in our lives or the world, the march of progress continues regardless. Doesn't it?
Almost certainly not. The first big problem is our insane addiction to oil. It powers everything we do and determines how we live. But, on the most optimistic projections, there are only 30 to 40 years of oil left. One pessimistic projection, from Sweden's Uppsala University, is that world reserves are massively overstated and the oil will start to run out in 10 years. That makes it virtually inconceivable that there will be kerosene-powered planes or petroleum-powered cars for much longer. Long before the oil actually runs out, it will have become far too expensive to use for such frivolous pursuits as flying and driving. People generally assume that we will find our way round this using hydrogen, nuclear, wave or wind power. In reality, none of these technologies are being developed anything like quickly enough to take over from oil. The great nations just aren't throwing enough money at the problem. Instead, they are preparing to fight for the last drops of oil. China has recently started making diplomatic overtures to Saudi Arabia, wanting to break America's grip on that nation's 262 billion barrel reserve.
Even if we did throw money at the problem, it's not certain we could fix it. One of the strangest portents of the end of progress is the recent discovery that humans are losing their ability to come up with new ideas.
Jonathan Huebner is an amiable, very polite and very correct physicist who works at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He took the job in 1985, when he was 26. An older scientist told him how lucky he was. In the course of his career, he could expect to see huge scientific and technological advances. But by 1990, Huebner had begun to suspect the old man was wrong. "The number of advances wasn't increasing exponentially, I hadn't seen as many as I had expected — not in any particular area, just generally."
Puzzled, he undertook some research of his own. He began to study the rate of significant innovations as catalogued in a standard work entitled The History of Science and Technology. After some elaborate mathematics, he came to a conclusion that raised serious questions about our continued ability to sustain progress. What he found was that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. In fact, our current rate of innovation — which Huebner puts at seven important technological developments per billion people per year — is about the same as it was in 1600. By 2024 it will have slumped to the same level as it was in the Dark Ages, the period between the end of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.
The calculations are based on innovations per person, so if we could keep growing the human population we could, in theory, keep up the absolute rate of innovation. But in practice, to do that, we'd have to swamp the world with billions more people almost at once. That being neither possible nor desirable, it seems we'll just have to accept that progress, at least on the scientific and technological front, is slowing very rapidly indeed.
Huebner offers two possible explanations: economics and the size of the human brain. Either it's just not worth pursuing certain innovations since they won't pay off — one reason why space exploration has all but ground to a halt — or we already know most of what we can know, and so discovering new things is becoming increasingly difficult. We have, for example, known for over 20 years how cancer works and what needs to be done to prevent or cure it. But in most cases, we still have no idea how to do it, and there is no likelihood that we will in the foreseeable future.
Huebner's insight has caused some outrage. The influential scientist Ray Kurzweil has criticised his sample of innovations as "arbitrary"; K Eric Drexler, prophet of nanotechnology, has argued that we should be measuring capabilities, not innovations. Thus we may travel faster or access more information at greater speeds without significant innovations as such.
Huebner has so far successfully responded to all these criticisms. Moreover, he is supported by the work of Ben Jones, a management professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. Jones has found that we are currently in a quandary comparable to that of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Basically, two centuries of economic growth in the industrialised world has been driven by scientific and technological innovation. We don't get richer unaided or simply by working harder: we get richer because smart people invent steam engines, antibiotics and the internet. What Jones has discovered is that we have to work harder and harder to sustain growth through innovation. More and more money has to be poured into research and development and we have to deploy more people in these areas just to keep up. "The result is," says Jones, "that the average individual innovator is having a smaller and smaller impact."
Like Huebner, he has two theories about why this is happening. The first is the "low-hanging fruit" theory: early innovators plucked the easiest-to-reach ideas, so later ones have to struggle to crack the harder problems. Or it may be that the massive accumulation of knowledge means that innovators have to stay in education longer to learn enough to invent something new and, as a result, less of their active life is spent innovating. "I've noticed that Nobel-prize winners are getting older," he says. "That's a sure sign it's taking longer to innovate." The other alternative is to specialise — but that would mean innovators would simply be tweaking the latest edition of Windows rather than inventing the light bulb. The effect of their innovations would be marginal, a process of making what we already have work slightly better. This may make us think we're progressing, but it will be an illusion.
If Huebner and Jones are right, our problem goes way beyond Windows. For if innovation is the engine of economic progress — and almost everybody agrees it is — growth may be coming to an end. Since our entire financial order — interest rates, pension funds, insurance, stock markets — is predicated on growth, the social and economic consequences may be cataclysmic.
Is it really happening? Will progress grind to a halt? The long view of history gives conflicting evidence. Paul Ormerod, a London-based economist and author of the book Why Most Things Fail, is unsure. "I am in two minds about this. Biologists have abandoned the idea of progress — we just are where we are. But humanity is so far in advance of anything that has gone before that it seems to be a qualitative leap."
For Ormerod, there may be very rare but similar qualitative leaps in the organisation of society. The creation of cities, he believes, is one. Cities emerged perhaps 10,000 years ago, not long after humanity ceased being hunter-gatherers and became farmers. Other apparently progressive developments cannot compete. The Roman empire, for example, once seemed eternal, bringing progress to the world. But then, one day, it collapsed and died. The question thus becomes: is our liberal-democratic-capitalist way of doing things, like cities, an irreversible improvement in the human condition, or is it like the Roman empire, a shooting star of wealth and success, soon to be extinguished?
Ormerod suspects that capitalism is indeed, like cities, a lasting change in the human condition. "Immense strides forward have been taken," he says. It may be that, after millennia of striving, we have found the right course. Capitalism may be the Darwinian survivor of a process of natural selection that has seen all other systems fail.
Ormerod does acknowledge, however, that the rate of innovation may well be slowing — "All the boxes may be ticked," as he puts it — and that progress remains dependent on contingencies far beyond our control. An asteroid strike or super-volcanic eruption could crush all our vanities in an instant. But in principle, Ormerod suspects that our 200-year spree is no fluke.
This is heartily endorsed by the Dutch-American Joel Mokyr, one of the most influential economic historians in the world today. Mokyr is the author of The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena, two books that support the progressive view that we are indeed doing something right, something that makes our liberal-democratic civilisation uniquely able to generate continuous progress. The argument is that, since the 18th-century Enlightenment, a new term has entered the human equation. This is the accumulation of and a free market in knowledge. As Mokyr puts it, we no longer behead people for saying the wrong thing — we listen to them. This "social knowledge" is progressive because it allows ideas to be tested and the most effective to survive. This knowledge is embodied in institutions, which, unlike individuals, can rise above our animal natures. Because of the success of these institutions, we can reasonably hope to be able, collectively, to think our way around any future problems. When the oil runs out, for example, we should have harnessed hydrogen or fusion power. If the environment is being destroyed, then we should find ways of healing it. "If global warming is happening," says Mokyr, "and I increasingly am persuaded that it is, then we will have the technology to deal with it."
But there are, as he readily admits, flies in the ointment of his optimism. First, he makes the crucial concession that, though a society may progress, individuals don't. Human nature does not progress at all. Our aggressive, tribal nature is hard-wired, unreformed and unreformable. Individually we are animals and, as animals, incapable of progress. The trick is to cage these animal natures in effective institutions: education, the law, government. But these can go wrong. "The thing that scares me," he says, "is that these institutions can misfire."
Big institutions, deeply entrenched within ancient cultures, misfired in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933, producing years of slaughter on a scale previously unseen in human history. For Mokyr, those misfirings produced not an institutionalism of our knowledge but of our aggressive, animal natures. The very fact that such things can happen at all is a warning that progress can never be taken for granted.
Some suggest that this institutional breakdown is now happening in the developed world, in the form of a "democratic deficit". This is happening at a number of levels. There is the supranational. In this, either large corporations or large institutions — the EU, the World Bank — gradually remove large areas of decision-making from the electorate, hollowing out local democracies. Or there is the national level. Here, massively increased political sophistication results in the manipulation, almost hypnotising, of electorates. This has been particularly true in Britain, where politics has been virtualised by new Labour into a series of presentational issues. Such developments show that merely calling a system "democratic" does not necessarily mean it will retain the progressive virtues that have seemed to arise from democracy. Democracy can destroy itself. In addition, with the rise of an unquantifiable global terrorist threat producing defensive transformations of legal systems designed to limit freedom and privacy, the possibility arises of institutional breakdown leading to a new, destructive social order. We are not immune from the totalitarian faults of the past.
The further point is that capitalism is one thing, globalisation another. The current globalisation wave was identified in the 1970s.
It was thought to represent the beginning of a process whereby the superior performance of free-market economics would lead a worldwide liberalisation process. Everybody, in effect, would be drawn into the developed world's 200-year boom. Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that it hasn't happened as planned. The prominent Canadian thinker John Ralston Saul argues in his book The Collapse of Globalism that globalisation is, in fact, over and is being replaced by a series of competing local and national interests. Meanwhile, in his book Why They Don't Hate Us, the Californian academic Mark LeVine shows that the evidence put forward by globalisation's fans, such as the World Trade Organization, conceals deep divisions and instabilities in countries like China and regions like the Middle East. Globalisation, he argues, is often just making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It is also destroying local culture and inspiring aggressive resistance movements, from student demonstrators in the West to radical Islamicists in the Middle East. Progress is built on very fragile foundations.
Or perhaps it never happens at all. John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, is the most lucid advocate of the view that progress is an illusion. People, he says, are "overimpressed by present reality" and assume, on the basis of only a couple of centuries of history, that progress is eternal. In his book Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, he argues that human nature is flawed and incorrigible, and its flaws will be embodied in whatever humans make. Joel Mokyr's institutions, therefore, do not rise above human nature: they embody it. Science, for Gray, does indeed accumulate knowledge. But that has the effect of empowering human beings to do at least as much damage as good. His book argues that, far from being a medieval institution as many have suggested, Al-Qaeda is a supremely modern organisation, using current technology and management theory to spread destruction. Modernity does not make us better, it just makes us more effective. We may have anaesthetic dentistry, but we also have nuclear weapons. We may or may not continue to innovate. It doesn't matter, because innovation will only enable us to do more of what humans do. In this view, all progress will be matched by regress. In our present condition, this can happen in two ways. Either human conflict will produce a new ethical decline, as it did in Germany and Russia, or our very commitment to growth will turn against us.
On the ethical front, Gray's most potent contemporary example is torture. For years we thought the developed world had banished torture for ever or that, if it occasionally happened here, it was an error or oversight, a crime to be punished at once. Not being torturers was a primary indicator of our civilised, progressive condition. But now suicide terrorism has posed a terrible question. If we have a prisoner who knows where a suitcase nuclear weapon is planted and refuses to talk, do we not have the right to torture him into revealing the information? Many now reluctantly admit that we would. Even the means of his torture has been discussed: a sterilised needle inserted beneath the fingernail. Having suffered this pain for a few seconds when having an anaesthetic injection prior to the removal of a nail, I can personally attest that it would work.
The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is now arguing for giving proper legal status to torture. "Torture is a matter that has always been unacceptable, beyond discussion. Let's not pretend, those days are passed. We now have ticking-bomb terrorists and it's an empirical fact that every civilised democracy would use torture in those circumstances." Dershowitz doesn't like the "surreptitious hypocrisy" that allows torture but pretends it doesn't. Look, he says, at the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda planner captured in 2003 in Pakistan. American interrogators subjected him to "water-boarding", effectively threatening him with drowning. This wasn't classified as torture because he wasn't hurt, but of course it was.
Dershowitz thinks a legal basis for torture would prevent abuses like the horrors perpetrated in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. If, for example, Tony Blair or George Bush had to sign a torture warrant, the whole business would be kept visible and legal. For Gray, torture represents obvious regress. Dershowitz partly agrees but argues that progressives must be ready to do deals. "Terrorism is a major step backwards in civilisation. Hitler was a major step backwards. Sometimes we have to step backwards too to combat such things. But progress happens in other areas. A generation now growing up may have to accept more security measures and less privacy, but in other areas like sexual conduct we are making progress. I don't think overall we are making a step back."
Progress, therefore, is faltering but, on aggregate, it moves in the right direction. Hitler was defeated and judicial torture may, in time, defeat terrorism. We just have to accept that three steps forward also involves two steps back. The point is to keep the faith.
But what if it is just faith? What if the very "fact" of progress is ultimately self-destructive? There are many ways in which this might turn out to be true. First, the human population is continuing to rise exponentially. It is currently approaching 6.5 billion, in 1900 it was 1.65 billion, in 1800 it was around a billion, in 1500 it was 500m. The figures show that economic and technological progress is loading the planet with billions more people. By keeping humans alive longer and by feeding them better, progress is continually pushing population levels. With population comes pollution. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming caused by human activity is happening. According to some estimates, we will pass the point of no return within a decade. Weather systems will change, huge flooding will occur, and human civilisation if not existence will be at risk. This can be avoided if the US and China cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by 50% at once. This won't happen, as they are fighting an economic war with progress as the prize. There are many other progress-created threats. Oil is one diminishing resource, and fresh water is another, even more vital one. Wars are virtually certain to be fought to gain control of these precious liquids.
In addition, antibiotic drugs are currently failing through overuse. No new generation of medicines is likely to be available to replace them in the near future. People may soon be dying again from sore throats and minor cuts. The massive longevity increase in the 20th century may soon begin to reverse itself.
Joel Mokyr's response to all this is that our open-knowledge societies will enable these problems to be solved. John Gray replies: "This is faith, not science." We believe we can fix things, but we can't be sure. And if we can't, then the Earth will fix them herself, flicking the human species into oblivion in the process.
Of course, the end of the world has been promised by Jews, Christians, Muslims and assorted crazies with sandwich boards for as long as there has been a human world to end. But those doomsdays were the product of faith; reason always used to say the world will continue. The point about the new apocalypse is that this situation has reversed. Now faith tells us we will be able to solve our problems; reason says we have no answers now and none are likely in the future. Perhaps we can't cure cancer because the problem is simply beyond our intellects. Perhaps we haven't flown to the stars because our biology and God's physics mean we never can. Perhaps we are close to the limit and the time of plenty is over.
The evidence is mounting that our two sunny centuries of growth and wealth may end in a new Dark Age in which ignorance will replace knowledge, war will replace peace, sickness will replace health and famine will replace obesity. You don't think so? It's always happened in the past. What makes us so different? Nothing, I'm afraid.
WHY I AM SAVING THE WORLD
So, as a new Dark Age approaches, are you just going to carry on living your life as if nothing has changed? John-Paul Flintoff, for one, decided he couldn't bury his head in the sand. He explains how he went on a one-man crusade to show that humanity can adapt and survive
I had just dropped my daughter at the nursery when I began to save the world. I mention this detail because it's important to emphasise that Nancy loves her nursery. If she didn't, I wouldn't drive four miles from home — into London's congestion zone, at a cost of £8 a day. I wouldn't have found myself in Connaught Square that morning, fretting about newspaper stories suggesting the price of petrol was going up. I wouldn't have seen a woman sitting inside a peculiar car parked beside me. Nor would I have noticed, on returning to my VW Golf from the nursery, that the car had moved some yards away and the woman had disappeared.
Intrigued, I wandered over and scribbled in my notebook. When I got home I began to investigate what I had seen. It may seem grandiose to describe my actions that morning, and in the days that followed, as "saving the world". It may be factually incorrect, because I may not have averted global catastrophe after all. You decide — but first get your head round the following, rather terrifying background information. A barrel of oil contains the equivalent of almost 25,000 hours of human labour. A gallon of petrol contains the energy equivalent of 500 hours — enough to propel a three-ton 4x4 along 10 miles; to push it yourself would take nearly three weeks. To support economic growth, the world currently requires more than 30 billion barrels of oil a year. That requirement is constantly increasing, owing to population growth, debt-servicing, and the rapid industrialisation of developing countries such as India and China. But we are about to enter an era in which less oil will be available each year. And many believe that industrial society is doomed. Are we really running out?
Well, half of all supplies come from "giant" oilfields, of which 95% are at least 25 years old; 50% have been producing for 40 years or more. In the North Sea, production peaked in 1999. Late last year, Britain began to import more oil than we export. Worldwide, discoveries of new oilfields peaked in the 1960s; and despite technological advances, new discoveries are at an all-time low. A recent story in The New York Times suggested that oil companies are failing to recoup exploration costs: significant discoveries are so scarce that looking for them is a monetary loser. Not that I normally read The New York Times' coverage of the oil business — like most people, I have tended to consider news about the oil industry to be extremely dull. That started to change when it crept out of the business pages and into the general news, and into advertisements. Practically every day, it seemed, a big oil company took a whole page to promote the fact that we are facing a crisis. One, paid for by Chevron, called on readers to help find a solution. I visited Chevron's website, www.willyoujoinus.com, where a whirring clock monitored worldwide oil consumption: nearly 1,500 barrels a second. The more I read, the scarier it became. Michael Meacher, who was Britain's environment minister for six years, is plainly terrified. "The implications are mind-blowing... Civilisation faces the sharpest and perhaps most violent dislocation in recent history."
Matthew Simmons, a Houston-based energy-industry financier and adviser to George Bush and Dick Cheney, was asked in 2003 if there is a solution. He replied: "The solution is to pray."
These people are not loonies. Optimists believe that the market — the law of supply and demand — will solve the problem. As oil becomes more expensive, we'll shift to some other energy source. But do high prices really cut demand? Since early 1999, oil prices have risen by about 350%. Meanwhile, demand growth in 2004 was the highest in 25 years. That's bad news, because the market won't push energy companies into pursuing alternative sources of energy until oil reaches considerably higher prices. And then it will be too late to make the switch.
The former oil-industry executive Jan Lundberg reckons the crisis will be sudden. "Market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices skyward," he says. "And the market will become paralysed at prices too high for the wheels of commerce and daily living." So forget the price at the pump: when oil becomes truly unaffordable, you will be more worried about the collapse of distribution networks, and the absence of food from local shops.
Ecologists use a technical term, "die-off", to describe what happens when a population grows too big for the resources that sustain it. Where will die-off occur this time? Everywhere. By some estimates, 5 billion of the world's 6½ billion population would never have been able to live without the blessed effects of fossil fuels, and oil in particular: oil powered the pumps that drained the land, and from oil came the chemicals that made intensive farming possible.
If oil dries up, we can assume, those 5 billion must starve. And they won't all be in Africa this time. You too may be fighting off neighbours to protect a shrinking stash of canned food, and, when that runs out, foraging for insects in suburban gardens.
Dr Richard Duncan, of the Institute on Energy and Man, has monitored the issue for years. "I became deeply depressed," he notes, "when I first concluded that our greatest scientific achievements will soon be forgotten and our most cherished monuments will crumble to dust." Of course, this isn't the first time people have predicted imminent apocalypse. During the late 19th century, Londoners feared they would all be killed by the methane in horse manure. But oil is certain to run out eventually, and most experts believe that will happen during the lifetimes of people now living. Pollyannas point out that the size of official oil reserves went up dramatically in the 1980s, and the same will happen again as oil companies discover new oilfields. But geologists say the world has been thoroughly searched already.
Not everyone believes we're doomed. Cheerier prognostications suggest that our future will more closely resemble 1990s Cuba. The American trade embargo, combined with the collapse of Cuba's communist allies in eastern Europe, suddenly deprived the island of imports. Without oil, public transport shut down and TV broadcasts finished early in the evening to save power. Industrial farms needed fuel and spare parts, pesticides and fertiliser — none of which were available. Consequently, the average Cuban diet dropped from about 3,000 calories per day in 1989 to 1,900 calories four years later. In effect, Cubans were skipping a meal a day, every day, week after month after year. Of necessity, the country converted to sustainable farming techniques, replacing artificial fertiliser with ecological alternatives, rotating crops to keep soil rich, and using teams of oxen instead of tractors. There are still problems supplying meat and milk, but over time Cubans regained the equivalent of that missing meal. And ecologists hailed their achievement in creating the world's largest working model of largely sustainable agriculture, largely independent of oil.
Can we steer ourselves towards the Cuban ideal? If so, how?
Well, let me tell you what I did. First I switched exclusively to wind power as the source of my domestic electricity, through a company called Ecotricity, which promises the price will not differ significantly from what I paid before. Then I got a man round to give us a quote for installing double-glazed sash windows. The latest, high-specification glass, I was told, traps domestic heat but allows sunlight to pass through, which means you can turn the thermostat right down in winter. I contacted a company that specialises in solar power. If I acted quickly, I could get government subsidies. I put my name down for a domestic wind turbine — apparently, traffic at the end of my street makes a greater racket, but I would need planning permission. The turbine would cover roughly a third of my electricity needs. The cost: £1,500.
I bought a tray for sprouting seeds (highly nutritious, apparently) and started the long process, as yet unresolved, of persuading my wife that we must dig up our flowerbeds and turn the garden into an allotment. I even got in touch with a local vicar who keeps chickens in his garden, and asked how I might do the same.
Does this really amount to "saving the world"? I've saved the best till last. Remember Nancy's nursery, and the peculiar car I saw in Connaught Square? The car is called a G-Wiz; it runs entirely on electricity, has four seats and storage in the bonnet, and is no bigger than a Smart car. A G-Wiz costs as little as £7,000. It does not incur road tax. It's in the cheapest insurance bracket, and exempt from the congestion charge. In Westminster you can park for nothing in pay-and-display spaces, or in your local car park, with free electricity to charge the batteries.
The downside? It can't go faster than 40mph, and the batteries go flat after about 40 miles. That didn't bother me: we'd use it in London, and for trips further afield we could hire a car. There was one problem. Unless local councils install a socket on the pavement, the only people who can run an electric car are the lucky few with off-street parking.
So I started a campaign. I wrote a letter to drop through my neighbours' doors, explaining about the coming oil crisis and describing the electric car. I promised to write to the council urging it to install electric sockets if at least a few of my neighbours would do the same. Within hours, two names appeared. Over the next couple of weeks, eight others had joined them. With this support, I wrote to my local councillors. For good measure, I sent through government proposals to subsidise that kind of installation by up to 60%. Placing my order for the G-Wiz, I popped a non-refundable cheque for £1,250 in the post. I would just have to hope Barnet council comes through before the car arrives.
I felt proud to belong to a district that was saving the world. And, to be honest, I felt rather pleased with myself. I sent for some fake parking tickets to leave on the windows of petrol-guzzling 4x4s. And I wrote a letter to the Saudi oil minister, urging him to invest in alternative energy technology before it's too late.
It has been a long and tiring campaign. I realise it may not work. I don't honestly believe most people will be motivated to match my shining example. Eventually, the government will impose the kind of restrictions normally used in wartime. When that happens, we'll move out of London to begin a new life of genuine self-sufficiency.
Oil isn't only useful as fuel
Most oil we consume is burnt as fuel. But hundreds of everyday objects are made from petrochemicals. We take them for granted now, but to drive your car, or fly away on a holiday that might just as well have taken place near home, is to burn a valuable resource that can be used to make products like these:
Household: Ballpoint pens, battery cases, bin bags, candles, carpets, curtains, detergents, drinking cups, dyes, enamel, lino, paint, brushes and rollers, pillows, refrigerants, refrigerator linings, roofing, safety glass, shower curtains, telephones, toilet seats, water pipes.
Personal: Cold cream, hair colour, lipstick, shampoo, shaving cream, combs, dentures, denture adhesive, deodorant, glasses, sunglasses, contact lenses, hand lotion, insect repellent, shoes, shoe polish, tights, toothbrushes, toothpaste, vitamin capsules.
Medical: Anaesthetics, antihistamines, antiseptics, artificial limbs, aspirin, bandages, cortisone, hearing aids, heart valves.
Leisure: cameras, fishing rods, footballs, golf balls, skis, stereos, tennis rackets, tents.
Agriculture: Fertilisers, insecticides, preservatives.
Other: Antifreeze, boats, lifejackets, glue, solvents, motorcycle helmets, parachutes, tyres.
How to survive when the oil runs out
Living without oil, if we don't start to prepare for it, will not be like returning to the late 1700s, because we have now lost the infrastructure that made 18th-century life possible. We have also lost our basic survival skills. Dr Richard Duncan, of the Institute on Energy and Man, believes that we will return to living in essentially Stone Age conditions. Here is a taste of how to deal with the essentials.
Water: Animal trails lead to water. Watch the direction in which bees fly. Make containers from animal bladders and gourds.
Food: To remove the bitterness from acorns, soak them in a running stream for a few days. The common dandelion is a versatile and delicious plant. Open pine cones in the heat of a fire to release the nuts inside.
Luxuries: Make soap using lye (from hardwood ash) and animal fat. For candles, sheep fat is best, followed by beef. (Pork fat is very smelly and burns with thick smoke.)
Medicine: Use hypnosis for pain control. Frame suggestions positively. Use the present tense. Be specific and use repetition. Keep it simple.
Develop a survivor personality: Survivors spend almost no time getting upset. They have a good sense of humour and laugh at mistakes.
From: When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance and Planetary Survival, by Matthew Stein
http://foi.missouri.edu/evolvingissues/fallhouseofsaud.html
The fall of the House of Saud.
By Robert Baer
The Atlantic Monthly
May 2003
Americans have long considered Saudi Arabia the one constant in the Arab Middle East--a source of cheap oil, political stability, and lucrative business relationships. But the country is run by an increasingly dysfunctional royal family that has been funding militant Islamic movements abroad in an attempt to protect itself from them at home. A former CIA operative argues, in an article drawn from his new book, Sleeping With the Devil, that today's Saudi Arabia can't last much longer--and the social and economic fallout of its demise could be calamitous
In the decades after World War II the United States and the rest of the industrialized world developed a deep and irrevocable dependence on oil from Saudi Arabia, the world's largest and most important producer. But by the mid-1980s--with the Iran-Iraq war raging, and the OPEC oil embargo a recent and traumatic memory--the supply, which had until that embargo been taken for granted, suddenly seemed at risk. Disaster planners in and out of government began to ask uncomfortable questions. What points of the Saudi oil infrastructure were most vulnerable to terrorist attack? And by what means? What sorts of disruption to the flow of oil, short-term and long-term, could be expected? These were critical concerns. Underlying them all was the fear that a major attack on the Saudi system could cause the global economy to collapse.
The Saudi system seemed--and still seems--frighteningly vulnerable to attack. Although Saudi Arabia has more than eighty active oil and natural-gas fields, and more than a thousand working wells, half its proven oil reserves are contained in only eight fields--including Ghawar, the world's largest onshore oil field, and Safaniya, the world's largest offshore oil field. Various confidential scenarios have suggested that if terrorists were simultaneously to hit only a few sensitive points "downstream" in the oil system from these eight fields--points that control more than 10,000 miles of pipe, both onshore and offshore, in which oil moves from wells to refineries and from refineries to ports, within the kingdom and without-they could effectively put the Saudis out of the oil business for about two years. And it just would not be that hard to do.
[Graphic omitted]The most vulnerable point and the most spectacular target in the Saudi oil system is the Abqaiq complex--the world's largest oil-processing facility, which sits about twenty-four miles inland from the northern end of the Gulf of Bahrain. All petroleum originating in the south is pumped to Abqaiq for processing. For the first two months after a moderate to severe attack on Abqaiq, production there would slow from an average of 6.8 million barrels a day to one million barrels, a loss equivalent to one third of America's daily consumption of crude oil. For seven months following the attack, daily production would remain as much as four million barrels below normal--a reduction roughly equal to what all of the OPEC partners were able to effect during their 1973 embargo.
Oil is pumped from Abqaiq to loading terminals at Ras Tanura and Ju'aymah, both on Saudi Arabia's east coast. Ras Tanura moves only slightly more oil than Ju'aymah does (4.5 million barrels per day as opposed to 4.3 million barrels), but it offers a greater variety of targets and more avenues of attack. Nearly all of Ras Tanura's export oil is handled by an offshore facility known as The Sea Island, and the facility's Platform No. 4 handles half of that. A commando attack on Platform 4 by surface boat or even by a Kilo-class submarine--available in the global arms bazaar--would be devastating. Such an attack would also be easy, as was made abundantly clear in 2000 by the attack on the USS Cole, carded out with lethal effectiveness by suicide bombers piloting nothing more than a Zodiac loaded with plastic explosives.
Another point of vulnerability is Pump Station No. 1, the station closest to Abqaiq, which sends oil uphill, into the Aramah Mountains, so that it can begin its long journey across the peninsula to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. If Pump No. 1 were taken out, the 900,000 barrels of Arabian light and superlight crude that are pumped daily to Yanbu would suddenly stop arriving, and Yanbu would be out of business.
Even the short pipe run from Abqaiq to the Gulf terminals at Ju'aymah and Ras Tanura is not without opportunity. If heavy damage were inflicted on the Qatif Junction manifold complex, which directs the flow of oil for all of eastern Saudi Arabia, the flow would be stopped for months. The pipes that connect the terminals and processing facilities can be replaced off the shelf, but those at Qatif require custom fabrication.
Promoters of Alaskan, Mexican Gulf, Caspian, and Siberian oil all like to point out that the United States has been weaning itself from Saudi Arabian oil, for protection against the effects of just such an attack on the Saudi oil system. Saudi Arabia may sit on 25 percent of the world's known oil reserves, they argue, but it provides somewhere around 18 percent of the crude oil consumed by the United States--and that is down from 28 percent in only a decade. What these people fail to mention is that Saudi Arabia has the world's only important surplus production capacity--two million barrels a day. This keeps the world market liquid. Not only that, but because the Saudis more or less determine the price of oil globally by deciding how much oil to produce, even countries that don't buy Saudi oil would be vulnerable if the flow of that oil were disrupted.
The Saudis have repeatedly used their surplus production capacity to stabilize the international oil market. They used it to break the OPEC embargo (but not before they had enriched themselves by tens of billions of dollars), in 1974. They used it again during the protracted Iran-Iraq war, to keep oil flowing to the industrialized West. They used it during the Gulf War, in 1990-1991; with help from a couple of other Gulf states, they produced an extra five million barrels a day, making up for the loss of Iraqi and Kuwait oil.
And they used it again on September 12, 2001. Less than twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Saudis decided to send nine million barrels of oil to the United States over the next two weeks. The result was that the United States experienced only a slight inflation spike in the wake of the most devastating terrorist attack in history. Had that same surplus capacity been taken out of play with twenty pounds of Semtex, all bets would have been off. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve can support the domestic market for only about seventy days. And if Saudi Arabia's contribution to the world's oil supply were cut off, crude petroleum could quite realistically rise from around $40 a barrel today to as much as $150 a barrel. It wouldn't take long for other economic and social calamities to follow.
Americans have long considered Saudi Arabia the one constant in the Arab Middle East. The Saudis banked our oil under their sand, and losing Saudi Arabia would be like losing the Federal Reserve. Even if the Saudi rulers one day did turn anti-American, the argument went, they would never stop pumping oil, because that would mean cutting their own throats. This, at any rate, is the way we looked at the matter before fifteen Saudis and four other terrorists launched their suicide attacks on September 11; before Osama bin Laden suddenly became for the Arab world the most popular Saudi in history; before USA Today reported last summer that nearly four out of five hits on a clandestine al Qaeda Web site came from inside Saudi Arabia; and before a recent report commissioned by the UN Security Council indicated that Saudi Arabia has transferred $500 million to al Qaeda over the past decade.
[Graphic omitted]Five extended families in the Middle East own about 60 percent of the world's oil. The Saud family, which rules Saudi Arabia, controls more than a third of that amount. This is the fulcrum on which the global economy teeters, and the House of Saud knows what the West is only beginning to learn: that it presides over a kingdom dangerously at war with itself. In the air in Riyadh and Jidda is the conviction that oil money has corrupted the ruling family beyond redemption, even as the general population has grown and gotten poorer; that the country's leaders have failed to protect fellow Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere; and that the House of Saud has let Islam be humiliated--that, in short, the country needs a radical "purification."
We can try to wish this away all we want. But the reality is getting harder and harder to ignore. Per capita income in Saudi Arabia fell from $28,600 in 1981 to $6,800 in 2001. The country's birth rate has soared, becoming one of the highest in the world. Its police force is corrupt, and the rule of law is a sham. Saudi Arabia almost certainly leads the world in public beheadings, the venue for which is often a Riyadh plaza popularly known as Chop-Chop Square. Illegal arms routinely flow into and out of the country. Taking into account its murky "off-budget" defense spending, Saudi Arabia may spend more per capita on defense than any other country in the world (some estimates put the figure at 50 percent of its total revenues), and the House of Saud believes this is necessary for its personal protection. The regime is threatened by increasingly hostile neighbors--and by determined enemies within the country's borders. Popular preachers all over Saudi Arabia call openly for a jihad against the West--a designation that clearly includes the royal family itself--in terms as vitriolic as anything heard in Iran at the height of the Islamic revolution there. The kingdom's mosque schools have become a breeding ground for militant Islam. Recent attacks in Bali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kenya, and the United States, not to mention those against U.S. military personnel within Saudi Arabia, all point back to these schools--and to the House of Saud itself, which, terrified at the prospect of a militant uprising against it, shovels protection money at the fundamentalists and tries to divert their attention abroad.
Recent examples of Saudi support for the fundamentalists abound. In 1997 a high-ranking member of the royal family coordinated a $100 million aid package for the Taliban. In Los Angeles two of the 9/11 hijackers met with a Saudi working for a company contracted to the Ministry of Defense. A raid on the Hamburg apartment of a suspected accomplice of the hijackers turned up the business card of a Saudi diplomat attached to the religious-affairs section of the embassy in Berlin. Most of the more than 650 al Qaeda prisoners being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba--"the worst of the worst," according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--are rumored to be Saudis.
I served for twenty-one years with the CIA's Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, and during all my years there I accepted on faith my government's easy assumption that the money the House of Saud was dumping into weaponry and national security meant that the family's armed forces and bodyguards could keep its members--and their oil--safe. "The royal family is like the fingers of a hand," my colleagues at the State Department liked to say. "Threaten it, and they become a fist." I no longer believe this. Saudi Arabia is more and more a breathtakingly irrational state. For a surprising number of Saudis, including some members of the royal family, taking the kingdom's oil off the world market--even for years, and at the risk of destroying their own economy--is an acceptable alternative to the status quo.
Saudi Arabia has existed as a formal nation only since 1932, when the tribal leader Abdul Aziz ibn Saud gained control of much of the Arabian Peninsula, named the territory after his clan, and proclaimed himself king. But the House of Saud had been powerful in the region ever since the eighteenth century, when the radical cleric Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the puritanical Wahhabi movement, wandered into Dar'iya, near present-day Riyadh, and made a bargain with its ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud. The Saud family would provide the generals, and the Wahhabis would provide the foot soldiers. Until recently it was a marriage made in heaven.
If I had to pick a single moment when the House of Saud truly began to fall apart, it would be when Abdul Aziz ibn Saud's son Fahd, who has been king since 1982, suffered a near fatal stroke, in 1995. As soon as the royal family heard about Fahd's stroke, it went on high alert. From all over Riyadh came the thump-thump of helicopters and the sirens of convoys converging on the hospital where Fahd had been taken.
Among the first to arrive were Jawhara al-Ibrahim, Fahd's fourth and favorite wife, and their spoiled, megalomaniac twenty-nine-year-old son Abdul Aziz--or "Azouzi" ("Dearie"), as Fahd called him. Anyone who knew how Fahd's court ran knew the extent to which Fahd had come to depend on Jawhara, who helped him with everything from remembering his medicine to handling intricate problems of foreign policy. If a prince wanted a matter immediately brought to Fahd's attention, he called Jawhara. As for Abdul Aziz, he was the youngest of Fahd's children and the apple of his father's eye. Fahd indulged him in everything. Stories circulated widely about Abdul Aziz's riding a Harley-Davidson inside his father's palace, chasing servants and smashing furniture. Most of the royal family found the king's indulgence strange. Abdul Aziz was pimply, craven, a bit slow. Apparently, though, he was regarded as the king's good-luck charm. Fahd's favorite soothsayer had once told him that as long as Abdul Aziz was by his side, the king would have a long, fulfilling life. So Fahd did not complain when Abdul Aziz spent $4.6 billion on a sprawling palace and theme park outside Riyadh, because Abdul Aziz was "interested" in history. The property includes a scale model of old Mecca, with actors attending mosque and chanting prayers twenty-four hours a day, and also replicas of the Alhambra, Medina, and half a dozen other Islamic landmarks.
Next to arrive at the hospital, in a great show of solidarity, were Fahd's full brothers--Sultan, the Defense Minister; Nayef, the Interior Minister; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh province. To outsiders, they were a tight bunch. Their mother, from the Sudayri clan, had taught them from an early age to stick together or risk being elbowed out by the forty-odd other children of their father.
Other princes--the children and grandchildren of Ibn Saud's children--hurried to the hospital too, from all over the kingdom and the rest of the world. Private executive jets were lined up wing to wing at Riyadh's airport. These princes couldn't get anywhere near Fahd, but by being close at hand they could pick up more-reliable news and, just as important, demonstrate their fealty. Most of them lived off his largesse--royal stipends, which ran from $800 to $270,000 a month. The princes knew they were breaking the treasury--all told, their brethren numbered 10,000 to 12,000. Would Crown Prince Abdullah--Fahd's half brother, a seventy-one-year-old reformer who was next in line for the throne--cut back on their stipends, or even eliminate them if Fahd died? They had to stick around to find out.
At this point Fahd's brothers were calling doctors in the United States and Europe. They wanted to know not whether Fahd would ever recover his mental capacities, or what kind of life he would be able to live, but what it would take to keep his heart beating and his body warm. Money, of course, wasn't a problem. They told the doctors they were prepared to lease as many Boeing 747 cargo jets as needed to bring in mobile hospitals and medical teams. The doctors couldn't understand the reasoning behind the questions--but only because they didn't understand the politics of the kingdom. What the family knew and the doctors didn't was that Crown Prince Abdullah had long been eager to take power. The only way to keep him at bay was to keep Fahd alive--God willing, until Abdullah died.
Abdullah had always been the odd prince out. To begin with, his mother was from the Rashid tribe, traditional enemies of the Saud. Ibn Saud had married her to cement a trace with the Rashid, and although the Rashid were now loyal subjects, Abdullah was still mistrusted by Fahd's full brothers. Almost alone among the top members of the royal family, Abdullah had chosen the way of the desert, turning his back on the luxuries of Riyadh, Jidda, and Ta'if. He never vacationed lavishly in Europe, unlike King Fahd and his entourage, who typically spent $5 million a day during visits to the palace at Marbella, on the Spanish Riviera. Abdullah preferred to spend his time in a tent, drinking camel's milk and eating dates. He interspersed his conversation with Bedouin aphorisms and turns of phrase. All his children were raised according to the customs of the desert. It is Abdullah who has recently called publicly for democratic reforms, the reining in of the conservative clergy, and military disengagement from the United States.
The royal family hated being reminded that they had abandoned their Bedouin roots, but they hated still more that Abdullah was trying to cut back royal corruption and entitlements. Aping the senior members of the family, the lesser princes had fantastic financial expectations, and their stipends didn't suffice. The third-generation princes were getting only about $19,000 a month--a fraction of what they needed for the lifestyles they sought. To keep even a modest yacht on the French Riviera requires a million dollars a year. What were they supposed to do? In order to make ends meet they had been getting into nastier and nastier business, taking bribes from construction firms (mostly the bin Laden family's) seeking government contracts, getting involved in arms deals, expropriating property from commoners, and selling Saudi visas to guest workers. Another trick they'd discovered was borrowing money from private banks and simply refusing to pay it back. It wasn't as if the larger family could somehow discipline or shame them. There were so many princes that they didn't even all know one another.
Abdullah had made no secret of his intention to put an end to the thievery when he became king--and for a while it looked as if he might get his way even before becoming king. In the mid-1990s, as Saudi Arabia was facing increasingly dire financial difficulties, he persuaded King Fahd to appoint a handful of reformist ministers. Abdullah first had them zero in on expropriations. The practice had become so widespread among the lesser princes that it was completely alienating Saudi Arabia's traditional merchant class and fledgling middle class. A prince might walk into a restaurant, see that it was doing well, and write out a check to buy the place, usually well below market price. There was nothing the owner could do. He knew that if he resisted, he'd end up in jail on trumped-up charges.
The senior princes used their government positions to do the same thing, but on a much grander scale. One of them would pick out a valuable piece of property--maybe a particularly good location for a shopping mall or a new road--and then order a court to condemn it in the name of the state, which would clear the way for the king to award it to him. The money to be earned was staggering, and senior princes had started to rely on the practice to maintain their ever more bloated personal budgets. In Abdullah's view, however, crooked property deals and the like were only a small part of the problem. The off-budget deals were a much bigger part. In off-budget spending, revenue from oil sales goes directly to special accounts, bypassing the Saudi treasury altogether. The money is then used to pay for pet projects, from defense procurement to construction, with no government audits or accountability of any sort. Commissions and bribes are enormous.
As a reformer, Abdullah was kept out of the tight circle that gathered around Fahd after his stroke. Bitterness against Abdullah within the family was so deep that he was in fact blamed for the stroke. One version had it that Fahd and Abdullah had been on the telephone, arguing about who would attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Oman. It was a fundamentally unimportant decision, but relations between the two men had become so toxic, it was said, that Fahd's anger brought on the event. Another rumor in circulation held that Fahd and Abdullah had been arguing about what they always argued about--looming financial collapse. There were even whispers that Abdullah had intentionally provoked Fahd, knowing his health wouldn't withstand a shouting match.
It eventually became clear that Fahd would live, but the extent of his impairment also became clear--embarrassingly so when, during a therapy session not long after the stroke, Fahd defecated in his pool in front of his family. His mind was affected too. Those close to him knew that he would never truly rule again, though he is still led out for ceremonial appearances.
A year and a half after Fahd's stroke Sultan had come to so despise Abdullah that he stopped attending cabinet meetings chaired by him. For Abdullah, the feeling was mutual. In July of 1997 he simply bypassed the Council of Ministers, which was heavily stacked in favor of the Sudayri, and tried to get Fahd to sign off on decrees and laws he thought needed passing. Jawhara and Abdul Aziz teamed up to thwart him.
Mind you, it is not as if the rest of the Fahd clan is united. Sultan, Salman, and Nayef may have arrived at the hospital together in a show of solidarity, but they got a rude shock once they pushed through the front doors. Jawhara and Abdul Aziz blocked them from seeing their brother. The two had set up camp outside Fahd's hospital room and were deriding who and what would or would not get in. That included ministers, senior princes, and doctors, along with petitions, decrees, and everything else.
Saudi succession doesn't operate according to primogeniture. By tradition, senior princes come to a consensus on succession, usually choosing one from their ranks who is thought to have the necessary experience and wisdom. So far the system had served the royal family well, even though Abdullah had become a gadfly, but now Fahd's brothers were afraid that Abdul Aziz was trying to circumvent custom and place himself higher in the line of succession. For one thing, he had started getting more and more involved in national security, from foreign affairs to intelligence. Even the Americans noticed it. When the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, General J. H. Binford Peay, came to Riyadh to meet with Fahd, in July of 1997, he was surprised to find Abdul Aziz at Fahd's side, whispering in his father's ear. Where was Abdullah? What had become of Sultan? Peay had to meet with Abdullah separately, and even then Abdullah didn't talk about the issues at hand.
[Graphic omitted]What really worried some members of his family was that Abdul Aziz was funding radical Wahhabi causes and was gaining strength and popularity as a result. They had little doubt that money was going to clerics and causes that were associated with Osama bin Laden. Abdul Aziz hadn't rediscovered his faith, of course: he was courting favor with the Wahhabis because he knew he would need their support to become king. In September of 1997 he helped to coordinate that $100 million aid package for the Taliban, even though the Taliban were protecting bin Laden--a man who not only had vowed to overthrow the House of Saud but also seemed increasingly capable of doing so. Abdul Aziz was buying support wherever he could find it. In December of 1993 Abdul Aziz authorized $100,000 for a Kansas City mosque. On September 15, 1995, he opened the King Fahd Academy, in Bonn, and two days later he dedicated a new mosque there. Nine days after that he invited the head of the Islamic Society of Spain, Mansur Abdul Salam, to Riyadh. In May of 1996 he and Jawhara arranged for King Fahd to release Muhammad al Fasi from prison. Al Fasi had been imprisoned for opposing the Gulf War and the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia; in other words, he shared some of bin Laden's chief grievances. In December of 1999 the press finally caught wind of Abdul Aziz's penchant for backing radical Islamic causes. One regional account made available by U.S. translation services noted that he was believed to have been funding an associate of bin Laden's, Sa'd al Burayk, who in turn was giving the money to Islamic groups dedicated to killing Russian soldiers and civilians in Chechnya. Nayef promised to put a stop to Abdul Aziz and bring his charity back under control--but he appears to have done nothing.
All the while, throughout the 1990s, the royal family kept growing and growing. A prince might sire forty to seventy children during a lifetime of healthy copulation; however, the resources to support the growing population of the entitled were shrinking, not just in relative terms but in absolute ones. Young royals were pushing up from below, chafing at leaders who were slipping into their late seventies and eighties. The incapacitated King Fahd will turn eighty this year; Crown Prince Abdullah will turn seventy-nine. Many of the most active court intriguers are also in their seventies.
The House of Saud currently has some 30,000 members. The number will be 60,000 in a generation, maybe much higher. According to reliable sources, anecdotal evidence, and the Saudi gossip machine, the royal family is obsessed with gambling, alcohol prostitution, and parties. And the commissions and other outlays to fund their vices are constant. What would the price of oil have to be in 2025 to support even the most basic privileges--for example, free air travel anywhere in the world on Saudia, the Saudi national airline--that the Saudi royals have come to enjoy? Once the family numbers 60,000, or 100,000, will there even be a spare seat for a mere commoner who wants to fly out of Riyadh or Jidda? Reformers among the royal family talk about cutting back the perks, but that's a hard package to sell.
Saudi Arabia operates the world's most advanced welfare state, a kind of anti-Marxian non-workers paradise. Saudis get free health care and interest-free home and business loans. College education is free within the kingdom, and heavily subsidized for those who study abroad. In one of the world's driest spots water is almost free. Electricity, domestic air travel, gasoline, and telephone service are available at far below cost. Many of the kingdom's best and brightest--the most well-educated and in theory, the best prepared for the work world--have little motivation to do any work at all. About a quarter of Saudi Arabia's population, and more than a third of all residents aged fifteen to sixty-four, are foreign nationals, allowed into the kingdom to do the dirty work in the oil fields and to provide domestic help, but also to program the computers and manage the refineries. Seventy percent of all jobs in Saudi Arabia--and close to 90 percent of all private-sector jobs--are filled by foreigners.
Among men, at least, the Saudis have an admirably high literacy rate, especially for a place that only three generations back was inhabited mostly by nomadic tribesmen. About 85 percent of Saudi men aged fifteen and older can read and write, as opposed to less than 70 percent of Saudi women of the same age. But because in recent years the Saudi education system has been largely entrusted to Wahhabi fundamentalists, as a form of appeasement that many in the royal family hope will direct the fundamentalists' animus at foreign targets, its products are generally ill prepared to compete in a technological age or a global economy. Today two out of every three Ph.D.s earned in Saudi Arabia are in Islamic studies. Doctorates are only very rarely granted in computer sciences, engineering, and other worldly vocations. Younger Saudis are being educated to take part in a world that will exist only if the Wahhabi jihadists succeed in turning back the clock not just a few decades but a few centuries.
Then there's the demographic problem. Saudi Arabia has one of the highest birth rates in the world outside Africa--37.25 births for every 1,000 citizens last year, compared with 14.5 per 1,000 in the United States. Ninety-seven percent of all Saudis are sixty-four or younger, and half the population is under eighteen. The simple presence of so many people of working age, and especially so many just now ready to enter the work force, places enormous pressure on an economy--particularly one designed less to accommodate those who want to work than to provide sustenance for those who would rather contemplate original intent in the Koran. A middle class stabilizes society. Saudi Arabia's middle class is imploding.
The functioning of the world's most advanced welfare state is influenced overwhelmingly by fluctuations in the price of oil. In 1981, when the entire kingdom was in effect being put on the dole, oil was selling at nearly $40 a barrel, and the annual per capita income was $28,600. A decade later, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait, refiners were able to buy oil for about $15 a barrel. The Gulf War sent prices back up to about $36 a barrel before they quickly fell. Today a barrel of oil once again fetches around $40, but twenty years' worth of inflation, combined with a population explosion, has brought per capita income down to below $7,000. Because roughly 85 percent of Saudi Arabia's total revenues are oil-based, every dollar increase in the price of a barrel of oil means a gain of about $3 billion to the Saudi treasury. In the early 1980s the kingdom boasted cash reserves on the order of $120 billion; today the figure is estimated to be $21 billion.
Given all these threatening forces, one might think that every map in official Washington would have a red flag sticking out of Riyadh, as a reminder that Saudi Arabia is on life support. The truth is quite the opposite. Before 9/11 the United States never issued an advisory indicating the obvious security problems for Americans traveling to Saudi Arabia. Dependents of U.S. citizens residing there were never advised to leave. According to official Washington, even today the country is stable: its government is in undisputed control of its borders; its police force and army are efficient and loyal; its people are well clothed, well fed, and well educated.
Consider the way the State Department has handled visas for Saudi nationals. Until 9/11, Saudis were not even required to appear at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh or the consulate in Jidda for a visa interview. Under a system called Visa Express a Saudi had only to send his passport, an application, and the application fee to a travel agent. The Saudi travel agent, in other words, stood in for the U.S. government. Just about any Saudi who had the money could book a flight to New York after a mere twenty-hour wait. Until recently Saudis were exempt from the new anti-terrorism entry regulations that apply to citizens of other Middle Eastern countries, despite the fact that most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis.
"The Saudi Arabian Government, at all levels, continued to reaffirm its commitment to combating terrorism," the State Department's 1999 report Patterns of Global Terrorism soberly asserted. The report went on to state, "The Government of Saudi Arabia continued to investigate the bombing in June 1996 of the Khobar Towers." This was false; Prince Nayef, Saudi Arabia's grim Interior Minister, had been stalling the investigation for years. Nayef told the kingdom's other senior princes that he was reluctant to help the United States with the Khobar investigation. In one heated meeting Nayef ignored Defense Minister Sultan when Sultan warned that stonewalling the FBI would end up causing a rift with the United States. To make his point Nayef went out of his way to avoid meeting the FBI's director, Louis Freeh, when Freeh showed up in Saudi Arabia to see what he could do to get the Khobar investigation going. Nayef put himself out of reach-on his yacht, anchored off the coast near Jidda, in the Red Sea--and turned the chore over to two low-ranking officials in the internal-security service, neither of whom knew anything about the Khobar investigation.
Even after the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which were organized by Osama bin Laden from his bases in Afghanistan, the Saudi royals continued to aid the Taliban and its main supporter in the region, Pakistan. This was hardly a secret: in July of 2000 Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, which calls itself the "bible" of the international petroleum industry, reported that Saudi Arabia was sending as many as 150,000 barrels of oil a day to Afghanistan and Pakistan in off-budget foreign aid that had a value of something like $2 million a day. Furthermore, the United States had known since 1994 that the Saudis were supporting Pakistan's nuclear development program, ultimately contributing upwards of a billion dollars. More recently, because Saudi law does not allow foreign agencies to directly question Saudi citizens, the FBI has not been allowed to interview Saudi suspects, including the families of the fifteen Saudi hijackers, about the 9/11 attacks. For more than a year after September 11 Saudi Arabia refused to provide advance manifests for flights coming into the United States--which could have led to a basic and potentially fatal breach of security. Although there are plenty of possible al Qaeda members awaiting trial, as of this writing there hasn't been a single Saudi arrest related to 9/11--not even of a material witness.
As for the CIA, the Agency let the State Department take the lead and decided simply to ignore Saudi Arabia. The CIA recruited no Saudi diplomats to tell us, for instance, what the religious-affairs sections of Saudi embassies were up to. The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence avoided writing national intelligence estimates--appraisals, drawn from various U.S. intelligence services, about areas of potential crisis--on Saudi Arabia, knowing that such estimates, especially when negative, have a tendency to find their way onto the front pages of U.S. newspapers, where they might have an undesired effect on public opinion. The CIA's line became the same as State's: There's no need to worry about Saudi Arabia and its oil reserves.
No need to worry, of course, means business as usual--and for decades now that's meant that almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has been involved with companies doing major deals with Saudi Arabia. Spending a lot of money was a tacit part of the U.S.-Saudi relationship practically from the very beginning: the Americans would buy Saudi Arabia's oil and would provide the Saudis with protection and security; the Saudis would buy American weapons, construction services, communications systems, and drilling rigs. In the global-economics game this is known as "recycling," and in this case it worked well: two-way trade between Saudi Arabia and the United States grew from $56.2 million in 1950 to $19.3 billion in 2000--an average annual growth rate of nearly 70 percent.
Consider the case of the Carlyle Group--a private investment company, founded in 1987, that almost since its inception has been conducting immensely profitable business with Saudi Arabia. From 1993 to 2002 the chairman of Carlyle was Frank Carlucci, who served first as Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser and then as his Secretary of Defense. Carlyle's senior counselor is James Baker, who served as Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush--who in his post-presidency also happens to be a Carlyle adviser. Others who hang their hats at Carlyle include Arthur Levitt, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Bill Clinton, and now Carlyle's senior adviser; John Major, a former Prime Minister of Great Britain and the current chairman of Carlyle Europe; William Kennard, who chaired the Federal Communications Commission during the second Clinton Administration; Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss, a former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank; and Richard Darman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under the first President Bush and also served as deputy secretary of the treasury under Reagan.
Carlyle isn't the only company in this business. Halliburton, run by Dick Cheney between his stints as Secretary of Defense under the first George Bush and Vice President under the second, has been a frequent beneficiary of Saudi money. In late 2001 Halliburton landed a $140 million contract to develop a new Saudi oil field. For many years Condoleezza Rice, now President Bush's National Security Adviser, served on the board of Chevron, which merged in 2001 with Texaco. The new corporation, ChevronTexaco, is a partner with Saudi Aramco in several ventures and has recently joined forces with Nimir Petroleum to develop oil fields in Kazakhstan. Currently on the board of ChevronTexaco are Carla Hills, who served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Gerald Ford and as a U.S. trade representative under George H.W. Bush; the former Louisiana senator J. Bennett Johnston, who made a specialty of energy issues while in Congress; and the former Georgia senator Sam Nunn, who served most notably as head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Elsewhere, Nicholas Brady, the Secretary of the Treasury under the first President Bush, and Edith Holiday, a former assistant to the first President Bush, serve on the board of Amerada Hess, which has teamed with some of Saudi Arabia's most powerful royal-family members to exploit the rich oil resources of Azerbaijan. In 1998 Amerada Hess formed a joint venture, Delta Hess, with the Saudi-owned Delta Oil to explore and exploit petroleum resources in Azerbaijan. The Houston-based Frontera Resources Corporation joined the Azerbaijan hunt the same year, teaming with the newly created Delta Hess. Among the members of Frontera's board of advisers: the former Texas senator former Secretary of the Treasury, and 1988 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen; and John Deutch, a former CIA director.
Just to make sure that no one upsets the workings of this system, perhaps by meddling in internal Saudi affairs, Saudi Arabia now keeps possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks--an agreement worked out in the early eighties by the Reagan Administration, in an effort to get the Saudis to offset U.S. government budget deficits. The Saudis hold another trillion dollars or so in the U.S. stock market. This gives them a remarkable degree of leverage in Washington. If they were suddenly to withdraw all their holdings in this country, the effect, though perhaps not as catastrophic as having a major source of oil shut down, would still be devastating.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship would not be as cozy as it is without there being someone well connected on both sides who can move comfortably between them. That someone is the fifty-four-year-old Prince Bandar. Although he ranks low on the royal bloodline (his father is King Fahd's brother Sultan, the Saudi Defense Minister, but his mother was a house servant), Prince Bandar has been the Saudi ambassador to the United States since 1983. He is the only foreign ambassador to have a security detail assigned to him by the State Department. A daredevil fighter pilot in his younger years, a Muslim with a taste for single-malt Scotch, and an envoy with a perpetually open wallet, Bandar has proved adept at working both the public and the private sides of diplomacy. As the Saudi military attache to the United States, he scored a stunning coup in 1981 by persuading Congress to approve the sale of AWACS air-defense technology to his country, over the objections of AIPAC, the pro-Israeli Washington lobby. Later, as ambassador, Bandar conveyed the kingdom's thanks by secretly placing $10 million in a Vatican City bank, as reported last year in The Washington Post; the money, deposited at the request of William Casey, then the director of the CIA, was to be used by Italy's Christian Democratic Party in a campaign against Italian Communists. Later still, in June of 1984, Bandar started paying out $30 million from the royal family so that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North could buy arms for the Nicaraguan contras.
It is on the personal front, however, where Bandar shines. A visit in the early nineties to the summer home of George H.W. Bush, in Kennebunkport, Maine, earned the prince the affectionate family sobriquet "Bandar Bush." Bandar reciprocated by inviting Bush to hunt pheasant on his estate in England. For good measure he also contributed a million dollars to the construction of the Bush Presidential Library, in College Station, Texas. King Fahd sent another million to Barbara Bush's campaign against illiteracy. (He had donated a million dollars to Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign against drugs four years earlier.) Bandar was once Colin Powell's racquetball partner.
Press accounts portrayed Bandar as largely on the outside during the Clinton years, passing melancholy weeks at his mountain compound in Aspen, Colorado (more than 50,000 square feet, thirty-two rooms, sixteen bathrooms). If Bandar was less physically present, however, he was his usual useful self. In 1992 he persuaded King Fahd to donate $20 million to the University of Arkansas's new Center for Middle Eastern Studies, a gesture of respect for the Arkansas governor who had just been elected President. He is said to have played a role in persuading the Libyans, in 1999, to turn over two intelligence operatives suspected in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland. As he reportedly does at the end of every administration, whether he is perceived as friend or foe, Bandar also invited each of the Clinton Cabinet members out to dinner, at a restaurant of their choice, in a private room or a public one, depending on their willingness to be seen with him.
Prince Bandar once told associates that he is very careful to look after U.S. government officials when they return to private life. "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office," Bandar has observed, according to a source cited in The Washington Post, "you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office". Practically every deal with the Saudis eventually becomes hard to trace, lost in some desert sandstorm back near the wellheads where the money sprang from in the first place. Many of Washington's lobbyists, PR firms, and lawyers live off Saudi money. Just about every Washington think tank has taken it. So have the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Children's National Medical Center, and every presidential library built in the past thirty years.
[Graphic omitted]Bandar hurried back to prominence after the election of George W. Bush, occupying a spot somewhere between ambassador and permanently enthroned visiting head of state. But after 9/11 he began to experience some difficulty in maintaining a positive Saudi image. In March of last year agents of the Treasury Department raided the northern-Virginia offices of four Saudi-based charities: the SAAR Foundation, the Safa Trust, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). Also raided was the local headquarters for the Muslim World League, an umbrella group funded by the Saudi government. All five organizations are located only a few miles from Bandar's mansion overlooking the Potomac River. The organizations can point to a long list of genuinely humanitarian causes they have aided and supported; but they also have a long list of alarming associations. Testifying before Congress in August of 2002, Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted that Tarik Hamdi, an IIIT employee, had personally provided Osama bin Laden with batteries for his satellite phone--a critical link in the stateless world that bin Laden inhabits. IIIT and the SAAR Foundation are suspected of helping to finance Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the sponsors of some of the most lethal suicide bombers in the Middle East. From 1986 to 1994 Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, a brother-in-law to Osama bin Laden, ran the IIRO's Philippine office, from which he channeled funds to al Qaeda. Only excellent work by the Indian police prevented another IIRO employee, Sayed Abu Nasir, from bombing the U.S. consulates in Calcutta and Madras.
In mid-2002 word leaked to the press that the semiofficial Defense Policy Board, chaired by the notorious cold warrior Richard Perle, had sponsored a report declaring Saudi Arabia to be part of the problem of international terrorism rather than part of the solution. Saudi Arabia, the report stated, was "central to the self-destruction of the Arab world and the chief vector of the Arab crisis and its outwardly-directed aggression." It went on to say, "The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader." Within hours Colin Powell was on the phone to the Saudi Foreign Minister, assuring him--and through him, the royal family--that such apostasy was not and never would be the official stance of the Bush Administration. To reinforce the message, President Bush invited Bandar down to the family ranch at Crawford, Texas.
And yet the image problems have continued. In October of 2001, NATO forces raided the offices of the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, founded by Prince Salman, and discovered, among other items, photos of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, before and after they were bombed; photos of the World Trade Center and the USS Cole; information on the use of crop-duster planes; and materials for forging U.S. State Department badges. His job wasn't made any easier when, in the fall of last year, Bandar found himself having to explain away the fact that about $130,000 in charitable contributions from his wife, Princess Haifa, might have ended up with two of the 9/11 hijackers.
In the wake of these revelations a U.S. delegation headed by Alan Larson, President Bush's undersecretary of state for economic affairs, traveled to Riyadh last November, ostensibly to prod the Saudis toward increasing the surveillance of their charities and financial networks. But U.S. and Saudi sources say that one of the main reasons for Larson's trip was to ensure that if the United States invaded Iraq, the Saudis would guarantee the flow of extra oil into the World market. The U.S. embrace of the House of Saud was as tight as ever.
Washington's answer for Saudi Arabia--apart from repeating that nothing is wrong--is to suggest that a little democracy will cure everything. Talk the royal family into ceding at least part of its authority; support the reform-minded princes; set up a model parliament; co-opt the firebrands with a cabinet position or two, a minor political party, and some outright bribery; send Jimmy Carter in to monitor the first election; and in a few generations Riyadh will be Ankara, maybe even London. The governmental mechanism may be faulty, the Washington view maintains, but the people who administer the government are for the most part committed to rooting out corruption, rounding up terrorists, and recognizing the right of the people to self-government.
It's utter nonsense, of course. If an election were held in Saudi Arabia today, if anyone who wanted to could run for the office of president, and if people could vote their hearts without fear of having their heads cut off afterward in Chop-Chop Square, Osama bin Laden would be elected in a landslide--not because the Saudi people want to wash their hands in the blood of the dead of September 11, but simply because bin Laden has dared to do what even the mighty United States of America won't do: stand up to the thieves who rule the country.
Saudi Arabia today is a mess, and it is our mess. We made it the private storage tank for our oil reserves. We reaped the benefits of a steady petroleum supply at a discounted price, and we grabbed at every available Saudi petrodollar. We taught the Saudis exactly what was expected of them. We cannot walk away morally from the consequences of this behavior--and we really can't walk away economically. So we crow about democracy and talk about someday weaning ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil, despite the fact that as long as America has been dependent on foreign oil there has never been an honest, sustained effort at the senior governmental level to reduce long-term U.S. petroleum consumption.
Not all the wishing in the world will change the basic reality of the situation.
* Saudi Arabia controls the largest share of the world's oil and serves as the market regulator for the global petroleum industry.
* No country consumes more oil, and is more dependent on Saudi oil, than the United States.
* The United States and the rest of the industrialized world are therefore absolutely dependent on Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, and will be for decades to come.
* If the Saudi oil spigot is shut off, by terrorism or by political revolution, the effect on the global economy, and particularly on the economy of the United States, will be devastating.
* Saudi oil is controlled by an increasingly bankrupt, criminal, dysfunctional, and out-of-touch royal family that is hated by the people it rules and by the nations that surround its kingdom.
Signs of impending disaster are everywhere, but the House of Saud has chosen to pray that the moment of reckoning will not come soon--and the United States has chosen to look away. So nothing changes: the royal family continues to exhaust the Saudi treasury, buying more and more arms and funneling more and more "charity" money to the jihadists, all in a desperate and self-destructive effort to protect itself.
The fact is that the West, especially the United States, has left the Saudis little choice. Leading U.S. corporations hire and rehire known Saudi crooks and known financiers of terrorism to represent their interests, so that they can land the deals that will pay the commissions back in Saudi Arabia--commissions that will further erode the budget and thus further divide the ruling class from everyone else. Former CIA directors serve on boards whose members have to hold their noses to cut deals with Saudi companies--because that's business, that's the price of entry, that's the way it's done. Ex-Presidents, former prime ministers, onetime senators and congressmen, and Cabinet members walk around with their hands out, acting as if they're doing something else but rarely slowing down, because most of them know it's an endgame too. But sometime soon, one way or another, the House of Saud is coming down.
Robert Baer served for twenty-one years with the CIA, primarily as a field officer in the Middle East. He resigned from the agency in 1997 and was awarded its Career Intelligence Medal in 1998. This article is adapted from the forthcoming book Sleeping With the Devil (Crown Publishers), to be published in June.
© COPYRIGHT 2003 The Atlantic Monthly Magazine
The fall of the House of Saud.
By Robert Baer
The Atlantic Monthly
May 2003
Americans have long considered Saudi Arabia the one constant in the Arab Middle East--a source of cheap oil, political stability, and lucrative business relationships. But the country is run by an increasingly dysfunctional royal family that has been funding militant Islamic movements abroad in an attempt to protect itself from them at home. A former CIA operative argues, in an article drawn from his new book, Sleeping With the Devil, that today's Saudi Arabia can't last much longer--and the social and economic fallout of its demise could be calamitous
In the decades after World War II the United States and the rest of the industrialized world developed a deep and irrevocable dependence on oil from Saudi Arabia, the world's largest and most important producer. But by the mid-1980s--with the Iran-Iraq war raging, and the OPEC oil embargo a recent and traumatic memory--the supply, which had until that embargo been taken for granted, suddenly seemed at risk. Disaster planners in and out of government began to ask uncomfortable questions. What points of the Saudi oil infrastructure were most vulnerable to terrorist attack? And by what means? What sorts of disruption to the flow of oil, short-term and long-term, could be expected? These were critical concerns. Underlying them all was the fear that a major attack on the Saudi system could cause the global economy to collapse.
The Saudi system seemed--and still seems--frighteningly vulnerable to attack. Although Saudi Arabia has more than eighty active oil and natural-gas fields, and more than a thousand working wells, half its proven oil reserves are contained in only eight fields--including Ghawar, the world's largest onshore oil field, and Safaniya, the world's largest offshore oil field. Various confidential scenarios have suggested that if terrorists were simultaneously to hit only a few sensitive points "downstream" in the oil system from these eight fields--points that control more than 10,000 miles of pipe, both onshore and offshore, in which oil moves from wells to refineries and from refineries to ports, within the kingdom and without-they could effectively put the Saudis out of the oil business for about two years. And it just would not be that hard to do.
[Graphic omitted]The most vulnerable point and the most spectacular target in the Saudi oil system is the Abqaiq complex--the world's largest oil-processing facility, which sits about twenty-four miles inland from the northern end of the Gulf of Bahrain. All petroleum originating in the south is pumped to Abqaiq for processing. For the first two months after a moderate to severe attack on Abqaiq, production there would slow from an average of 6.8 million barrels a day to one million barrels, a loss equivalent to one third of America's daily consumption of crude oil. For seven months following the attack, daily production would remain as much as four million barrels below normal--a reduction roughly equal to what all of the OPEC partners were able to effect during their 1973 embargo.
Oil is pumped from Abqaiq to loading terminals at Ras Tanura and Ju'aymah, both on Saudi Arabia's east coast. Ras Tanura moves only slightly more oil than Ju'aymah does (4.5 million barrels per day as opposed to 4.3 million barrels), but it offers a greater variety of targets and more avenues of attack. Nearly all of Ras Tanura's export oil is handled by an offshore facility known as The Sea Island, and the facility's Platform No. 4 handles half of that. A commando attack on Platform 4 by surface boat or even by a Kilo-class submarine--available in the global arms bazaar--would be devastating. Such an attack would also be easy, as was made abundantly clear in 2000 by the attack on the USS Cole, carded out with lethal effectiveness by suicide bombers piloting nothing more than a Zodiac loaded with plastic explosives.
Another point of vulnerability is Pump Station No. 1, the station closest to Abqaiq, which sends oil uphill, into the Aramah Mountains, so that it can begin its long journey across the peninsula to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. If Pump No. 1 were taken out, the 900,000 barrels of Arabian light and superlight crude that are pumped daily to Yanbu would suddenly stop arriving, and Yanbu would be out of business.
Even the short pipe run from Abqaiq to the Gulf terminals at Ju'aymah and Ras Tanura is not without opportunity. If heavy damage were inflicted on the Qatif Junction manifold complex, which directs the flow of oil for all of eastern Saudi Arabia, the flow would be stopped for months. The pipes that connect the terminals and processing facilities can be replaced off the shelf, but those at Qatif require custom fabrication.
Promoters of Alaskan, Mexican Gulf, Caspian, and Siberian oil all like to point out that the United States has been weaning itself from Saudi Arabian oil, for protection against the effects of just such an attack on the Saudi oil system. Saudi Arabia may sit on 25 percent of the world's known oil reserves, they argue, but it provides somewhere around 18 percent of the crude oil consumed by the United States--and that is down from 28 percent in only a decade. What these people fail to mention is that Saudi Arabia has the world's only important surplus production capacity--two million barrels a day. This keeps the world market liquid. Not only that, but because the Saudis more or less determine the price of oil globally by deciding how much oil to produce, even countries that don't buy Saudi oil would be vulnerable if the flow of that oil were disrupted.
The Saudis have repeatedly used their surplus production capacity to stabilize the international oil market. They used it to break the OPEC embargo (but not before they had enriched themselves by tens of billions of dollars), in 1974. They used it again during the protracted Iran-Iraq war, to keep oil flowing to the industrialized West. They used it during the Gulf War, in 1990-1991; with help from a couple of other Gulf states, they produced an extra five million barrels a day, making up for the loss of Iraqi and Kuwait oil.
And they used it again on September 12, 2001. Less than twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Saudis decided to send nine million barrels of oil to the United States over the next two weeks. The result was that the United States experienced only a slight inflation spike in the wake of the most devastating terrorist attack in history. Had that same surplus capacity been taken out of play with twenty pounds of Semtex, all bets would have been off. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve can support the domestic market for only about seventy days. And if Saudi Arabia's contribution to the world's oil supply were cut off, crude petroleum could quite realistically rise from around $40 a barrel today to as much as $150 a barrel. It wouldn't take long for other economic and social calamities to follow.
Americans have long considered Saudi Arabia the one constant in the Arab Middle East. The Saudis banked our oil under their sand, and losing Saudi Arabia would be like losing the Federal Reserve. Even if the Saudi rulers one day did turn anti-American, the argument went, they would never stop pumping oil, because that would mean cutting their own throats. This, at any rate, is the way we looked at the matter before fifteen Saudis and four other terrorists launched their suicide attacks on September 11; before Osama bin Laden suddenly became for the Arab world the most popular Saudi in history; before USA Today reported last summer that nearly four out of five hits on a clandestine al Qaeda Web site came from inside Saudi Arabia; and before a recent report commissioned by the UN Security Council indicated that Saudi Arabia has transferred $500 million to al Qaeda over the past decade.
[Graphic omitted]Five extended families in the Middle East own about 60 percent of the world's oil. The Saud family, which rules Saudi Arabia, controls more than a third of that amount. This is the fulcrum on which the global economy teeters, and the House of Saud knows what the West is only beginning to learn: that it presides over a kingdom dangerously at war with itself. In the air in Riyadh and Jidda is the conviction that oil money has corrupted the ruling family beyond redemption, even as the general population has grown and gotten poorer; that the country's leaders have failed to protect fellow Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere; and that the House of Saud has let Islam be humiliated--that, in short, the country needs a radical "purification."
We can try to wish this away all we want. But the reality is getting harder and harder to ignore. Per capita income in Saudi Arabia fell from $28,600 in 1981 to $6,800 in 2001. The country's birth rate has soared, becoming one of the highest in the world. Its police force is corrupt, and the rule of law is a sham. Saudi Arabia almost certainly leads the world in public beheadings, the venue for which is often a Riyadh plaza popularly known as Chop-Chop Square. Illegal arms routinely flow into and out of the country. Taking into account its murky "off-budget" defense spending, Saudi Arabia may spend more per capita on defense than any other country in the world (some estimates put the figure at 50 percent of its total revenues), and the House of Saud believes this is necessary for its personal protection. The regime is threatened by increasingly hostile neighbors--and by determined enemies within the country's borders. Popular preachers all over Saudi Arabia call openly for a jihad against the West--a designation that clearly includes the royal family itself--in terms as vitriolic as anything heard in Iran at the height of the Islamic revolution there. The kingdom's mosque schools have become a breeding ground for militant Islam. Recent attacks in Bali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kenya, and the United States, not to mention those against U.S. military personnel within Saudi Arabia, all point back to these schools--and to the House of Saud itself, which, terrified at the prospect of a militant uprising against it, shovels protection money at the fundamentalists and tries to divert their attention abroad.
Recent examples of Saudi support for the fundamentalists abound. In 1997 a high-ranking member of the royal family coordinated a $100 million aid package for the Taliban. In Los Angeles two of the 9/11 hijackers met with a Saudi working for a company contracted to the Ministry of Defense. A raid on the Hamburg apartment of a suspected accomplice of the hijackers turned up the business card of a Saudi diplomat attached to the religious-affairs section of the embassy in Berlin. Most of the more than 650 al Qaeda prisoners being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba--"the worst of the worst," according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--are rumored to be Saudis.
I served for twenty-one years with the CIA's Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, and during all my years there I accepted on faith my government's easy assumption that the money the House of Saud was dumping into weaponry and national security meant that the family's armed forces and bodyguards could keep its members--and their oil--safe. "The royal family is like the fingers of a hand," my colleagues at the State Department liked to say. "Threaten it, and they become a fist." I no longer believe this. Saudi Arabia is more and more a breathtakingly irrational state. For a surprising number of Saudis, including some members of the royal family, taking the kingdom's oil off the world market--even for years, and at the risk of destroying their own economy--is an acceptable alternative to the status quo.
Saudi Arabia has existed as a formal nation only since 1932, when the tribal leader Abdul Aziz ibn Saud gained control of much of the Arabian Peninsula, named the territory after his clan, and proclaimed himself king. But the House of Saud had been powerful in the region ever since the eighteenth century, when the radical cleric Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, the founder of the puritanical Wahhabi movement, wandered into Dar'iya, near present-day Riyadh, and made a bargain with its ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud. The Saud family would provide the generals, and the Wahhabis would provide the foot soldiers. Until recently it was a marriage made in heaven.
If I had to pick a single moment when the House of Saud truly began to fall apart, it would be when Abdul Aziz ibn Saud's son Fahd, who has been king since 1982, suffered a near fatal stroke, in 1995. As soon as the royal family heard about Fahd's stroke, it went on high alert. From all over Riyadh came the thump-thump of helicopters and the sirens of convoys converging on the hospital where Fahd had been taken.
Among the first to arrive were Jawhara al-Ibrahim, Fahd's fourth and favorite wife, and their spoiled, megalomaniac twenty-nine-year-old son Abdul Aziz--or "Azouzi" ("Dearie"), as Fahd called him. Anyone who knew how Fahd's court ran knew the extent to which Fahd had come to depend on Jawhara, who helped him with everything from remembering his medicine to handling intricate problems of foreign policy. If a prince wanted a matter immediately brought to Fahd's attention, he called Jawhara. As for Abdul Aziz, he was the youngest of Fahd's children and the apple of his father's eye. Fahd indulged him in everything. Stories circulated widely about Abdul Aziz's riding a Harley-Davidson inside his father's palace, chasing servants and smashing furniture. Most of the royal family found the king's indulgence strange. Abdul Aziz was pimply, craven, a bit slow. Apparently, though, he was regarded as the king's good-luck charm. Fahd's favorite soothsayer had once told him that as long as Abdul Aziz was by his side, the king would have a long, fulfilling life. So Fahd did not complain when Abdul Aziz spent $4.6 billion on a sprawling palace and theme park outside Riyadh, because Abdul Aziz was "interested" in history. The property includes a scale model of old Mecca, with actors attending mosque and chanting prayers twenty-four hours a day, and also replicas of the Alhambra, Medina, and half a dozen other Islamic landmarks.
Next to arrive at the hospital, in a great show of solidarity, were Fahd's full brothers--Sultan, the Defense Minister; Nayef, the Interior Minister; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh province. To outsiders, they were a tight bunch. Their mother, from the Sudayri clan, had taught them from an early age to stick together or risk being elbowed out by the forty-odd other children of their father.
Other princes--the children and grandchildren of Ibn Saud's children--hurried to the hospital too, from all over the kingdom and the rest of the world. Private executive jets were lined up wing to wing at Riyadh's airport. These princes couldn't get anywhere near Fahd, but by being close at hand they could pick up more-reliable news and, just as important, demonstrate their fealty. Most of them lived off his largesse--royal stipends, which ran from $800 to $270,000 a month. The princes knew they were breaking the treasury--all told, their brethren numbered 10,000 to 12,000. Would Crown Prince Abdullah--Fahd's half brother, a seventy-one-year-old reformer who was next in line for the throne--cut back on their stipends, or even eliminate them if Fahd died? They had to stick around to find out.
At this point Fahd's brothers were calling doctors in the United States and Europe. They wanted to know not whether Fahd would ever recover his mental capacities, or what kind of life he would be able to live, but what it would take to keep his heart beating and his body warm. Money, of course, wasn't a problem. They told the doctors they were prepared to lease as many Boeing 747 cargo jets as needed to bring in mobile hospitals and medical teams. The doctors couldn't understand the reasoning behind the questions--but only because they didn't understand the politics of the kingdom. What the family knew and the doctors didn't was that Crown Prince Abdullah had long been eager to take power. The only way to keep him at bay was to keep Fahd alive--God willing, until Abdullah died.
Abdullah had always been the odd prince out. To begin with, his mother was from the Rashid tribe, traditional enemies of the Saud. Ibn Saud had married her to cement a trace with the Rashid, and although the Rashid were now loyal subjects, Abdullah was still mistrusted by Fahd's full brothers. Almost alone among the top members of the royal family, Abdullah had chosen the way of the desert, turning his back on the luxuries of Riyadh, Jidda, and Ta'if. He never vacationed lavishly in Europe, unlike King Fahd and his entourage, who typically spent $5 million a day during visits to the palace at Marbella, on the Spanish Riviera. Abdullah preferred to spend his time in a tent, drinking camel's milk and eating dates. He interspersed his conversation with Bedouin aphorisms and turns of phrase. All his children were raised according to the customs of the desert. It is Abdullah who has recently called publicly for democratic reforms, the reining in of the conservative clergy, and military disengagement from the United States.
The royal family hated being reminded that they had abandoned their Bedouin roots, but they hated still more that Abdullah was trying to cut back royal corruption and entitlements. Aping the senior members of the family, the lesser princes had fantastic financial expectations, and their stipends didn't suffice. The third-generation princes were getting only about $19,000 a month--a fraction of what they needed for the lifestyles they sought. To keep even a modest yacht on the French Riviera requires a million dollars a year. What were they supposed to do? In order to make ends meet they had been getting into nastier and nastier business, taking bribes from construction firms (mostly the bin Laden family's) seeking government contracts, getting involved in arms deals, expropriating property from commoners, and selling Saudi visas to guest workers. Another trick they'd discovered was borrowing money from private banks and simply refusing to pay it back. It wasn't as if the larger family could somehow discipline or shame them. There were so many princes that they didn't even all know one another.
Abdullah had made no secret of his intention to put an end to the thievery when he became king--and for a while it looked as if he might get his way even before becoming king. In the mid-1990s, as Saudi Arabia was facing increasingly dire financial difficulties, he persuaded King Fahd to appoint a handful of reformist ministers. Abdullah first had them zero in on expropriations. The practice had become so widespread among the lesser princes that it was completely alienating Saudi Arabia's traditional merchant class and fledgling middle class. A prince might walk into a restaurant, see that it was doing well, and write out a check to buy the place, usually well below market price. There was nothing the owner could do. He knew that if he resisted, he'd end up in jail on trumped-up charges.
The senior princes used their government positions to do the same thing, but on a much grander scale. One of them would pick out a valuable piece of property--maybe a particularly good location for a shopping mall or a new road--and then order a court to condemn it in the name of the state, which would clear the way for the king to award it to him. The money to be earned was staggering, and senior princes had started to rely on the practice to maintain their ever more bloated personal budgets. In Abdullah's view, however, crooked property deals and the like were only a small part of the problem. The off-budget deals were a much bigger part. In off-budget spending, revenue from oil sales goes directly to special accounts, bypassing the Saudi treasury altogether. The money is then used to pay for pet projects, from defense procurement to construction, with no government audits or accountability of any sort. Commissions and bribes are enormous.
As a reformer, Abdullah was kept out of the tight circle that gathered around Fahd after his stroke. Bitterness against Abdullah within the family was so deep that he was in fact blamed for the stroke. One version had it that Fahd and Abdullah had been on the telephone, arguing about who would attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Oman. It was a fundamentally unimportant decision, but relations between the two men had become so toxic, it was said, that Fahd's anger brought on the event. Another rumor in circulation held that Fahd and Abdullah had been arguing about what they always argued about--looming financial collapse. There were even whispers that Abdullah had intentionally provoked Fahd, knowing his health wouldn't withstand a shouting match.
It eventually became clear that Fahd would live, but the extent of his impairment also became clear--embarrassingly so when, during a therapy session not long after the stroke, Fahd defecated in his pool in front of his family. His mind was affected too. Those close to him knew that he would never truly rule again, though he is still led out for ceremonial appearances.
A year and a half after Fahd's stroke Sultan had come to so despise Abdullah that he stopped attending cabinet meetings chaired by him. For Abdullah, the feeling was mutual. In July of 1997 he simply bypassed the Council of Ministers, which was heavily stacked in favor of the Sudayri, and tried to get Fahd to sign off on decrees and laws he thought needed passing. Jawhara and Abdul Aziz teamed up to thwart him.
Mind you, it is not as if the rest of the Fahd clan is united. Sultan, Salman, and Nayef may have arrived at the hospital together in a show of solidarity, but they got a rude shock once they pushed through the front doors. Jawhara and Abdul Aziz blocked them from seeing their brother. The two had set up camp outside Fahd's hospital room and were deriding who and what would or would not get in. That included ministers, senior princes, and doctors, along with petitions, decrees, and everything else.
Saudi succession doesn't operate according to primogeniture. By tradition, senior princes come to a consensus on succession, usually choosing one from their ranks who is thought to have the necessary experience and wisdom. So far the system had served the royal family well, even though Abdullah had become a gadfly, but now Fahd's brothers were afraid that Abdul Aziz was trying to circumvent custom and place himself higher in the line of succession. For one thing, he had started getting more and more involved in national security, from foreign affairs to intelligence. Even the Americans noticed it. When the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, General J. H. Binford Peay, came to Riyadh to meet with Fahd, in July of 1997, he was surprised to find Abdul Aziz at Fahd's side, whispering in his father's ear. Where was Abdullah? What had become of Sultan? Peay had to meet with Abdullah separately, and even then Abdullah didn't talk about the issues at hand.
[Graphic omitted]What really worried some members of his family was that Abdul Aziz was funding radical Wahhabi causes and was gaining strength and popularity as a result. They had little doubt that money was going to clerics and causes that were associated with Osama bin Laden. Abdul Aziz hadn't rediscovered his faith, of course: he was courting favor with the Wahhabis because he knew he would need their support to become king. In September of 1997 he helped to coordinate that $100 million aid package for the Taliban, even though the Taliban were protecting bin Laden--a man who not only had vowed to overthrow the House of Saud but also seemed increasingly capable of doing so. Abdul Aziz was buying support wherever he could find it. In December of 1993 Abdul Aziz authorized $100,000 for a Kansas City mosque. On September 15, 1995, he opened the King Fahd Academy, in Bonn, and two days later he dedicated a new mosque there. Nine days after that he invited the head of the Islamic Society of Spain, Mansur Abdul Salam, to Riyadh. In May of 1996 he and Jawhara arranged for King Fahd to release Muhammad al Fasi from prison. Al Fasi had been imprisoned for opposing the Gulf War and the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia; in other words, he shared some of bin Laden's chief grievances. In December of 1999 the press finally caught wind of Abdul Aziz's penchant for backing radical Islamic causes. One regional account made available by U.S. translation services noted that he was believed to have been funding an associate of bin Laden's, Sa'd al Burayk, who in turn was giving the money to Islamic groups dedicated to killing Russian soldiers and civilians in Chechnya. Nayef promised to put a stop to Abdul Aziz and bring his charity back under control--but he appears to have done nothing.
All the while, throughout the 1990s, the royal family kept growing and growing. A prince might sire forty to seventy children during a lifetime of healthy copulation; however, the resources to support the growing population of the entitled were shrinking, not just in relative terms but in absolute ones. Young royals were pushing up from below, chafing at leaders who were slipping into their late seventies and eighties. The incapacitated King Fahd will turn eighty this year; Crown Prince Abdullah will turn seventy-nine. Many of the most active court intriguers are also in their seventies.
The House of Saud currently has some 30,000 members. The number will be 60,000 in a generation, maybe much higher. According to reliable sources, anecdotal evidence, and the Saudi gossip machine, the royal family is obsessed with gambling, alcohol prostitution, and parties. And the commissions and other outlays to fund their vices are constant. What would the price of oil have to be in 2025 to support even the most basic privileges--for example, free air travel anywhere in the world on Saudia, the Saudi national airline--that the Saudi royals have come to enjoy? Once the family numbers 60,000, or 100,000, will there even be a spare seat for a mere commoner who wants to fly out of Riyadh or Jidda? Reformers among the royal family talk about cutting back the perks, but that's a hard package to sell.
Saudi Arabia operates the world's most advanced welfare state, a kind of anti-Marxian non-workers paradise. Saudis get free health care and interest-free home and business loans. College education is free within the kingdom, and heavily subsidized for those who study abroad. In one of the world's driest spots water is almost free. Electricity, domestic air travel, gasoline, and telephone service are available at far below cost. Many of the kingdom's best and brightest--the most well-educated and in theory, the best prepared for the work world--have little motivation to do any work at all. About a quarter of Saudi Arabia's population, and more than a third of all residents aged fifteen to sixty-four, are foreign nationals, allowed into the kingdom to do the dirty work in the oil fields and to provide domestic help, but also to program the computers and manage the refineries. Seventy percent of all jobs in Saudi Arabia--and close to 90 percent of all private-sector jobs--are filled by foreigners.
Among men, at least, the Saudis have an admirably high literacy rate, especially for a place that only three generations back was inhabited mostly by nomadic tribesmen. About 85 percent of Saudi men aged fifteen and older can read and write, as opposed to less than 70 percent of Saudi women of the same age. But because in recent years the Saudi education system has been largely entrusted to Wahhabi fundamentalists, as a form of appeasement that many in the royal family hope will direct the fundamentalists' animus at foreign targets, its products are generally ill prepared to compete in a technological age or a global economy. Today two out of every three Ph.D.s earned in Saudi Arabia are in Islamic studies. Doctorates are only very rarely granted in computer sciences, engineering, and other worldly vocations. Younger Saudis are being educated to take part in a world that will exist only if the Wahhabi jihadists succeed in turning back the clock not just a few decades but a few centuries.
Then there's the demographic problem. Saudi Arabia has one of the highest birth rates in the world outside Africa--37.25 births for every 1,000 citizens last year, compared with 14.5 per 1,000 in the United States. Ninety-seven percent of all Saudis are sixty-four or younger, and half the population is under eighteen. The simple presence of so many people of working age, and especially so many just now ready to enter the work force, places enormous pressure on an economy--particularly one designed less to accommodate those who want to work than to provide sustenance for those who would rather contemplate original intent in the Koran. A middle class stabilizes society. Saudi Arabia's middle class is imploding.
The functioning of the world's most advanced welfare state is influenced overwhelmingly by fluctuations in the price of oil. In 1981, when the entire kingdom was in effect being put on the dole, oil was selling at nearly $40 a barrel, and the annual per capita income was $28,600. A decade later, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait, refiners were able to buy oil for about $15 a barrel. The Gulf War sent prices back up to about $36 a barrel before they quickly fell. Today a barrel of oil once again fetches around $40, but twenty years' worth of inflation, combined with a population explosion, has brought per capita income down to below $7,000. Because roughly 85 percent of Saudi Arabia's total revenues are oil-based, every dollar increase in the price of a barrel of oil means a gain of about $3 billion to the Saudi treasury. In the early 1980s the kingdom boasted cash reserves on the order of $120 billion; today the figure is estimated to be $21 billion.
Given all these threatening forces, one might think that every map in official Washington would have a red flag sticking out of Riyadh, as a reminder that Saudi Arabia is on life support. The truth is quite the opposite. Before 9/11 the United States never issued an advisory indicating the obvious security problems for Americans traveling to Saudi Arabia. Dependents of U.S. citizens residing there were never advised to leave. According to official Washington, even today the country is stable: its government is in undisputed control of its borders; its police force and army are efficient and loyal; its people are well clothed, well fed, and well educated.
Consider the way the State Department has handled visas for Saudi nationals. Until 9/11, Saudis were not even required to appear at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh or the consulate in Jidda for a visa interview. Under a system called Visa Express a Saudi had only to send his passport, an application, and the application fee to a travel agent. The Saudi travel agent, in other words, stood in for the U.S. government. Just about any Saudi who had the money could book a flight to New York after a mere twenty-hour wait. Until recently Saudis were exempt from the new anti-terrorism entry regulations that apply to citizens of other Middle Eastern countries, despite the fact that most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis.
"The Saudi Arabian Government, at all levels, continued to reaffirm its commitment to combating terrorism," the State Department's 1999 report Patterns of Global Terrorism soberly asserted. The report went on to state, "The Government of Saudi Arabia continued to investigate the bombing in June 1996 of the Khobar Towers." This was false; Prince Nayef, Saudi Arabia's grim Interior Minister, had been stalling the investigation for years. Nayef told the kingdom's other senior princes that he was reluctant to help the United States with the Khobar investigation. In one heated meeting Nayef ignored Defense Minister Sultan when Sultan warned that stonewalling the FBI would end up causing a rift with the United States. To make his point Nayef went out of his way to avoid meeting the FBI's director, Louis Freeh, when Freeh showed up in Saudi Arabia to see what he could do to get the Khobar investigation going. Nayef put himself out of reach-on his yacht, anchored off the coast near Jidda, in the Red Sea--and turned the chore over to two low-ranking officials in the internal-security service, neither of whom knew anything about the Khobar investigation.
Even after the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which were organized by Osama bin Laden from his bases in Afghanistan, the Saudi royals continued to aid the Taliban and its main supporter in the region, Pakistan. This was hardly a secret: in July of 2000 Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, which calls itself the "bible" of the international petroleum industry, reported that Saudi Arabia was sending as many as 150,000 barrels of oil a day to Afghanistan and Pakistan in off-budget foreign aid that had a value of something like $2 million a day. Furthermore, the United States had known since 1994 that the Saudis were supporting Pakistan's nuclear development program, ultimately contributing upwards of a billion dollars. More recently, because Saudi law does not allow foreign agencies to directly question Saudi citizens, the FBI has not been allowed to interview Saudi suspects, including the families of the fifteen Saudi hijackers, about the 9/11 attacks. For more than a year after September 11 Saudi Arabia refused to provide advance manifests for flights coming into the United States--which could have led to a basic and potentially fatal breach of security. Although there are plenty of possible al Qaeda members awaiting trial, as of this writing there hasn't been a single Saudi arrest related to 9/11--not even of a material witness.
As for the CIA, the Agency let the State Department take the lead and decided simply to ignore Saudi Arabia. The CIA recruited no Saudi diplomats to tell us, for instance, what the religious-affairs sections of Saudi embassies were up to. The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence avoided writing national intelligence estimates--appraisals, drawn from various U.S. intelligence services, about areas of potential crisis--on Saudi Arabia, knowing that such estimates, especially when negative, have a tendency to find their way onto the front pages of U.S. newspapers, where they might have an undesired effect on public opinion. The CIA's line became the same as State's: There's no need to worry about Saudi Arabia and its oil reserves.
No need to worry, of course, means business as usual--and for decades now that's meant that almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has been involved with companies doing major deals with Saudi Arabia. Spending a lot of money was a tacit part of the U.S.-Saudi relationship practically from the very beginning: the Americans would buy Saudi Arabia's oil and would provide the Saudis with protection and security; the Saudis would buy American weapons, construction services, communications systems, and drilling rigs. In the global-economics game this is known as "recycling," and in this case it worked well: two-way trade between Saudi Arabia and the United States grew from $56.2 million in 1950 to $19.3 billion in 2000--an average annual growth rate of nearly 70 percent.
Consider the case of the Carlyle Group--a private investment company, founded in 1987, that almost since its inception has been conducting immensely profitable business with Saudi Arabia. From 1993 to 2002 the chairman of Carlyle was Frank Carlucci, who served first as Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser and then as his Secretary of Defense. Carlyle's senior counselor is James Baker, who served as Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush--who in his post-presidency also happens to be a Carlyle adviser. Others who hang their hats at Carlyle include Arthur Levitt, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Bill Clinton, and now Carlyle's senior adviser; John Major, a former Prime Minister of Great Britain and the current chairman of Carlyle Europe; William Kennard, who chaired the Federal Communications Commission during the second Clinton Administration; Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss, a former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank; and Richard Darman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under the first President Bush and also served as deputy secretary of the treasury under Reagan.
Carlyle isn't the only company in this business. Halliburton, run by Dick Cheney between his stints as Secretary of Defense under the first George Bush and Vice President under the second, has been a frequent beneficiary of Saudi money. In late 2001 Halliburton landed a $140 million contract to develop a new Saudi oil field. For many years Condoleezza Rice, now President Bush's National Security Adviser, served on the board of Chevron, which merged in 2001 with Texaco. The new corporation, ChevronTexaco, is a partner with Saudi Aramco in several ventures and has recently joined forces with Nimir Petroleum to develop oil fields in Kazakhstan. Currently on the board of ChevronTexaco are Carla Hills, who served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Gerald Ford and as a U.S. trade representative under George H.W. Bush; the former Louisiana senator J. Bennett Johnston, who made a specialty of energy issues while in Congress; and the former Georgia senator Sam Nunn, who served most notably as head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Elsewhere, Nicholas Brady, the Secretary of the Treasury under the first President Bush, and Edith Holiday, a former assistant to the first President Bush, serve on the board of Amerada Hess, which has teamed with some of Saudi Arabia's most powerful royal-family members to exploit the rich oil resources of Azerbaijan. In 1998 Amerada Hess formed a joint venture, Delta Hess, with the Saudi-owned Delta Oil to explore and exploit petroleum resources in Azerbaijan. The Houston-based Frontera Resources Corporation joined the Azerbaijan hunt the same year, teaming with the newly created Delta Hess. Among the members of Frontera's board of advisers: the former Texas senator former Secretary of the Treasury, and 1988 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen; and John Deutch, a former CIA director.
Just to make sure that no one upsets the workings of this system, perhaps by meddling in internal Saudi affairs, Saudi Arabia now keeps possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks--an agreement worked out in the early eighties by the Reagan Administration, in an effort to get the Saudis to offset U.S. government budget deficits. The Saudis hold another trillion dollars or so in the U.S. stock market. This gives them a remarkable degree of leverage in Washington. If they were suddenly to withdraw all their holdings in this country, the effect, though perhaps not as catastrophic as having a major source of oil shut down, would still be devastating.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship would not be as cozy as it is without there being someone well connected on both sides who can move comfortably between them. That someone is the fifty-four-year-old Prince Bandar. Although he ranks low on the royal bloodline (his father is King Fahd's brother Sultan, the Saudi Defense Minister, but his mother was a house servant), Prince Bandar has been the Saudi ambassador to the United States since 1983. He is the only foreign ambassador to have a security detail assigned to him by the State Department. A daredevil fighter pilot in his younger years, a Muslim with a taste for single-malt Scotch, and an envoy with a perpetually open wallet, Bandar has proved adept at working both the public and the private sides of diplomacy. As the Saudi military attache to the United States, he scored a stunning coup in 1981 by persuading Congress to approve the sale of AWACS air-defense technology to his country, over the objections of AIPAC, the pro-Israeli Washington lobby. Later, as ambassador, Bandar conveyed the kingdom's thanks by secretly placing $10 million in a Vatican City bank, as reported last year in The Washington Post; the money, deposited at the request of William Casey, then the director of the CIA, was to be used by Italy's Christian Democratic Party in a campaign against Italian Communists. Later still, in June of 1984, Bandar started paying out $30 million from the royal family so that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North could buy arms for the Nicaraguan contras.
It is on the personal front, however, where Bandar shines. A visit in the early nineties to the summer home of George H.W. Bush, in Kennebunkport, Maine, earned the prince the affectionate family sobriquet "Bandar Bush." Bandar reciprocated by inviting Bush to hunt pheasant on his estate in England. For good measure he also contributed a million dollars to the construction of the Bush Presidential Library, in College Station, Texas. King Fahd sent another million to Barbara Bush's campaign against illiteracy. (He had donated a million dollars to Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign against drugs four years earlier.) Bandar was once Colin Powell's racquetball partner.
Press accounts portrayed Bandar as largely on the outside during the Clinton years, passing melancholy weeks at his mountain compound in Aspen, Colorado (more than 50,000 square feet, thirty-two rooms, sixteen bathrooms). If Bandar was less physically present, however, he was his usual useful self. In 1992 he persuaded King Fahd to donate $20 million to the University of Arkansas's new Center for Middle Eastern Studies, a gesture of respect for the Arkansas governor who had just been elected President. He is said to have played a role in persuading the Libyans, in 1999, to turn over two intelligence operatives suspected in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland. As he reportedly does at the end of every administration, whether he is perceived as friend or foe, Bandar also invited each of the Clinton Cabinet members out to dinner, at a restaurant of their choice, in a private room or a public one, depending on their willingness to be seen with him.
Prince Bandar once told associates that he is very careful to look after U.S. government officials when they return to private life. "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office," Bandar has observed, according to a source cited in The Washington Post, "you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office". Practically every deal with the Saudis eventually becomes hard to trace, lost in some desert sandstorm back near the wellheads where the money sprang from in the first place. Many of Washington's lobbyists, PR firms, and lawyers live off Saudi money. Just about every Washington think tank has taken it. So have the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Children's National Medical Center, and every presidential library built in the past thirty years.
[Graphic omitted]Bandar hurried back to prominence after the election of George W. Bush, occupying a spot somewhere between ambassador and permanently enthroned visiting head of state. But after 9/11 he began to experience some difficulty in maintaining a positive Saudi image. In March of last year agents of the Treasury Department raided the northern-Virginia offices of four Saudi-based charities: the SAAR Foundation, the Safa Trust, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). Also raided was the local headquarters for the Muslim World League, an umbrella group funded by the Saudi government. All five organizations are located only a few miles from Bandar's mansion overlooking the Potomac River. The organizations can point to a long list of genuinely humanitarian causes they have aided and supported; but they also have a long list of alarming associations. Testifying before Congress in August of 2002, Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted that Tarik Hamdi, an IIIT employee, had personally provided Osama bin Laden with batteries for his satellite phone--a critical link in the stateless world that bin Laden inhabits. IIIT and the SAAR Foundation are suspected of helping to finance Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the sponsors of some of the most lethal suicide bombers in the Middle East. From 1986 to 1994 Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, a brother-in-law to Osama bin Laden, ran the IIRO's Philippine office, from which he channeled funds to al Qaeda. Only excellent work by the Indian police prevented another IIRO employee, Sayed Abu Nasir, from bombing the U.S. consulates in Calcutta and Madras.
In mid-2002 word leaked to the press that the semiofficial Defense Policy Board, chaired by the notorious cold warrior Richard Perle, had sponsored a report declaring Saudi Arabia to be part of the problem of international terrorism rather than part of the solution. Saudi Arabia, the report stated, was "central to the self-destruction of the Arab world and the chief vector of the Arab crisis and its outwardly-directed aggression." It went on to say, "The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader." Within hours Colin Powell was on the phone to the Saudi Foreign Minister, assuring him--and through him, the royal family--that such apostasy was not and never would be the official stance of the Bush Administration. To reinforce the message, President Bush invited Bandar down to the family ranch at Crawford, Texas.
And yet the image problems have continued. In October of 2001, NATO forces raided the offices of the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, founded by Prince Salman, and discovered, among other items, photos of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, before and after they were bombed; photos of the World Trade Center and the USS Cole; information on the use of crop-duster planes; and materials for forging U.S. State Department badges. His job wasn't made any easier when, in the fall of last year, Bandar found himself having to explain away the fact that about $130,000 in charitable contributions from his wife, Princess Haifa, might have ended up with two of the 9/11 hijackers.
In the wake of these revelations a U.S. delegation headed by Alan Larson, President Bush's undersecretary of state for economic affairs, traveled to Riyadh last November, ostensibly to prod the Saudis toward increasing the surveillance of their charities and financial networks. But U.S. and Saudi sources say that one of the main reasons for Larson's trip was to ensure that if the United States invaded Iraq, the Saudis would guarantee the flow of extra oil into the World market. The U.S. embrace of the House of Saud was as tight as ever.
Washington's answer for Saudi Arabia--apart from repeating that nothing is wrong--is to suggest that a little democracy will cure everything. Talk the royal family into ceding at least part of its authority; support the reform-minded princes; set up a model parliament; co-opt the firebrands with a cabinet position or two, a minor political party, and some outright bribery; send Jimmy Carter in to monitor the first election; and in a few generations Riyadh will be Ankara, maybe even London. The governmental mechanism may be faulty, the Washington view maintains, but the people who administer the government are for the most part committed to rooting out corruption, rounding up terrorists, and recognizing the right of the people to self-government.
It's utter nonsense, of course. If an election were held in Saudi Arabia today, if anyone who wanted to could run for the office of president, and if people could vote their hearts without fear of having their heads cut off afterward in Chop-Chop Square, Osama bin Laden would be elected in a landslide--not because the Saudi people want to wash their hands in the blood of the dead of September 11, but simply because bin Laden has dared to do what even the mighty United States of America won't do: stand up to the thieves who rule the country.
Saudi Arabia today is a mess, and it is our mess. We made it the private storage tank for our oil reserves. We reaped the benefits of a steady petroleum supply at a discounted price, and we grabbed at every available Saudi petrodollar. We taught the Saudis exactly what was expected of them. We cannot walk away morally from the consequences of this behavior--and we really can't walk away economically. So we crow about democracy and talk about someday weaning ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil, despite the fact that as long as America has been dependent on foreign oil there has never been an honest, sustained effort at the senior governmental level to reduce long-term U.S. petroleum consumption.
Not all the wishing in the world will change the basic reality of the situation.
* Saudi Arabia controls the largest share of the world's oil and serves as the market regulator for the global petroleum industry.
* No country consumes more oil, and is more dependent on Saudi oil, than the United States.
* The United States and the rest of the industrialized world are therefore absolutely dependent on Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, and will be for decades to come.
* If the Saudi oil spigot is shut off, by terrorism or by political revolution, the effect on the global economy, and particularly on the economy of the United States, will be devastating.
* Saudi oil is controlled by an increasingly bankrupt, criminal, dysfunctional, and out-of-touch royal family that is hated by the people it rules and by the nations that surround its kingdom.
Signs of impending disaster are everywhere, but the House of Saud has chosen to pray that the moment of reckoning will not come soon--and the United States has chosen to look away. So nothing changes: the royal family continues to exhaust the Saudi treasury, buying more and more arms and funneling more and more "charity" money to the jihadists, all in a desperate and self-destructive effort to protect itself.
The fact is that the West, especially the United States, has left the Saudis little choice. Leading U.S. corporations hire and rehire known Saudi crooks and known financiers of terrorism to represent their interests, so that they can land the deals that will pay the commissions back in Saudi Arabia--commissions that will further erode the budget and thus further divide the ruling class from everyone else. Former CIA directors serve on boards whose members have to hold their noses to cut deals with Saudi companies--because that's business, that's the price of entry, that's the way it's done. Ex-Presidents, former prime ministers, onetime senators and congressmen, and Cabinet members walk around with their hands out, acting as if they're doing something else but rarely slowing down, because most of them know it's an endgame too. But sometime soon, one way or another, the House of Saud is coming down.
Robert Baer served for twenty-one years with the CIA, primarily as a field officer in the Middle East. He resigned from the agency in 1997 and was awarded its Career Intelligence Medal in 1998. This article is adapted from the forthcoming book Sleeping With the Devil (Crown Publishers), to be published in June.
© COPYRIGHT 2003 The Atlantic Monthly Magazine
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/curmud...x_Eastland.html
I'm Recycling as Fast as I Can
A Conversation with Corporate America
by Juliet Eastland
PAPER, PAPER EVERYWHERE. In this digital age, it's amazing how many trees we still go through in a day. But eco-warriors, paper-pushers, and guilty liberals rejoice: America recycles! According to the American Forest & Paper Association, U.S. recovery of paper and paperboard increased in 2004 to an all-time high of 50.3 million tons. Good news, right?
Well, sort of, until you look at what America consumes: 98,664,727 tons of paper and paperboard in 2002 alone. To bring it to a more personal level, while the U.N. estimates that the minimum needed to meet basic literacy and communication needs is 66 to 88 pounds per year, the average U.S. citizen consumes approximately 660 pounds of paper annually, according to Worldwatch Institute. But hey, we live in America, land of the beautiful and the big. Wanna make something of it?
I was moved to look up these statistics after opening my mailbox and retrieving my brazillionth advertising brochure from Time Warner Cable. Like a persistent suitor—some might say stalker—the company has been pursuing me for years. It started with the occasional flirtatious postcard dropped in my mailbox. But my coy refusals to respond seem to have only inflamed the company's desire, and it has launched an assault: a garish, monthly, multi-page missive bursting with boldface type, capital letters, and italicized imperatives ("Call"). And no matter how much I protest, the love letters just keep coming.
My friends, all of whom have learned to live with junk mail, humor me. "I'd stay away for a few days," they whisper. "Yes, another catalog. You know how she gets." But of all the junk mail in the world, Time Warner's riles me for reasons that go beyond the aforementioned statistics. Corporate America may not think twice about deforesting the entire planet in service of its marketing agenda, but I don't want any part of this dastardly scheme. I just had a baby; I want her to grow up in a world where plant life still exists in a recognizable form. I can picture a conversation when she's older:
"Yes, honey," I'll say, brandishing a catalog, "this is a tree. Of course, in my day, trees looked different—they grew out of the ground, and were covered with little green things called 'leaves'."
The packaging is bad enough, but Time Warner's message is equally offensive—because, as I keep informing their customer service department, I do not own a television. (In case that wasn't clear, Big Brother, I DO NOT OWN A TELEVISION.) Never have, never will. And if Time Warner thinks it's going to change my mind and lure me to the boob tube with its slick pages of shiny TV people, its blithe waste of paper, its insistent marketing of a medium I despise (except for those endearing panda shows)—well, you can forget it, bud.
Except not, because a big company with something to sell and a mailing list that, unfurled, could encircle the equator five times, never forgets. This lesson was hammered home in a conversation I had recently with a local customer service representative.
"Time Warner Cable, can I help you?" The voice is guttural and just this side of impatient, with a heavy New York accent. I explain that I do not want to join the twenty million happy Time Warner Cable subscribers, I prefer to sit home alone in the dark, thank you, and could I please have my name removed from the company's mailing list.
"Ma'am," he interrupts, "it's just junk mail. We all get it. I get it. I get a ton of junk mail every day. And you know what I do when I get junk mail?" he asks solicitously. "I take that mail, and I crumple it up, and I throw it in the garbage, and I don't think about it again."
Now this is interesting. Is the gentleman recommending that I deposit his company's mailings into the trash?
"You should recycle," I scold. "Did you know that the U.S. consumes almost 100 million tons of paper a year? Why not take me off your list? We'll both feel better about ourselves."
He's not buying it. His voice rises: "Look, ma'am, everyone in Noo Yawk gets this mailing, whether they have a television or not . It's Just. Junk. Mail. If you don't want it, just Throw. It. Out."
I consider unleashing another statistic—according to the group Environmental Defense, if the entire U.S. catalog industry switched its publications to just ten percent recycled-content paper, the savings in wood alone would be enough to stretch a 1.8-meter-high fence across the U.S. seven times—but the image is too unwieldy. "I understand," I say. "But instead of throwing my junk mail out, I'd rather not get it at all, so I'd appreciate it if you Took. Me. Off."
I've clearly used up my time with this guy. I can practically hear his eyes rolling as he delivers the coup de grace: "We can't do that, ma'am. These catalogs go out to everyone. NO. ONE. GETS. OFF. THE. LIST."
A shiver runs down my spine. Poor sinners, we—cogs in the wheel of the Time Warner juggernaut, doomed to endure its marketing machinations without hope or reprieve so long as we shall live. No escape, no exceptions. Huis Clos, baby; give up now. I stifle a sob.
"There was a time," I finally say, "when I was not on your infernal list. Therefore, it must be possible to revert to that state of grace. Or, once fallen, is there no redemption?"
He's silent. Ah! I've impressed him. But when he speaks, I realize that he's simply written me off.
"Ma'am," he says tersely, "I really can't do anything more for you."
"One hundred million tons of paper! One hundred million tons, you bastard!" The strangled cry escapes before I can suppress it.
There's a frosty silence. Oh, lord, I think, I have just sworn at a stranger. My mother would be appalled. I take a deep breath. "Excuse me," I say. "I didn't mean it personally."
More silence.
I plow on. "So what you're telling me to do, when I get my next mailing from Time Warner, is take it to the garbage can and throw it into the trash. Is this correct?"
"Yes." Then, perhaps realizing the rashness of his proposition (is this call being recorded for training purposes?), he graciously adds, "Well, if it's THAT IMPORTANT—I mean, it probably took you fifteen minutes to call us, and it would take TWO SECONDS to throw it out—if it's THAT IMPORTANT, I can take your name and address and see what I can do." What he can do, his tone implies, cannot be mentioned on an unsecured phone line.
"Thank you," I say. "And your name is... ?" I always like to get this information so I can chant the correct name while stabbing my voodoo doll with a cocktail fork.
"Uh, Tim," he lies. "Thanks for calling Time Warner Cable and have a good day." Click.
For a blessed month, not a single catalog arrives. Has Tim, like some intervening archangel, reprieved me after all?
Not a chance. Two days ago, I opened my mailbox, and there it was—the dreadful brochure, leering at me, making a mockery of all my good, just, and right efforts.
When I finished screaming, I sat down and wrote to Time Warner's potentates (Thomas G. Baxter, President, and Glenn A. Britt, Chairman & CEO: 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10019). I explained the situation, making sure to spell out "Tim's" customer service advice. I'm still waiting for a response; but if I don't hear, I'll just send another letter next month, and then another, and another. And you should, too. Time Warner, love, you're on my list now.
I'm Recycling as Fast as I Can
A Conversation with Corporate America
by Juliet Eastland
PAPER, PAPER EVERYWHERE. In this digital age, it's amazing how many trees we still go through in a day. But eco-warriors, paper-pushers, and guilty liberals rejoice: America recycles! According to the American Forest & Paper Association, U.S. recovery of paper and paperboard increased in 2004 to an all-time high of 50.3 million tons. Good news, right?
Well, sort of, until you look at what America consumes: 98,664,727 tons of paper and paperboard in 2002 alone. To bring it to a more personal level, while the U.N. estimates that the minimum needed to meet basic literacy and communication needs is 66 to 88 pounds per year, the average U.S. citizen consumes approximately 660 pounds of paper annually, according to Worldwatch Institute. But hey, we live in America, land of the beautiful and the big. Wanna make something of it?
I was moved to look up these statistics after opening my mailbox and retrieving my brazillionth advertising brochure from Time Warner Cable. Like a persistent suitor—some might say stalker—the company has been pursuing me for years. It started with the occasional flirtatious postcard dropped in my mailbox. But my coy refusals to respond seem to have only inflamed the company's desire, and it has launched an assault: a garish, monthly, multi-page missive bursting with boldface type, capital letters, and italicized imperatives ("Call"). And no matter how much I protest, the love letters just keep coming.
My friends, all of whom have learned to live with junk mail, humor me. "I'd stay away for a few days," they whisper. "Yes, another catalog. You know how she gets." But of all the junk mail in the world, Time Warner's riles me for reasons that go beyond the aforementioned statistics. Corporate America may not think twice about deforesting the entire planet in service of its marketing agenda, but I don't want any part of this dastardly scheme. I just had a baby; I want her to grow up in a world where plant life still exists in a recognizable form. I can picture a conversation when she's older:
"Yes, honey," I'll say, brandishing a catalog, "this is a tree. Of course, in my day, trees looked different—they grew out of the ground, and were covered with little green things called 'leaves'."
The packaging is bad enough, but Time Warner's message is equally offensive—because, as I keep informing their customer service department, I do not own a television. (In case that wasn't clear, Big Brother, I DO NOT OWN A TELEVISION.) Never have, never will. And if Time Warner thinks it's going to change my mind and lure me to the boob tube with its slick pages of shiny TV people, its blithe waste of paper, its insistent marketing of a medium I despise (except for those endearing panda shows)—well, you can forget it, bud.
Except not, because a big company with something to sell and a mailing list that, unfurled, could encircle the equator five times, never forgets. This lesson was hammered home in a conversation I had recently with a local customer service representative.
"Time Warner Cable, can I help you?" The voice is guttural and just this side of impatient, with a heavy New York accent. I explain that I do not want to join the twenty million happy Time Warner Cable subscribers, I prefer to sit home alone in the dark, thank you, and could I please have my name removed from the company's mailing list.
"Ma'am," he interrupts, "it's just junk mail. We all get it. I get it. I get a ton of junk mail every day. And you know what I do when I get junk mail?" he asks solicitously. "I take that mail, and I crumple it up, and I throw it in the garbage, and I don't think about it again."
Now this is interesting. Is the gentleman recommending that I deposit his company's mailings into the trash?
"You should recycle," I scold. "Did you know that the U.S. consumes almost 100 million tons of paper a year? Why not take me off your list? We'll both feel better about ourselves."
He's not buying it. His voice rises: "Look, ma'am, everyone in Noo Yawk gets this mailing, whether they have a television or not . It's Just. Junk. Mail. If you don't want it, just Throw. It. Out."
I consider unleashing another statistic—according to the group Environmental Defense, if the entire U.S. catalog industry switched its publications to just ten percent recycled-content paper, the savings in wood alone would be enough to stretch a 1.8-meter-high fence across the U.S. seven times—but the image is too unwieldy. "I understand," I say. "But instead of throwing my junk mail out, I'd rather not get it at all, so I'd appreciate it if you Took. Me. Off."
I've clearly used up my time with this guy. I can practically hear his eyes rolling as he delivers the coup de grace: "We can't do that, ma'am. These catalogs go out to everyone. NO. ONE. GETS. OFF. THE. LIST."
A shiver runs down my spine. Poor sinners, we—cogs in the wheel of the Time Warner juggernaut, doomed to endure its marketing machinations without hope or reprieve so long as we shall live. No escape, no exceptions. Huis Clos, baby; give up now. I stifle a sob.
"There was a time," I finally say, "when I was not on your infernal list. Therefore, it must be possible to revert to that state of grace. Or, once fallen, is there no redemption?"
He's silent. Ah! I've impressed him. But when he speaks, I realize that he's simply written me off.
"Ma'am," he says tersely, "I really can't do anything more for you."
"One hundred million tons of paper! One hundred million tons, you bastard!" The strangled cry escapes before I can suppress it.
There's a frosty silence. Oh, lord, I think, I have just sworn at a stranger. My mother would be appalled. I take a deep breath. "Excuse me," I say. "I didn't mean it personally."
More silence.
I plow on. "So what you're telling me to do, when I get my next mailing from Time Warner, is take it to the garbage can and throw it into the trash. Is this correct?"
"Yes." Then, perhaps realizing the rashness of his proposition (is this call being recorded for training purposes?), he graciously adds, "Well, if it's THAT IMPORTANT—I mean, it probably took you fifteen minutes to call us, and it would take TWO SECONDS to throw it out—if it's THAT IMPORTANT, I can take your name and address and see what I can do." What he can do, his tone implies, cannot be mentioned on an unsecured phone line.
"Thank you," I say. "And your name is... ?" I always like to get this information so I can chant the correct name while stabbing my voodoo doll with a cocktail fork.
"Uh, Tim," he lies. "Thanks for calling Time Warner Cable and have a good day." Click.
For a blessed month, not a single catalog arrives. Has Tim, like some intervening archangel, reprieved me after all?
Not a chance. Two days ago, I opened my mailbox, and there it was—the dreadful brochure, leering at me, making a mockery of all my good, just, and right efforts.
When I finished screaming, I sat down and wrote to Time Warner's potentates (Thomas G. Baxter, President, and Glenn A. Britt, Chairman & CEO: 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10019). I explained the situation, making sure to spell out "Tim's" customer service advice. I'm still waiting for a response; but if I don't hear, I'll just send another letter next month, and then another, and another. And you should, too. Time Warner, love, you're on my list now.
http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/pdf/hirsch_world_oil_production.pdf
10/17/05 The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production, Robert L. Hirsch, The Atlantic Council, October 2005. A distinguished energy scientist considers three questions pertinent to world conflict: When will oil production peak? How will we know that it has? And will we have sufficient warning to mitigate its effects? Although estimates range from next year to 2025 (or later), the fact is that for the last 15 years, the world has used more oil than it has discovered. This trend is accelerating as China, India, and other developing countries ramp up their consumption. (211 KB PDF)
thanks to www.d-n-i.net
10/17/05 The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production, Robert L. Hirsch, The Atlantic Council, October 2005. A distinguished energy scientist considers three questions pertinent to world conflict: When will oil production peak? How will we know that it has? And will we have sufficient warning to mitigate its effects? Although estimates range from next year to 2025 (or later), the fact is that for the last 15 years, the world has used more oil than it has discovered. This trend is accelerating as China, India, and other developing countries ramp up their consumption. (211 KB PDF)
thanks to www.d-n-i.net
$4 a gallon - America Is Over
Letters at 3AM
$4 a gallon
BY MICHAEL VENTURA
APRIL 29, 2005
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/disp...ls_ventura.html
America is over. America is like Wile E. Coyote after he's run out a few paces past the edge of the cliff – he'll take a few more steps in midair before he looks down. Then, when he sees that there's nothing under him, he'll fall. Many Americans suspect that they're running on thin air, but they haven't looked down yet. When they do ...
Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, a pillar of the Establishment with access to economic information beyond our reach, wrote recently: "Circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember. ... What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little willingness or capacity to do anything about it" (quoted in The Economist, April 16, p.12). Volcker chooses words carefully: "dangerous and intractable," "willingness or capacity." He's saying: The situation is probably beyond our powers to remedy.
Gas prices can only go up. Oil production is at or near peak capacity. The U.S. must compete for oil with China, the fastest-growing colossus in history. But the U.S. also must borrow $2 billion a day to remain solvent, nearly half of that from China and her neighbors, while they supply most of our manufacturing ("Benson's Economic and Market Trends," quoted in Asia Times Online) – so we have no cards to play with China, even militarily. (You can't war with the bankers who finance your army and the factories that supply your stores.) China now determines oil demand, and the U.S. has no long-term way to influence prices. That means $4 a gallon by next spring, and rising – $5, then $6, probably $10 by 2010 or thereabouts. Their economy can afford it; ours can't. We may hobble along with more or less the same way of life for the next dollar or so of hikes, but at around $4 America changes. Drastically.
The "exburbs" and the rural poor will feel it first and hardest. Exburbians moved to the farthest reaches of suburbia for cheap real estate, willing to drive at least an hour each way to work. Many live marginally now. What happens when their commute becomes prohibitively expensive, just as interest rates and inflation rise, while their property values plummet? Urban real estate will go up, so they won't be able to live near their jobs – and there's nowhere else to go. In addition, thanks to Congress' recent shameless activity, bankruptcy is no longer an option for many. What happens to these people? Exburb refugees. A modern Dust Bowl.
For the rural poor it's even worse. They are the poorest among us, with no assets and few skills; they earn the lowest nonimmigrant wages in America, and they must drive. When gas hits $4, their already below-the-margin life will be unsustainable. They'll have no choice but to be refugees and join in the modern Dust Bowl migration. So, too, will people who live where people were never intended to live in such numbers – places like Phoenix and Vegas, unlivable without air conditioning and water transport (energy prices will rise across the board, regular brownouts, blackouts, and faucet-drips will be "the new normal" everywhere). In the desert cities, real estate will plunge, thousands will be ruined, most will leave – while all over the country folks will have to get used to "hot" and "cold" again.
But where will the new refugees go, and what will they do when they get there? They will migrate to the more livable cities, where rents are already unreasonable and social services are already strained, and where the new refugees will compete with immigrants for the lowest-level housing and jobs. Immigration issues will intensify to hysteria. Native-born Americans will clamor for work that only legal and illegal aliens do now. In a culture as prone to violence as ours, that will probably get ugly.
Meanwhile, suburbs and cities will be in various states of chaos, depending on their infrastructure. As inflation and interest rates rise, and the real estate bubble bursts, millions will see their assets plunge precipitously. In five years, many who are now well-off will live as the marginal live today, while the marginal will sink into poverty. With gas at $4-plus a gallon, real estate values will depend on nearness to working centers and access to transportation. As has already happened in Manhattan, the well-off will head for what are now slums, and the slum-dwellers will go God-knows-where. Places with decent rail service will be prime. Places without rail service will be in deep trouble.
One key to America's future will be: How quickly can we build or rebuild heavy and light rail? And where will we get the money to do it? Railroads are the cheapest transport, the easiest to sustain, and the only solution to a post-automobile America. (For reasons I haven't space to detail, hybrid cars and alternative energy won't cut it, if by "cut it" one means retaining anything like the present standard of living. See James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" on Rolling Stone's Web site. Also check Mike Ruppert's site www.fromthewilderness.com and the documentary The End of Suburbia.) A massive investment in railroad infrastructure could offer jobs to the unskilled and skilled alike, absorb much of the inevitable population displacement, and create a new social equilibrium 10 or 15 years down the line. Old RR cities like Grand Junction, Colo.; Amarillo, Texas; and Albuquerque, N.M., could become vital centers, offering new lives for the displaced. Railroads are key, but the question is: how to finance them?
There's only one section of our economy that has that kind of money: the military budget. The U.S. now spends more on its military than all other nations combined. A sane transit to a post-automobile America will require a massive shift from military to infrastructure spending. That shift would be supported by our bankers in China and Europe (that is, they would continue to finance our debt) because it's in their interests that we regain economic viability. What's not in their interests is that we remain a military superpower.
And that's where things get really interesting. The question becomes:
Can America face reality? If the government responds to the coming changes by attempting to remain a superpower no matter what, there is no way to underestimate the harm. The numbers speak for themselves. Soon we'll no longer have the resources to remain a military superpower and sustain a livable society that is anything like what we know today. It happened to England; it happened to Russia; it's about to happen to us. England sustained the transformation more or less gracefully; it lost its dominance while retaining its essential character. Russia is still in a period of transformation, but has remained a player thanks to its oil reserves. Europe in general – France, Germany, Italy, and Spain (all world powers in the fairly recent past) – is creating a post-national society, the most experimental form of governance since America's revolution. We have no appreciable oil, and we no longer have a manufacturing base. So what will the United States do? Sanely recognize its declining status and act accordingly, or make one last ignoble stab to retain its position by force?
Half a century ago James Baldwin wrote: "Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses." Americans believe they're "No. 1," destined to lead the world. That is the America that's over. If we insist on that illusion, then this world is in for tough times. We will neither hold on to what we have nor create what we might have, but we will wreak untold harm (if we don't destroy the species altogether). Or we can face and embrace reality. And that reality is: There is no such thing as "No. 1" ... there is no such thing as an ideal destined country that is better than any other ... there is only us, doing the best we can, trying to live free and sanely, within limits that are about to become only too clear. Our glory days are done. What's next?
Remember, we're not talking about the far future. We're talking about the next decade.
No country gets two centuries anymore. The 21st will be China's century. That's what $4-plus a gallon means, and nothing can stop it. So: How will we change? But the question "How will we change?" is really the question "How will I change?" Because history isn't a spectator sport. It's you and me. Everything depends on whether we side with reality or illusion. Face reality, and we have a chance. Cling to illusion, and we are lost. The America we've known is over – very soon. The America we can create is up to us.
end story
Letters at 3AM
$4 a gallon
BY MICHAEL VENTURA
APRIL 29, 2005
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/disp...ls_ventura.html
America is over. America is like Wile E. Coyote after he's run out a few paces past the edge of the cliff – he'll take a few more steps in midair before he looks down. Then, when he sees that there's nothing under him, he'll fall. Many Americans suspect that they're running on thin air, but they haven't looked down yet. When they do ...
Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, a pillar of the Establishment with access to economic information beyond our reach, wrote recently: "Circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember. ... What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little willingness or capacity to do anything about it" (quoted in The Economist, April 16, p.12). Volcker chooses words carefully: "dangerous and intractable," "willingness or capacity." He's saying: The situation is probably beyond our powers to remedy.
Gas prices can only go up. Oil production is at or near peak capacity. The U.S. must compete for oil with China, the fastest-growing colossus in history. But the U.S. also must borrow $2 billion a day to remain solvent, nearly half of that from China and her neighbors, while they supply most of our manufacturing ("Benson's Economic and Market Trends," quoted in Asia Times Online) – so we have no cards to play with China, even militarily. (You can't war with the bankers who finance your army and the factories that supply your stores.) China now determines oil demand, and the U.S. has no long-term way to influence prices. That means $4 a gallon by next spring, and rising – $5, then $6, probably $10 by 2010 or thereabouts. Their economy can afford it; ours can't. We may hobble along with more or less the same way of life for the next dollar or so of hikes, but at around $4 America changes. Drastically.
The "exburbs" and the rural poor will feel it first and hardest. Exburbians moved to the farthest reaches of suburbia for cheap real estate, willing to drive at least an hour each way to work. Many live marginally now. What happens when their commute becomes prohibitively expensive, just as interest rates and inflation rise, while their property values plummet? Urban real estate will go up, so they won't be able to live near their jobs – and there's nowhere else to go. In addition, thanks to Congress' recent shameless activity, bankruptcy is no longer an option for many. What happens to these people? Exburb refugees. A modern Dust Bowl.
For the rural poor it's even worse. They are the poorest among us, with no assets and few skills; they earn the lowest nonimmigrant wages in America, and they must drive. When gas hits $4, their already below-the-margin life will be unsustainable. They'll have no choice but to be refugees and join in the modern Dust Bowl migration. So, too, will people who live where people were never intended to live in such numbers – places like Phoenix and Vegas, unlivable without air conditioning and water transport (energy prices will rise across the board, regular brownouts, blackouts, and faucet-drips will be "the new normal" everywhere). In the desert cities, real estate will plunge, thousands will be ruined, most will leave – while all over the country folks will have to get used to "hot" and "cold" again.
But where will the new refugees go, and what will they do when they get there? They will migrate to the more livable cities, where rents are already unreasonable and social services are already strained, and where the new refugees will compete with immigrants for the lowest-level housing and jobs. Immigration issues will intensify to hysteria. Native-born Americans will clamor for work that only legal and illegal aliens do now. In a culture as prone to violence as ours, that will probably get ugly.
Meanwhile, suburbs and cities will be in various states of chaos, depending on their infrastructure. As inflation and interest rates rise, and the real estate bubble bursts, millions will see their assets plunge precipitously. In five years, many who are now well-off will live as the marginal live today, while the marginal will sink into poverty. With gas at $4-plus a gallon, real estate values will depend on nearness to working centers and access to transportation. As has already happened in Manhattan, the well-off will head for what are now slums, and the slum-dwellers will go God-knows-where. Places with decent rail service will be prime. Places without rail service will be in deep trouble.
One key to America's future will be: How quickly can we build or rebuild heavy and light rail? And where will we get the money to do it? Railroads are the cheapest transport, the easiest to sustain, and the only solution to a post-automobile America. (For reasons I haven't space to detail, hybrid cars and alternative energy won't cut it, if by "cut it" one means retaining anything like the present standard of living. See James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" on Rolling Stone's Web site. Also check Mike Ruppert's site www.fromthewilderness.com and the documentary The End of Suburbia.) A massive investment in railroad infrastructure could offer jobs to the unskilled and skilled alike, absorb much of the inevitable population displacement, and create a new social equilibrium 10 or 15 years down the line. Old RR cities like Grand Junction, Colo.; Amarillo, Texas; and Albuquerque, N.M., could become vital centers, offering new lives for the displaced. Railroads are key, but the question is: how to finance them?
There's only one section of our economy that has that kind of money: the military budget. The U.S. now spends more on its military than all other nations combined. A sane transit to a post-automobile America will require a massive shift from military to infrastructure spending. That shift would be supported by our bankers in China and Europe (that is, they would continue to finance our debt) because it's in their interests that we regain economic viability. What's not in their interests is that we remain a military superpower.
And that's where things get really interesting. The question becomes:
Can America face reality? If the government responds to the coming changes by attempting to remain a superpower no matter what, there is no way to underestimate the harm. The numbers speak for themselves. Soon we'll no longer have the resources to remain a military superpower and sustain a livable society that is anything like what we know today. It happened to England; it happened to Russia; it's about to happen to us. England sustained the transformation more or less gracefully; it lost its dominance while retaining its essential character. Russia is still in a period of transformation, but has remained a player thanks to its oil reserves. Europe in general – France, Germany, Italy, and Spain (all world powers in the fairly recent past) – is creating a post-national society, the most experimental form of governance since America's revolution. We have no appreciable oil, and we no longer have a manufacturing base. So what will the United States do? Sanely recognize its declining status and act accordingly, or make one last ignoble stab to retain its position by force?
Half a century ago James Baldwin wrote: "Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses." Americans believe they're "No. 1," destined to lead the world. That is the America that's over. If we insist on that illusion, then this world is in for tough times. We will neither hold on to what we have nor create what we might have, but we will wreak untold harm (if we don't destroy the species altogether). Or we can face and embrace reality. And that reality is: There is no such thing as "No. 1" ... there is no such thing as an ideal destined country that is better than any other ... there is only us, doing the best we can, trying to live free and sanely, within limits that are about to become only too clear. Our glory days are done. What's next?
Remember, we're not talking about the far future. We're talking about the next decade.
No country gets two centuries anymore. The 21st will be China's century. That's what $4-plus a gallon means, and nothing can stop it. So: How will we change? But the question "How will we change?" is really the question "How will I change?" Because history isn't a spectator sport. It's you and me. Everything depends on whether we side with reality or illusion. Face reality, and we have a chance. Cling to illusion, and we are lost. The America we've known is over – very soon. The America we can create is up to us.
end story
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 7 2005, 10:54 AM) [snapback]93153[/snapback]
Regular BuzzFlash readers know that we have regularly run articles, commentaries and editorials arguing that, in part, the invasion of Iraq was a Bush administration effort to divert attention from the primary financiers of terrorism -- and the source of much of the al-Qaeda leadership -- Saudi Arabia. Of course, there were other motivating factors for the Bush military action against Iraq, which we have detailed (see, as examples, The Perfect War and Endgame).
But a recent poll indicates that the American public still believes Iraq was behind 9/11, even though bin Laden received Saudi, not Iraq financing, and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. The Bush administration kept -- and keeps -- insinuating that Iraq was involved deeply in 9/11, while trying to sweep under the carpet much, much stronger indications of key Saudi involvement in the financing, strategy and implementation of 9/11. As a result, they have successfully misled Americans about who was really responsible for 9/11.
This information is completely false. These lies aren't surprising from Buzzflash. They claim to be an independent website concerned with the TRUTH, yet Buzzflash totally denies the reality of Peak oil!!! Why? Because it doesn't 'fit' their agenda. They are justified in bashing the Bush administration, who are the worst traitors in American history, but they are so caught up in their Bush-bashing party that they can't accept that industrial civilization is on the brink of collapse due to resource (especially hydrocarbon) depletion. For what it's worth, Buzzflash used to be my favorite news website, but they still can't handle the painful truth about the energy crisis we face.
It is, in fact, BUZZFLASH, who is "misleading Americans about who was really responsible for 9/11."
Buzzflash claims that "15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis."
THIS IS A LIE. How do I know? Because at least six of the hijackers are still alive! Says who? ABC News, BBC International News, The Independent (UK), The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and more:
"Hijack 'suspects' alive and well"
Sunday, 23 September, 2001, 12:30 GMT 13:30 UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm
"Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.
The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt."
...
"Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September. Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.
He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Dayton Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring. But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco."
***
For the rest, see the following website:
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/decept...identities.html
Of the 19 alleged hijackers identified by the FBI, at least six turned up alive after the attack. The FBI's identifications included names, photographs, and, in several cases, other personal details -- all of which matched the six persons who surfaced after the attack to proclaim their innocence.
Abdulaziz Alomari
Abdulaziz Alomari was identified by the FBI as the hijacker who accompanied Mohamed Atta from the connecting flight from Portland and helped him hijack and pilot Flight 11 into the North Tower. Abdulaziz told the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper: "The name [listed by the FBI] is my name and the birth date is the same as mine, but I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Center in New York." 1 Saudi Embassy officials in Washington defended the innocence of Alomari, saying that his passport was stolen in 1996 and that he had reported the theft to the police. 2
Saeed Alghamdi
Saeed Alghamdi, a Saudi Airlines pilot, was identified by the FBI of being a hijacker of Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. Alghamdi was "shocked and furious" to learn this three days after the attack, noting that his name, place of residence, date of birth, and occupation matched those described by the FBI. "You cannot imagine what it is like to be described as a terrorist - and a dead man - when you are innocent and alive," said Alghamdi, who considered legal action against the FBI. 3
Salem Al-Hamzi
Al-Hamzi was identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers of Flight 77, thought to have crashed into the Pentagon. Al-Hamzi said: "I have never been to the United States and have not been out of Saudi Arabia in the past two years." 4
Ahmed Al-Nami
Al-Nami was identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers of Flight 93. Al-Nami said: "I'm still alive, as you can see. I was shocked to see my name mentioned by the American Justice Department. I had never even heard of Pennsylvania where the plane I was supposed to have hijacked." 5
Waleed Alshehri
Waleed Alshehri, a Saudi Arabian pilot, was identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers of Flight 11. Alshehri turned up in Morocco after the attack where he contacted both the Saudi and American authorities to tell them he was not involved in the attack. 6 7
Abdulrahman al-Omari
Abdulrahman al-Omari, a Saudi Airlines pilot, was identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers of Flight 11. After learning this, he visited the US consulate in Jeddah to demand an explanation. 8
Ameer and Adnan Bukhari
Ameer and Adnan Bukhari were named by CNN as suspected hijackers of Flight 175, the jetliner which crashed into the South Tower, in an article dated 9/13/01. In a correction, CNN stated that Ameer Bukhari died in a small plane crash in Florida, and that Adnan was still alive in Florida, having passed a polygraph test to confirm his innocence. 9
10
References
1. Who Did It?, ABCnews.com, [cached]
2. The hijack suspects, BBC, 9/28/01 [cached]
3. Revealed: the men with stolen identities, telegraph.co.uk, 9/23/01 [cached]
4. Revealed: the men with stolen identities,
5. Revealed: the men with stolen identities,
6. Hijack 'suspects' alive and well, BBC, 9/23/01 [cached]
7. Dead Saudi Hijack Suspect Resurfaces, Denies Involvement, AllAfrica.com, 9/24/01 [cached]
8. 'Suicide hijacker' is an airline pilot alive and well in Jeddah, Independent.co.uk, 9/17/01 [cached]
9. Arrests made at New York airports, CNN.com, 9/13/01 [cached]
10. Les Américains se trompent sur 5 des 19 terroristes, AllAfrica.com, 9/21/01 [cached]
*****
Peak Oil is the real connection between 9/11 and Iraq, but very few people in this country can handle reality. They are too busy distracting themselves with American Idol, professional sports, and the Michael Jackson trial (or whatever celebrity scandal comes next).
For more information on these issues, see:
The Complete 9/11 timeline, http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/project...ect=911_project
http://www.911truth.org , especially this article:
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041221155307646
http://www.fromthewilderness.com (especially Mike Ruppert's book "Crossing the Rubicon", which implicates Vice President Cheney in the mass murders of 9/11)
http://www.oilempire.us -Excellent website for the politics of Peak Oil, particularly 9/11 related issues
By the way, you have done a great job with your posts so far. You have posted very useful information for those just discovering Peak Oil. Keep up the good work!
[EDIT] oh yea, and here's that Washington Post article for good measure:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?p...4¬Found=true
Saudi officials have repeatedly pointed out that some of the suicide hijackers adopted the names of real people who are still alive and had no involvement in the attack. But U.S. investigators believe they have positively identified 15 of the 19 hijackers.
...
Still, the father of Alghamdi told Al Watan that the picture provided by the FBI was not that of his son. "It has no resemblance to him at all," he said.
^hrm, this isn't a 9-11 thread, nor is a conspiracy thread, or a thread to examine the real motives behind American foreign policy (i.e. the Iraq invasion) 
I posted the Baer interview only to highlight America's dependence on Saudi oil and why America must be careful in how it deals with Saudi Arabia.
I posted the Baer interview only to highlight America's dependence on Saudi oil and why America must be careful in how it deals with Saudi Arabia.
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 23 2005, 01:54 PM) [snapback]398632[/snapback]
^hrm, this isn't a 9-11 thread, nor is a conspiracy thread, or a thread to examine the real motives behind American foreign policy (i.e. the Iraq invasion)
I posted the Baer interview only to highlight America's dependence on Saudi oil and why America must be careful in how it deals with Saudi Arabia.
Papabear,
So far, the only one that has discussed unsupported "conspiracy" theories is you, in regards to your demonstratably false "Saudi Arabia did 9/11" Buzzflash post, which has no basis in fact. Of course, you could have edited out the 9/11 misinformation, but you did not.
I came here to discuss Peak Oil, but I could not overlook the glaring falsehood that you posted, so I made my best effort to correct it. I have nothing further to say on this subject.
My goal here is to enlighten, not obfuscate, and I intend to post more Peak Oil articles to that end.
The one thing that puzzles me is your insistence on not discussing the real motives behind the Iraq invasion. Is it that you don't agree that the world faces a high risk of erupting into resource wars over dwindling oil resources, or that you don't see the connection between Peak Oil and the Iraq conflict? Isn't this fundamental to a serious discussion of Peak Oil?
Jesse
P.S. -I hope that you have a chance to read the "$4 a gallon" article that I posted. It is a powerful and informed comment about the probable effects of Peak Oil on American society in the near term. It may apply to other industrialized societies as well.
QUOTE(reveille91 @ Oct 23 2005, 08:39 PM) [snapback]402588[/snapback]
Papabear,
So far, the only one that has discussed unsupported "conspiracy" theories is you, in regards to your demonstratably false "Saudi Arabia did 9/11" Buzzflash post, which has no basis in fact. Of course, you could have edited out the 9/11 misinformation, but you did not.
No one generalizes to put the blame on Saudi Arabia, either the government or the people as a whole. If you want to dispute the identities of those responsible, go right ahead. The fact remains that Saudi Arabia is a breeding ground for terrorists, and the Saudi gov't is very careful in how it deals with them and certain sects of Islam.
QUOTE
I came here to discuss Peak Oil, but I could not overlook the glaring falsehood that you posted, so I made my best effort to correct it. I have nothing further to say on this subject.
Let's keep it that way, please.
QUOTE
My goal here is to enlighten, not obfuscate, and I intend to post more Peak Oil articles to that end.
The one thing that puzzles me is your insistence on not discussing the real motives behind the Iraq invasion. Is it that you don't agree that the world faces a high risk of erupting into resource wars over dwindling oil resources, or that you don't see the connection between Peak Oil and the Iraq conflict? Isn't this fundamental to a serious discussion of Peak Oil?
The one thing that puzzles me is your insistence on not discussing the real motives behind the Iraq invasion. Is it that you don't agree that the world faces a high risk of erupting into resource wars over dwindling oil resources, or that you don't see the connection between Peak Oil and the Iraq conflict? Isn't this fundamental to a serious discussion of Peak Oil?
No, because it's irrelevant. Might there be a conflict over resources? Yes, it is possible. Is there a connection between P.O. and the invasion of Iraq? That's debatable. Do we need to have certain answers to those questions in order to recognize our dependence on oil and the fact that there are looming economic and social problems if we continue to rely on it, or to recognize that we are living an unhealthy way of life? Not at all.
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 23 2005, 08:56 PM) [snapback]404624[/snapback]
The fact remains that Saudi Arabia is a breeding ground for terrorists,
Please post a source for this statement. It appears to be nothing more than U.S. propaganda, unsupported by the facts.
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 23 2005, 08:56 PM) [snapback]404624[/snapback]
No, because it's irrelevant. Might there be a conflict over resources? Yes, it is possible. Is there a connection between P.O. and the invasion of Iraq? That's debatable. Do we need to have certain answers to those questions in order to recognize our dependence on oil and the fact that there are looming economic and social problems if we continue to rely on it, or to recognize that we are living an unhealthy way of life? Not at all.
I noticed that you link to lifeaftertheoilcrash.net in your signature. Matt Savinar, the author of LATOC, commented in his book that every country accused by the U.S. of harboring terrorists also just happens to harbor huge reserves of oil. He makes an extremely compelling argument that the "war on terror" is in reality "war for oil" (including the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq). I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy.
I'm just curious, how long ago did you first discover and begin reading about Peak Oil issues?
February 2004 for me.
Also, where do you live? I live in Michigan, U.S.A.
Jesse
QUOTE(reveille91 @ Oct 24 2005, 01:51 AM) [snapback]407187[/snapback]
Please post a source for this statement. It appears to be nothing more than U.S. propaganda, unsupported by the facts.
You think the moderate imams in Saudi Arabia are making up stories about the more extreme sects there?
Or that everyone is happy with the Saudi royal family? *edit* Do you think the stories of Saudi security forces hunting down and killing AQ leaders in SA were fabricated? Or that the AQ presence in SA is a fiction?** If so, you need to do more reading--no competent journalist or author has denied that these tensions exist within Saudi society.
QUOTE
I noticed that you link to lifeaftertheoilcrash.net in your signature. Matt Savinar, the author of LATOC, commented in his book that every country accused by the U.S. of harboring terrorists also just happens to harbor huge reserves of oil. He makes an extremely compelling argument that the "war on terror" is in reality "war for oil" (including the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq). I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy.
It's also no surprise that those countries are also MUSLIM. As I've said, this is irrelevant for addressing the question of peak oil.
QUOTE
I'm just curious, how long ago did you first discover and begin reading about Peak Oil issues?
February 2004 for me.
Also, where do you live? I live in Michigan, U.S.A.
Jesse
February 2004 for me.
Also, where do you live? I live in Michigan, U.S.A.
Jesse
Questions regarding shortages of natural resources, not just oil? A long while ago. (as for projections of peak oil being within the next half-century--within the half-year or so)
MA
http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/pubs/WWVisn/GrWater.htm
The Global Groundwater Situation:
Overview of Opportunities and Challenges
Tushaar Shah, David Molden, R. Sakthivadivel, and David Seckler
http://wmc.ar.nrcs.usda.gov/technical/GW/Drought.html
http://www.accesskansas.org/kda/dwr/basint...quiferinfo.html
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/...b/update23.html
The High Plains Aquifer
By Dr. Steve Overmann
Southeast Missouri State University
The Global Groundwater Situation:
Overview of Opportunities and Challenges
Tushaar Shah, David Molden, R. Sakthivadivel, and David Seckler
http://wmc.ar.nrcs.usda.gov/technical/GW/Drought.html
QUOTE
In the United States, agriculture relies on ground water supplies to produce an abundance of inexpensive food and fiber. Of the total ground water use in the United States, irrigated crop agriculture accounts for 65%. In the United States, 81% of total consumptive use is for irrigation. Ground-water use for irrigation of row crops has grown from 34,000 million gallons per day (mgd) in 1950 to 76,400 mgd in 1995. The highest ground water use year was 1980, which exceeded 83,000 mgd. The ratio of total water use for irrigation in 1950 was-72% from surface water and 28% from ground water. In 1995, ground water withdrawals have increased to account for 37%, (1). Agricultural production has increased on decreasing field acreage. This abundance, efficiency and economic prosperity has been possible in many areas due to the availability of shallow ground-water reserves. Increasing dependence on ground-water resources has exceeded the safe yield of many aquifers and caused water quality problems elsewhere. Several areas are losing irrigated cropland acreage due to dwindling ground water supplies and/or quality degradation. Some aquifers have been permanently damaged because full recharge of depleted aquifer storage will not be possible where compaction and subsidence have occurred. Mining of ground water reserves to sustain agricultural production is temporary. Declining water levels will increase pumping costs and aquifer depletion will decrease well yields to the point where aquifers will be abandoned for irrigation usage. Long-term solutions must be investigated and evaluated today to maintain United States (US) food and fiber production for tomorrow.
Areas impacted by overdraft of ground-water resources include-the High Plains of Texas, the Ogallala aquifer is near depletion. The state of Texas has lost 1.435 million acres of irrigated cultivated cropland over the period, 1982-1997 (2). Most of the loss is due to dwindling ground-water supplies from the Ogallala aquifer. Aquifer level declines have ranged from 50-100 feet since 1980 with saturated thickness reductions of 50%. Depth to water is highly variable but commonly exceeds 100 feet. Well yields are down from 1000 gallons per minute (gpm) to 250 gpm and less in some areas. At current rates of pumpage, current irrigated acreage is predicted to drop 50% by 2030, (3). In south central Arizona, ground water depletion is a primary concern. Since development, water table declines of 200 feet have been observed. Land subsidence caused by aquifer depletion has reached 18 feet in some areas near Phoenix, indicating considerable and potentially irreversible impacts on aquifer storage and conductivity, (5). In the southern section of the Central Valley of California- (Kern, Kings and Tulare Counties) overdraft of 800,000 acre feet (acft) per year has resulted in declines of over 200 feet in some areas. Subsidence has been measured at 29 feet in Mendota, California indicating aquifer damage, (4). Irrigated, cultivated crop acreage for the state of California has declined 700,000 acres from 1982 to 1997, (2). Many states that have traditionally been perceived as having abundant water resources are beginning to experience ground water shortages. In Arkansas, the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer has declined 100 feet in 90 years in the Grand Prairie region and well yields have declined accordingly. Declines in saturated thickness there have limited water availability for agriculture. In Rhode Island, agricultural irrigation combined with municipal, commercial and other uses have impacted stream flows.
With agriculture’s critical dependence on the ground water resource base, long-range planning must be conducted that includes ground water. Often, information is readily available to make predictions on aquifer health and longevity. Other times, data may have to be collected and analyzed.
Areas impacted by overdraft of ground-water resources include-the High Plains of Texas, the Ogallala aquifer is near depletion. The state of Texas has lost 1.435 million acres of irrigated cultivated cropland over the period, 1982-1997 (2). Most of the loss is due to dwindling ground-water supplies from the Ogallala aquifer. Aquifer level declines have ranged from 50-100 feet since 1980 with saturated thickness reductions of 50%. Depth to water is highly variable but commonly exceeds 100 feet. Well yields are down from 1000 gallons per minute (gpm) to 250 gpm and less in some areas. At current rates of pumpage, current irrigated acreage is predicted to drop 50% by 2030, (3). In south central Arizona, ground water depletion is a primary concern. Since development, water table declines of 200 feet have been observed. Land subsidence caused by aquifer depletion has reached 18 feet in some areas near Phoenix, indicating considerable and potentially irreversible impacts on aquifer storage and conductivity, (5). In the southern section of the Central Valley of California- (Kern, Kings and Tulare Counties) overdraft of 800,000 acre feet (acft) per year has resulted in declines of over 200 feet in some areas. Subsidence has been measured at 29 feet in Mendota, California indicating aquifer damage, (4). Irrigated, cultivated crop acreage for the state of California has declined 700,000 acres from 1982 to 1997, (2). Many states that have traditionally been perceived as having abundant water resources are beginning to experience ground water shortages. In Arkansas, the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer has declined 100 feet in 90 years in the Grand Prairie region and well yields have declined accordingly. Declines in saturated thickness there have limited water availability for agriculture. In Rhode Island, agricultural irrigation combined with municipal, commercial and other uses have impacted stream flows.
With agriculture’s critical dependence on the ground water resource base, long-range planning must be conducted that includes ground water. Often, information is readily available to make predictions on aquifer health and longevity. Other times, data may have to be collected and analyzed.
http://www.accesskansas.org/kda/dwr/basint...quiferinfo.html
QUOTE
Aquifer Information
The High Plains aquifer underlies about 174,000 square miles of the central United States east of the Rocky Mountains in the southern part of the Great Plains. The aquifer underlies portions of eight states, which are South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. The High Plains aquifer is the shallowest and most abundant source of water in the region, which leads the economy of the area to depend upon it for irrigated agriculture.
The Ogallala formation is the principal geologic unit in the High Plains aquifer, and it accounts for approximately 134,000 square miles of the High Plains aquifer. Groundwater flow is generally from west to east, at an average rate of approximately 1 foot per day, and discharges naturally to streams and springs, and directly through atmospheric evapotranspiration. Estimated recharge rates vary from 0.024 inches per year in part of Texas to 6 inches per year in south-central Kansas.
The irrigation economy of the Ogallala-High Plains region has became a growing concern in select areas (notably Texas and Kansas) due to decreased well yields and increases in the costs of lifting water for irrigation. This concern has sparked an interest for research and more education in Kansas.
The High Plains aquifer underlies about 174,000 square miles of the central United States east of the Rocky Mountains in the southern part of the Great Plains. The aquifer underlies portions of eight states, which are South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. The High Plains aquifer is the shallowest and most abundant source of water in the region, which leads the economy of the area to depend upon it for irrigated agriculture.
The Ogallala formation is the principal geologic unit in the High Plains aquifer, and it accounts for approximately 134,000 square miles of the High Plains aquifer. Groundwater flow is generally from west to east, at an average rate of approximately 1 foot per day, and discharges naturally to streams and springs, and directly through atmospheric evapotranspiration. Estimated recharge rates vary from 0.024 inches per year in part of Texas to 6 inches per year in south-central Kansas.
The irrigation economy of the Ogallala-High Plains region has became a growing concern in select areas (notably Texas and Kansas) due to decreased well yields and increases in the costs of lifting water for irrigation. This concern has sparked an interest for research and more education in Kansas.
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/...b/update23.html
The High Plains Aquifer
By Dr. Steve Overmann
Southeast Missouri State University
The Joseph Emergency
As the energy emergency unfolds, is the blackout of 2003 a preview of things to come?
David Ehrenfeld
WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF THE DRAMATIC STORY of Joseph and his brothers, told in the Book of Genesis, they think first of the Canaanite family drama -- of a brother abused and brought low by his siblings -- ending in one of the most moving family reconciliations in all literature. Less often considered is the subplot of the story: Joseph's accurate prediction of impending environmental catastrophe -- drought and famine -- and his masterful strategy for avoiding disaster by taking steps while resources were still abundant.
Sold into slavery, Joseph becomes known as a skilled interpreter of dreams, a talent that comes to the ears of Pharaoh, who has been troubled by two dreams that his advisors cannot explain. The dreams are similar: in one, seven fat cows emerge from the Nile to graze, followed by seven emaciated cows which swallow them up; in the other, seven full, healthy heads of grain are eaten up by seven thin, shriveled ones. The repetition of the theme in two dreams was believed a sign that God was about to bring these events to pass. Pharaoh sends for Joseph.
Joseph's interpretation of the dreams is that there will be seven years of abundant harvest, followed by seven years of famine.
Therefore, he suggests to Pharaoh with breathtaking boldness, you should appoint a wise and discreet man who will oversee Egypt, and who will organize the collecting of one-fifth of the grain during the years of plenty, to be stored in granaries in the cities and doled out during the years of famine.
AT THE HEART OF JOSEPH'S STRATEGY was a simple lesson: In a world of changing fortunes, long-term survival of an individual or a country can often be achieved by saving during the good years. This is a profoundly conservative strategy, one that must have evolved along with the development of agriculture, which from the early days was largely based on the planting of annual grain crops.
This lesson has been ignored in more recent history. In the 1920s, times were good; during the postwar boom many people believed prosperity would last forever, and they spent lavishly on every kind of luxury. Then, in 1929, came the crash, followed by the Great Depression, a shattering experience for millions. Personal and corporate bankruptcies were legion, and survivors lived the rest of their lives obsessed by the need for savings and insurance.
In 2003, a new generation is repeating the mistakes of the '20s. We have an administration that calls itself conservative, yet countenances with equanimity a rising tide of bankruptcies and unemployment, and a deficit of more than six trillion dollars. We are allowing our state and federal legislators to borrow against pension plans and Social Security funds as if tomorrow will never come. This fiscal nonchalance shows how little we remember the Depression and its grim teaching: All parties sooner or later come to an end, as many who put their life savings into high-tech stocks have realized.
Our party, like the revels of the carefree summer of 1929, is ending, too. Grave troubles concerning the environment, health, security, food, and water have already begun to arrive. But the mother of them all is the dwindling global supply of cheap energy, upon which modern civilization and global commerce utterly depend. Here is a fundamental problem that will not go away. All of the oil in Iraq, all of the oil in the Caspian region, all of the oil in Russia, all of the oil that may be under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and all of the potential supplies that have yet to be discovered and developed anywhere will not be enough to meet the increasingly ravenous demand of industry, transportation, agribusiness, consumerism, and other modern sinkholes for cheap energy, even in the short term.
And it doesn't help much to add in other fossil fuel sources: Venezuela's very heavy oil, the Athabasca oil sands of northern Alberta, the gas hydrates or clathrates off the coast of North Carolina, coal deposits everywhere, and the oil shales of western Colorado and eastern Utah. For example, the petroleum geologist Walter Youngquist pointed out that for oil shale the net energy costs of mining, transporting, refining, and disposing of waste are probably greater than the energy recovered. Similar objections apply to every other source of non-petroleum hydrocarbon energy, including biomass energy from corn and garbage. It is true that we will not soon run out of fossil fuels, but the cheap, oil-based energy upon which global industrialization is based is going fast.
Our party, like the revels of the
carefree summer of 1929, is ending. The signs are
clear for those who care to observe them.
As we in America are using more and more energy, the rest of the world is making do with less. The energy expert Richard Duncan has pointed out that global energy production per capita reached its peak in 1979 and has been falling at an average rate of 0.33 percent per year ever since. There is now less energy available for each person on Earth than there was in 1979. Duncan has predicted that world oil production will peak in 2006, and then begin to fall rapidly, even as much of the less developed world is industrializing, and its population growing. This prediction is roughly in accord with those of other prominent oil geologists. If it is correct, Duncan claims, "energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 [level] by 2030."
This is industrial civilization as we know it, a fast-driving, heavily consuming, self-indulgent civilization that lacks inherent braking mechanisms. If Duncan and other energy analysts are right (they seem fairly conservative), we can expect widespread electricity blackouts in a decade or so, followed by the rapid unraveling of our highly complex, highly interlinked, highly unstable, and highly unpredictable globalized system.
At some point, as the price of energy goes up and the net assets and purchasing power of most Americans continue to wane, it will no longer be feasible to ship large quantities of green peppers from Mexico to Boston in January, or send steel for heavy construction from China to Atlanta. Economists will then wonder how we could have squandered our energy resources with such abandon. As industrial civilization starts to come apart, social and economic failure will lower energy consumption, but not in a way that most of us would find tolerable.
There are elements of industrial civilization that few would want to lose -- advances in understanding and treating human diseases, research on conservation and habitat restoration, improved ways of communicating over great distances and of processing information, among others. Can we save these elements by changing the system now before it disintegrates? This is, I think, a possibility, unless it turns out that for social as well as economic reasons the system is so dependent on consumption and waste, on sheer volume of buying and selling, that it cannot survive moderation. But assuming the worst case will only cause paralysis of action. And we have a moral obligation to act, because we in the First World have created this system, which includes not ourselves alone, but those people in Third World nations who have toiled and have polluted and depleted their own resources to feed our consumption.
We are well into the unfolding energy emergency -- our dependence on oil from the Middle East, where we have imposed our military and political presence and culture, has spawned increasing terrorism and tumultuous unrest. As we dangle from an oil-soaked lifeline, thousands of people in the Islamic world are struggling to apply a lighted match. Terrorism against a vast, complex, interlinked industrial society such as ours is very cheap and relatively easy to accomplish; defense against terrorism is fabulously expensive, compromises our civil liberties, and is not very effective. The best way to minimize the threat of terrorism is to eliminate our most vulnerable and provocative activities, the first of which is our heavy use of imported oil.
One thing is certain: If we are to reduce energy consumption in a way that preserves the best parts of industrial civilization, we have to start now. Now, while we are still sufficiently energy-rich and material-rich to afford the high costs of technological development and to buy time for the changes we need in public attitudes toward energy use. In other words, the Joseph Strategy.
Americans seem to regard our
unrealistically low gasoline prices as an entitlement, rather than the heavy social, military,
and environmental burden that they really are.
THERE ARE THREE QUITE DIFFERENT COURSES of action that might be taken, each with its advantages and drawbacks.
The first approach is a combination of stockpiling and rationing, a "top-down" tactic that is roughly similar to the one that Joseph used. The energy stockpile most directly analogous to Joseph's huge granaries in the cities is the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in existence since 1977. The capacity of the petroleum reserve is seven hundred million barrels of oil; it is not yet filled completely.
The U.S. consumption of oil is now approximately twenty million barrels per day, a little more than half of which is provided by foreign oil. Thus the reserve could hold a thirty-five-day supply. If the reserve were used to replace only the foreign oil we consume, it would last a little less than seventy days -- the slower the drawdown, the longer the supply would last. By no stretch of the imagination, however, could the reserve make a significant contribution to our energy needs for more than a year or two, so stockpiling is not a factor in any long-term energy strategy.
Rationing is a different matter. Joseph kept strict control of the stockpiled grain that was sold to the hungry Egyptians. A rough counterpart was our government's rationing of gasoline during the Second World War. When voluntary gas rationing proved ineffective, mandatory gas rationing was put in place throughout the country by December 1942. Cars used for "nonessential driving," the majority, had yellow A stickers on their windshields, and received three to four gallons of gas per week. The sticker hardest to come by, good for unlimited fuel, was the X sticker, offered to VIPs such as members of Congress. In Washington, twelve percent of the city's population applied for X stickers. Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, conspicuously applied for an A sticker. Leon Henderson (Joseph's equivalent), the head of the Office of Price Administration, the notorious OPA which administered rationing, also had an A sticker, and when he made public the names of X sticker holders, several hundred changed their minds and surrendered them.
Gas rationing worked fairly well; people understood that it was necessary, and an exercise in effective patriotism, though cars were far less important in the daily lives of Americans in the 1940s than they are today. It seems likely that some form of mandatory energy rationing will be needed again in twenty-first-century America. But in the absence of a national energy catastrophe, the only politically acceptable forms of rationing are likely to be indirect. Imposing strict gas mileage standards on all new vehicles could be a viable equivalent of rationing. Strict regulation of electricity consumption by outdoor advertising, refrigerators, and lighting fixtures would do the same, as would the mandating of ecological design criteria to reduce energy consumption in new buildings. With such equivalents of rationing in place, we would have the time and money to implement further improvements in our use of energy, and to devote more attention to our many other environmental and social problems.
THE SECOND TACTIC for the precautionary avoidance of energy shortage is technological innovation -- like rationing, a top-down approach. Energy-saving technologies are already commercially available and more are being developed.
Obviously it would be ideal to couple the new energy-use and energy-generating technologies: for instance, a hydrogen fuel cell-powered car whose hydrogen is provided by energy from photovoltaic cells or wind generators. But it seems doubtful that truly renewable sources can ever provide even close to enough energy to run all the vehicular and other fuel cells in an industrialized world at the current rate of use. In the foreseeable future, we will still be powered primarily by fossil fuel. For example, in the case of hydrogen-powered fuel cells, pollution and fossil fuel consumption still exist at the original point of hydrogen production.
In times of crisis, people tend to accept strong
central authority, (as after the bombing
of the Reichstag in 1933, or after September 11),
and often find themselves sacrificing their liberty.
Therefore, however much energy we save through our inventiveness, we will sooner or later have to reduce our consumption. But in the meantime, technological innovation that increases the efficiency of energy use and provides more renewable energy is a great improvement over the wastefulness of traditional practices. It is a crime that our government is only paying lip service to most of this technology, when it should be supporting a research and production effort on the scale of the World War II Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb. We should be grateful that a few developments -- the compact fluorescent bulb, wind power, and the hybrid car -- are moving forward rapidly without much governmental assistance. And perhaps, as profits from energy-saving technologies grow, our government will belatedly join the parade. We can hope so, because technological innovation is the second, necessary part of the Joseph Strategy.
THERE IS ONE SERIOUS PROBLEM with both rationing and the new energy technologies. In this regard, the Joseph story has more to tell us. In chapter 47 of Genesis we learn what happened in Egypt after the famine began:
The famine was very severe.... Joseph gathered in all the money that was to be found in the land of Egypt... and brought the money into Pharaoh's palace. And when the money gave out... Joseph said, "Bring your livestock and I will sell to you against your livestock, if the money is gone...." And the next year [they] said to him..."With all the money and animal stocks consigned to my lord, nothing is left.... Take us and our land in exchange for bread, and we with our land will be serfs to Pharaoh; provide the seed that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become a waste." So Joseph gained possession of all the farm land of Egypt for Pharaoh.... And he removed the population [to cities] from one end of Egypt's border to the other.... Then Joseph said to the people, "... here is seed for you to sow the land. And when harvest comes, you shall give one-fifth to Pharaoh, and four-fifths shall be yours." And they said, "You have saved our lives! We are grateful to my lord and we shall be serfs to Pharaoh." (Jewish Publication Society translation)
Joseph averted overwhelming famine and death, but at a price. In some respects, the social consequences -- landless economic serfdom -- are reminiscent of the changes that took place in Britain at the time of the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in modern Mexico among the Mixtec and Zapotec peoples.
Photograph | Edward Burtynsky, Container Ports #10, Vancouver, British Columbia 2001
Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco
The net results of Joseph's actions were not only the avoidance of terrible famine but the centralization of power in a country where it had previously been dispersed, as well as the loss of liberty for most of its inhabitants. Paradoxically, he also set the stage for the creation of a powerful regime which eventually enslaved his own descendants.
Both rationing on the one hand and technological change on the other leave us vulnerable to this side effect of the Joseph Strategy. In the case of rationing of energy sources and uses, the danger is obvious. In any rationing scheme, some people get more, others less. There is always a potential for favoritism and manipulation.
Technological innovation, like rationing, also leaves us subject to top-down control. With a few exceptions, such as the solar oven, modern technological innovation in this field requires large amounts of capital and large research establishments; and the kinds of organizations that can carry out this research -- the federal government and multinational corporations -- are not disposed to give up power. This research and development is not a job for enterprising young beginners. The great majority of people will have little or no opportunity to create any of the modern, energy-saving devices themselves, or to make innovations, improvements, or even repairs to the ones they buy. One has only to think of the sealed components of today's automobiles and appliances. Some readers of this article may thoroughly understand the physics and engineering of hydrogen fuel cells, but there is probably not one of you who can build a working, useful fuel cell from scratch in your basement workshop and economically and safely generate the hydrogen to run it. Your familiar power company, or its surrogate, will still be selling and servicing your high-tech power generator. You are likely to be connected forever to the company by an umbilical cord that you cannot cut.
Mandatory rationing and technological innovation are critically necessary but we have to remember that these are top-down approaches. In times of crisis, people tend to accept strong central authority (as after the bombing of the Reichstag in 1933, or after September 11), and often find themselves sacrificing their liberty. In the face of a severe energy shortage, how much of our freedom will we be willing to lose to preserve our current lifestyle? Or can that lifestyle change?
THE THIRD PROACTIVE TACTIC for dealing with energy shortage is a largely "bottom-up" approach that does not put us at the mercy of centralized power structures or compromise our freedom. We consume far more than we need to of almost everything: food, space, material goods, and, underlying all other consumption, energy. A popular movement to lower consumption would defuse the energy crisis quickly, at little or no direct cost. Unlike rationing and most technological advances, it would reduce rather than increase centralized control and our indebtedness to energy-giving authority.
Such a movement already exists and is growing, as more and more people take themselves off the consumption treadmill. Consuming less, including much less energy, doesn't have to mean shutting down. But an energy-sparing life of quality does not come without effort. A thousand economic and cultural obstacles, created by government in league with transnational corporations, make it hard to operate a farm, small business, or a professional practice in a low-consumption way. The spend-and-discard, mall-dwelling lifestyle is easier and more convenient, and requires much less knowledge and commitment. This is why we should not expect a widespread, dramatic conversion until the true costs of our obscene energy (and other) consumption begin to hit home with skyrocketing gasoline prices, scattered blackouts, increasing unemployment, and possibly more terrorist attacks. When this point comes, our hope must be that enough people have pioneered low-consumption ways of living to teach survival skills to the refugees who cannot imagine life without low-priced gas, cheap imports, and the produce of factory farms.
Then we will discover that the ability to reduce our own consumption will give us enormous power that cannot be taken away by higher authority. True, military-related contracts, paid by the taxpayers, can be handed out by the government, but the great bulk of buying is under our control. The power not to spend, at least on nonessential goods and services, has not yet been exploited to pressure our political leaders to look beyond materialism for the public good.
We can only be sold what we want to buy. Europeans have demonstrated this truth with their boycott of "genetically modified" (GM) food, which has in turn spelled deep financial trouble for Monsanto, its largest purveyor. Monsanto has been a major contributor to both Republican and Democratic parties, and few would say that this has not affected national policy. But if Monsanto is weakened by popular lack of demand for its products and by the opposition of other commercial interests damaged by the GM food wars, will this not reduce its political influence as well?
A voluntary lowering of consumption -- the end of gross materialism -- would bring about many beneficial changes in our society. It would improve our health by breaking the stressful spiral of working more to buy more -- and to pay the ever-ballooning interest on credit card debt. It would increase our need and concern for each other as we rediscover that neighbors can share goods and exchange services at great savings and with much joy.
Lowering consumption would also have dramatic effects beyond the industrial world. It would reduce exploitation of children and semi-slave laborers in Third World countries, and would slow depletion of global resources. These countries could then promote a healthy, equitable commerce among themselves by forming regional trading blocs, free of the negative economic and social consequences of depending on Western markets. This in turn would lower the risk of war and international terrorism, and would narrow the now-widening gap between rich and poor everywhere.
Yet ending our consumption habit, both voluntarily and as a result of a growing energy crisis, may also cause widespread and profound commercial failures and economic disruption -- possibly economic chaos. This is especially likely if the change is abrupt. A few examples will suffice. The demise of the energy-sponging, automobile-dependent suburbs without adequate provision for the people who live there, and the disappearance of giant malls without replacement of the useful services they provide and the retail jobs they generate, will bring about much suffering. We should also anticipate the loss of the sales-generated surpluses that now pay for the arts, much environmental protection, special education, and many other necessary amenities. Moreover, if local communities revive at the expense of centralized authority, we should be ready to deal with a resurgence of parochialism, prejudice, and intolerance -- implementing the transition from excess to moderation will challenge both our ingenuity and our humanity, if the best of modernity is to survive the end of materialism.
THE TIME TO START DEALING with the energy crisis is now, while we still have the resources and wealth that allow us to act. This is the Joseph Strategy. A modern approach will have the three components, each with advantages and drawbacks. A judicious mix of all three -- rationing, investment in technological change, and the voluntary reduction of consumption -- will serve us best and do the least harm. These components can work well together -- for example, in a less materialistic society, wise rationing of energy would not be onerous. And our willingness to jettison gross materialism may well evoke the kind of adroit and farseeing leadership that Joseph provided, but leadership now more by example than by command.
Perhaps our model should not be Joseph in his royal chariot, but Eleanor Roosevelt in her car with the yellow A sticker on the windshield.
DAVID EHRENFELD is a professor of Biology at Rutgers University. His books include: The Arrogance of Humanism, Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium, and most recently, Swimming Lessons: Keeping Afloat in the Age of Technology. He lectures widely and has written many magazine articles, including the former Orion column Raritan Letter.
As the energy emergency unfolds, is the blackout of 2003 a preview of things to come?
David Ehrenfeld
WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF THE DRAMATIC STORY of Joseph and his brothers, told in the Book of Genesis, they think first of the Canaanite family drama -- of a brother abused and brought low by his siblings -- ending in one of the most moving family reconciliations in all literature. Less often considered is the subplot of the story: Joseph's accurate prediction of impending environmental catastrophe -- drought and famine -- and his masterful strategy for avoiding disaster by taking steps while resources were still abundant.
Sold into slavery, Joseph becomes known as a skilled interpreter of dreams, a talent that comes to the ears of Pharaoh, who has been troubled by two dreams that his advisors cannot explain. The dreams are similar: in one, seven fat cows emerge from the Nile to graze, followed by seven emaciated cows which swallow them up; in the other, seven full, healthy heads of grain are eaten up by seven thin, shriveled ones. The repetition of the theme in two dreams was believed a sign that God was about to bring these events to pass. Pharaoh sends for Joseph.
Joseph's interpretation of the dreams is that there will be seven years of abundant harvest, followed by seven years of famine.
Therefore, he suggests to Pharaoh with breathtaking boldness, you should appoint a wise and discreet man who will oversee Egypt, and who will organize the collecting of one-fifth of the grain during the years of plenty, to be stored in granaries in the cities and doled out during the years of famine.
AT THE HEART OF JOSEPH'S STRATEGY was a simple lesson: In a world of changing fortunes, long-term survival of an individual or a country can often be achieved by saving during the good years. This is a profoundly conservative strategy, one that must have evolved along with the development of agriculture, which from the early days was largely based on the planting of annual grain crops.
This lesson has been ignored in more recent history. In the 1920s, times were good; during the postwar boom many people believed prosperity would last forever, and they spent lavishly on every kind of luxury. Then, in 1929, came the crash, followed by the Great Depression, a shattering experience for millions. Personal and corporate bankruptcies were legion, and survivors lived the rest of their lives obsessed by the need for savings and insurance.
In 2003, a new generation is repeating the mistakes of the '20s. We have an administration that calls itself conservative, yet countenances with equanimity a rising tide of bankruptcies and unemployment, and a deficit of more than six trillion dollars. We are allowing our state and federal legislators to borrow against pension plans and Social Security funds as if tomorrow will never come. This fiscal nonchalance shows how little we remember the Depression and its grim teaching: All parties sooner or later come to an end, as many who put their life savings into high-tech stocks have realized.
Our party, like the revels of the carefree summer of 1929, is ending, too. Grave troubles concerning the environment, health, security, food, and water have already begun to arrive. But the mother of them all is the dwindling global supply of cheap energy, upon which modern civilization and global commerce utterly depend. Here is a fundamental problem that will not go away. All of the oil in Iraq, all of the oil in the Caspian region, all of the oil in Russia, all of the oil that may be under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and all of the potential supplies that have yet to be discovered and developed anywhere will not be enough to meet the increasingly ravenous demand of industry, transportation, agribusiness, consumerism, and other modern sinkholes for cheap energy, even in the short term.
And it doesn't help much to add in other fossil fuel sources: Venezuela's very heavy oil, the Athabasca oil sands of northern Alberta, the gas hydrates or clathrates off the coast of North Carolina, coal deposits everywhere, and the oil shales of western Colorado and eastern Utah. For example, the petroleum geologist Walter Youngquist pointed out that for oil shale the net energy costs of mining, transporting, refining, and disposing of waste are probably greater than the energy recovered. Similar objections apply to every other source of non-petroleum hydrocarbon energy, including biomass energy from corn and garbage. It is true that we will not soon run out of fossil fuels, but the cheap, oil-based energy upon which global industrialization is based is going fast.
Our party, like the revels of the
carefree summer of 1929, is ending. The signs are
clear for those who care to observe them.
As we in America are using more and more energy, the rest of the world is making do with less. The energy expert Richard Duncan has pointed out that global energy production per capita reached its peak in 1979 and has been falling at an average rate of 0.33 percent per year ever since. There is now less energy available for each person on Earth than there was in 1979. Duncan has predicted that world oil production will peak in 2006, and then begin to fall rapidly, even as much of the less developed world is industrializing, and its population growing. This prediction is roughly in accord with those of other prominent oil geologists. If it is correct, Duncan claims, "energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 [level] by 2030."
This is industrial civilization as we know it, a fast-driving, heavily consuming, self-indulgent civilization that lacks inherent braking mechanisms. If Duncan and other energy analysts are right (they seem fairly conservative), we can expect widespread electricity blackouts in a decade or so, followed by the rapid unraveling of our highly complex, highly interlinked, highly unstable, and highly unpredictable globalized system.
At some point, as the price of energy goes up and the net assets and purchasing power of most Americans continue to wane, it will no longer be feasible to ship large quantities of green peppers from Mexico to Boston in January, or send steel for heavy construction from China to Atlanta. Economists will then wonder how we could have squandered our energy resources with such abandon. As industrial civilization starts to come apart, social and economic failure will lower energy consumption, but not in a way that most of us would find tolerable.
There are elements of industrial civilization that few would want to lose -- advances in understanding and treating human diseases, research on conservation and habitat restoration, improved ways of communicating over great distances and of processing information, among others. Can we save these elements by changing the system now before it disintegrates? This is, I think, a possibility, unless it turns out that for social as well as economic reasons the system is so dependent on consumption and waste, on sheer volume of buying and selling, that it cannot survive moderation. But assuming the worst case will only cause paralysis of action. And we have a moral obligation to act, because we in the First World have created this system, which includes not ourselves alone, but those people in Third World nations who have toiled and have polluted and depleted their own resources to feed our consumption.
We are well into the unfolding energy emergency -- our dependence on oil from the Middle East, where we have imposed our military and political presence and culture, has spawned increasing terrorism and tumultuous unrest. As we dangle from an oil-soaked lifeline, thousands of people in the Islamic world are struggling to apply a lighted match. Terrorism against a vast, complex, interlinked industrial society such as ours is very cheap and relatively easy to accomplish; defense against terrorism is fabulously expensive, compromises our civil liberties, and is not very effective. The best way to minimize the threat of terrorism is to eliminate our most vulnerable and provocative activities, the first of which is our heavy use of imported oil.
One thing is certain: If we are to reduce energy consumption in a way that preserves the best parts of industrial civilization, we have to start now. Now, while we are still sufficiently energy-rich and material-rich to afford the high costs of technological development and to buy time for the changes we need in public attitudes toward energy use. In other words, the Joseph Strategy.
Americans seem to regard our
unrealistically low gasoline prices as an entitlement, rather than the heavy social, military,
and environmental burden that they really are.
THERE ARE THREE QUITE DIFFERENT COURSES of action that might be taken, each with its advantages and drawbacks.
The first approach is a combination of stockpiling and rationing, a "top-down" tactic that is roughly similar to the one that Joseph used. The energy stockpile most directly analogous to Joseph's huge granaries in the cities is the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in existence since 1977. The capacity of the petroleum reserve is seven hundred million barrels of oil; it is not yet filled completely.
The U.S. consumption of oil is now approximately twenty million barrels per day, a little more than half of which is provided by foreign oil. Thus the reserve could hold a thirty-five-day supply. If the reserve were used to replace only the foreign oil we consume, it would last a little less than seventy days -- the slower the drawdown, the longer the supply would last. By no stretch of the imagination, however, could the reserve make a significant contribution to our energy needs for more than a year or two, so stockpiling is not a factor in any long-term energy strategy.
Rationing is a different matter. Joseph kept strict control of the stockpiled grain that was sold to the hungry Egyptians. A rough counterpart was our government's rationing of gasoline during the Second World War. When voluntary gas rationing proved ineffective, mandatory gas rationing was put in place throughout the country by December 1942. Cars used for "nonessential driving," the majority, had yellow A stickers on their windshields, and received three to four gallons of gas per week. The sticker hardest to come by, good for unlimited fuel, was the X sticker, offered to VIPs such as members of Congress. In Washington, twelve percent of the city's population applied for X stickers. Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, conspicuously applied for an A sticker. Leon Henderson (Joseph's equivalent), the head of the Office of Price Administration, the notorious OPA which administered rationing, also had an A sticker, and when he made public the names of X sticker holders, several hundred changed their minds and surrendered them.
Gas rationing worked fairly well; people understood that it was necessary, and an exercise in effective patriotism, though cars were far less important in the daily lives of Americans in the 1940s than they are today. It seems likely that some form of mandatory energy rationing will be needed again in twenty-first-century America. But in the absence of a national energy catastrophe, the only politically acceptable forms of rationing are likely to be indirect. Imposing strict gas mileage standards on all new vehicles could be a viable equivalent of rationing. Strict regulation of electricity consumption by outdoor advertising, refrigerators, and lighting fixtures would do the same, as would the mandating of ecological design criteria to reduce energy consumption in new buildings. With such equivalents of rationing in place, we would have the time and money to implement further improvements in our use of energy, and to devote more attention to our many other environmental and social problems.
THE SECOND TACTIC for the precautionary avoidance of energy shortage is technological innovation -- like rationing, a top-down approach. Energy-saving technologies are already commercially available and more are being developed.
Obviously it would be ideal to couple the new energy-use and energy-generating technologies: for instance, a hydrogen fuel cell-powered car whose hydrogen is provided by energy from photovoltaic cells or wind generators. But it seems doubtful that truly renewable sources can ever provide even close to enough energy to run all the vehicular and other fuel cells in an industrialized world at the current rate of use. In the foreseeable future, we will still be powered primarily by fossil fuel. For example, in the case of hydrogen-powered fuel cells, pollution and fossil fuel consumption still exist at the original point of hydrogen production.
In times of crisis, people tend to accept strong
central authority, (as after the bombing
of the Reichstag in 1933, or after September 11),
and often find themselves sacrificing their liberty.
Therefore, however much energy we save through our inventiveness, we will sooner or later have to reduce our consumption. But in the meantime, technological innovation that increases the efficiency of energy use and provides more renewable energy is a great improvement over the wastefulness of traditional practices. It is a crime that our government is only paying lip service to most of this technology, when it should be supporting a research and production effort on the scale of the World War II Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb. We should be grateful that a few developments -- the compact fluorescent bulb, wind power, and the hybrid car -- are moving forward rapidly without much governmental assistance. And perhaps, as profits from energy-saving technologies grow, our government will belatedly join the parade. We can hope so, because technological innovation is the second, necessary part of the Joseph Strategy.
THERE IS ONE SERIOUS PROBLEM with both rationing and the new energy technologies. In this regard, the Joseph story has more to tell us. In chapter 47 of Genesis we learn what happened in Egypt after the famine began:
The famine was very severe.... Joseph gathered in all the money that was to be found in the land of Egypt... and brought the money into Pharaoh's palace. And when the money gave out... Joseph said, "Bring your livestock and I will sell to you against your livestock, if the money is gone...." And the next year [they] said to him..."With all the money and animal stocks consigned to my lord, nothing is left.... Take us and our land in exchange for bread, and we with our land will be serfs to Pharaoh; provide the seed that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become a waste." So Joseph gained possession of all the farm land of Egypt for Pharaoh.... And he removed the population [to cities] from one end of Egypt's border to the other.... Then Joseph said to the people, "... here is seed for you to sow the land. And when harvest comes, you shall give one-fifth to Pharaoh, and four-fifths shall be yours." And they said, "You have saved our lives! We are grateful to my lord and we shall be serfs to Pharaoh." (Jewish Publication Society translation)
Joseph averted overwhelming famine and death, but at a price. In some respects, the social consequences -- landless economic serfdom -- are reminiscent of the changes that took place in Britain at the time of the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in modern Mexico among the Mixtec and Zapotec peoples.
Photograph | Edward Burtynsky, Container Ports #10, Vancouver, British Columbia 2001
Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco
The net results of Joseph's actions were not only the avoidance of terrible famine but the centralization of power in a country where it had previously been dispersed, as well as the loss of liberty for most of its inhabitants. Paradoxically, he also set the stage for the creation of a powerful regime which eventually enslaved his own descendants.
Both rationing on the one hand and technological change on the other leave us vulnerable to this side effect of the Joseph Strategy. In the case of rationing of energy sources and uses, the danger is obvious. In any rationing scheme, some people get more, others less. There is always a potential for favoritism and manipulation.
Technological innovation, like rationing, also leaves us subject to top-down control. With a few exceptions, such as the solar oven, modern technological innovation in this field requires large amounts of capital and large research establishments; and the kinds of organizations that can carry out this research -- the federal government and multinational corporations -- are not disposed to give up power. This research and development is not a job for enterprising young beginners. The great majority of people will have little or no opportunity to create any of the modern, energy-saving devices themselves, or to make innovations, improvements, or even repairs to the ones they buy. One has only to think of the sealed components of today's automobiles and appliances. Some readers of this article may thoroughly understand the physics and engineering of hydrogen fuel cells, but there is probably not one of you who can build a working, useful fuel cell from scratch in your basement workshop and economically and safely generate the hydrogen to run it. Your familiar power company, or its surrogate, will still be selling and servicing your high-tech power generator. You are likely to be connected forever to the company by an umbilical cord that you cannot cut.
Mandatory rationing and technological innovation are critically necessary but we have to remember that these are top-down approaches. In times of crisis, people tend to accept strong central authority (as after the bombing of the Reichstag in 1933, or after September 11), and often find themselves sacrificing their liberty. In the face of a severe energy shortage, how much of our freedom will we be willing to lose to preserve our current lifestyle? Or can that lifestyle change?
THE THIRD PROACTIVE TACTIC for dealing with energy shortage is a largely "bottom-up" approach that does not put us at the mercy of centralized power structures or compromise our freedom. We consume far more than we need to of almost everything: food, space, material goods, and, underlying all other consumption, energy. A popular movement to lower consumption would defuse the energy crisis quickly, at little or no direct cost. Unlike rationing and most technological advances, it would reduce rather than increase centralized control and our indebtedness to energy-giving authority.
Such a movement already exists and is growing, as more and more people take themselves off the consumption treadmill. Consuming less, including much less energy, doesn't have to mean shutting down. But an energy-sparing life of quality does not come without effort. A thousand economic and cultural obstacles, created by government in league with transnational corporations, make it hard to operate a farm, small business, or a professional practice in a low-consumption way. The spend-and-discard, mall-dwelling lifestyle is easier and more convenient, and requires much less knowledge and commitment. This is why we should not expect a widespread, dramatic conversion until the true costs of our obscene energy (and other) consumption begin to hit home with skyrocketing gasoline prices, scattered blackouts, increasing unemployment, and possibly more terrorist attacks. When this point comes, our hope must be that enough people have pioneered low-consumption ways of living to teach survival skills to the refugees who cannot imagine life without low-priced gas, cheap imports, and the produce of factory farms.
Then we will discover that the ability to reduce our own consumption will give us enormous power that cannot be taken away by higher authority. True, military-related contracts, paid by the taxpayers, can be handed out by the government, but the great bulk of buying is under our control. The power not to spend, at least on nonessential goods and services, has not yet been exploited to pressure our political leaders to look beyond materialism for the public good.
We can only be sold what we want to buy. Europeans have demonstrated this truth with their boycott of "genetically modified" (GM) food, which has in turn spelled deep financial trouble for Monsanto, its largest purveyor. Monsanto has been a major contributor to both Republican and Democratic parties, and few would say that this has not affected national policy. But if Monsanto is weakened by popular lack of demand for its products and by the opposition of other commercial interests damaged by the GM food wars, will this not reduce its political influence as well?
A voluntary lowering of consumption -- the end of gross materialism -- would bring about many beneficial changes in our society. It would improve our health by breaking the stressful spiral of working more to buy more -- and to pay the ever-ballooning interest on credit card debt. It would increase our need and concern for each other as we rediscover that neighbors can share goods and exchange services at great savings and with much joy.
Lowering consumption would also have dramatic effects beyond the industrial world. It would reduce exploitation of children and semi-slave laborers in Third World countries, and would slow depletion of global resources. These countries could then promote a healthy, equitable commerce among themselves by forming regional trading blocs, free of the negative economic and social consequences of depending on Western markets. This in turn would lower the risk of war and international terrorism, and would narrow the now-widening gap between rich and poor everywhere.
Yet ending our consumption habit, both voluntarily and as a result of a growing energy crisis, may also cause widespread and profound commercial failures and economic disruption -- possibly economic chaos. This is especially likely if the change is abrupt. A few examples will suffice. The demise of the energy-sponging, automobile-dependent suburbs without adequate provision for the people who live there, and the disappearance of giant malls without replacement of the useful services they provide and the retail jobs they generate, will bring about much suffering. We should also anticipate the loss of the sales-generated surpluses that now pay for the arts, much environmental protection, special education, and many other necessary amenities. Moreover, if local communities revive at the expense of centralized authority, we should be ready to deal with a resurgence of parochialism, prejudice, and intolerance -- implementing the transition from excess to moderation will challenge both our ingenuity and our humanity, if the best of modernity is to survive the end of materialism.
THE TIME TO START DEALING with the energy crisis is now, while we still have the resources and wealth that allow us to act. This is the Joseph Strategy. A modern approach will have the three components, each with advantages and drawbacks. A judicious mix of all three -- rationing, investment in technological change, and the voluntary reduction of consumption -- will serve us best and do the least harm. These components can work well together -- for example, in a less materialistic society, wise rationing of energy would not be onerous. And our willingness to jettison gross materialism may well evoke the kind of adroit and farseeing leadership that Joseph provided, but leadership now more by example than by command.
Perhaps our model should not be Joseph in his royal chariot, but Eleanor Roosevelt in her car with the yellow A sticker on the windshield.
DAVID EHRENFELD is a professor of Biology at Rutgers University. His books include: The Arrogance of Humanism, Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium, and most recently, Swimming Lessons: Keeping Afloat in the Age of Technology. He lectures widely and has written many magazine articles, including the former Orion column Raritan Letter.
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 24 2005, 12:02 AM) [snapback]407338[/snapback]
You think the moderate imams in Saudi Arabia are making up stories about the more extreme sects there?
Or that everyone is happy with the Saudi royal family? If so, you need to do more reading--no competent journalist or author has denied that these tensions exist within Saudi society.
It's also no surprise that those countries are also MUSLIM. As I've said, this is irrelevant for addressing the question of peak oil.
Questions regarding natural resources, not just oil? A long while ago.
MA
I never disputed that there is major social turmoil in Saudi Arabia and popular sentiment against the Royal Family. I disputed your assertion that "Saudi Arabia is a breeding ground for terrorists". To make that assertion, you have to define the term "terrorist", and identify the "terrorist" party as well as the party or parties being "terrorized". If, as is consistent with the 'received wisdom', you were alleging the existence of Saudi Arabian terrorists who have the means and opportunity to terrorize America, then you were simply regurgitating U.S. government propaganda. BBC made an excellent documentary called "The Power of Nightmares" on this subject. I would highly recommend it.
[EDIT] AQ, as in "Al Qaeda"? I was waiting for you to mention that. Al Qaeda is an invention of the United States Intelligence apparatus and U.S. foreign policy. What I mean, very specifically, is that the CIA armed, trained, and funded the mujahideen fighters (and OBL) to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. The remnants of this faction later became known as "Al Qaeda". Osama Bin Laden was a CIA assett for years. You think our intelligence apparatus wasn't tracking him/lost track of him/can't find him? I would suggest this reading:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html
And, if oil wars are irrelevant to the discussion of Peak Oil, I would like to know what you think IS relevant.
Jesse
Wow, just because AQ may have received support from the U.S. you think it is a puppet or 'invention'? That is to use the word 'invention' equivocally. Or are you implying something else? The fact remains that AQ is distinct from the U.S. and has goals different from the U.S., and that Osama's ideological and religious leanings can be traced back in his personal history to before Afghanistan, while he was still in SA.
If you don't think the extremists (AQ, the Wahabbis, etc.) in SA view both the Saudi family and the U.S. as enemies, or if you think it's merely about economics and there is no ideological or religious factor involved, then there is nothing more to be said. If you want to view everything in the "official story" as being a fabrication, that's you prerogative but as I have stated before, all of this is off-topic and does not belong here. Those who claim the gov't is using real terrorist groups as an excuse would have more credibility.
If you don't think the extremists (AQ, the Wahabbis, etc.) in SA view both the Saudi family and the U.S. as enemies, or if you think it's merely about economics and there is no ideological or religious factor involved, then there is nothing more to be said. If you want to view everything in the "official story" as being a fabrication, that's you prerogative but as I have stated before, all of this is off-topic and does not belong here. Those who claim the gov't is using real terrorist groups as an excuse would have more credibility.
I was just looking through this thread and just a question, is this thread entirely based on th oil crisis we are facing atm?
Ok, here are my thoughts (and please note that I'm not some analysis/english pro. who speaks of extremely good reasoning):
As people living in the 21st century, oil has become a crucial part in our lives whilst most developed countries have become completely oil dependent.
It's really causing huge problems atm, the fuel prices in countries have risen dramatically, as well as businesses which make little profit struggle to keep up with the minimum income needed to actually earn money and pay for all the money they spent on all they've provided.
Some airlines have risen their fares with each international sector in order to increase their income since fuel is so expensive these days.
And also as a result, within a few years, many small companies may have to shut down due to lack of income. As petroleum industries struggle to find more oil, it may be possible that more money will be spent on extracting the oil deep down within the earth using high-tech equipments rather than earned after selling it.
As a result, alternatives may be considered, possibly using less harmful substances or oil-saving resources.
Clothes, plastic, cars, industries, transport, electricity, food, environment and tourism are all major factors that contribute to our oil crisis - just to name a few - meaning that when oil is insufficient, we're definitely screwed.
The Kyoto Agreement also contributes since global warming is a major pollution to the environment. The combined green house gases (GHG), caught amongst the ozone layer, trapping all the gases within the surface of the earth and therefore, causing a rise in temperature aka global warming.
Ok, I gotta go finish off my H/W now, hope what I said was relevent, I'm still a young student at school so please correct me if I got any part wrong.
Ok, here are my thoughts (and please note that I'm not some analysis/english pro. who speaks of extremely good reasoning):
As people living in the 21st century, oil has become a crucial part in our lives whilst most developed countries have become completely oil dependent.
It's really causing huge problems atm, the fuel prices in countries have risen dramatically, as well as businesses which make little profit struggle to keep up with the minimum income needed to actually earn money and pay for all the money they spent on all they've provided.
Some airlines have risen their fares with each international sector in order to increase their income since fuel is so expensive these days.
And also as a result, within a few years, many small companies may have to shut down due to lack of income. As petroleum industries struggle to find more oil, it may be possible that more money will be spent on extracting the oil deep down within the earth using high-tech equipments rather than earned after selling it.
As a result, alternatives may be considered, possibly using less harmful substances or oil-saving resources.
Clothes, plastic, cars, industries, transport, electricity, food, environment and tourism are all major factors that contribute to our oil crisis - just to name a few - meaning that when oil is insufficient, we're definitely screwed.
The Kyoto Agreement also contributes since global warming is a major pollution to the environment. The combined green house gases (GHG), caught amongst the ozone layer, trapping all the gases within the surface of the earth and therefore, causing a rise in temperature aka global warming.
Ok, I gotta go finish off my H/W now, hope what I said was relevent, I'm still a young student at school so please correct me if I got any part wrong.
I wonder if this needs another thread? Anyway, I'm just gonna post it here since it relates to oil and natural resources
Frist orders oil price probe
52 minutes ago
Amid record-high earnings from oil companies, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on Thursday ordered a Senate hearing with testimony from major oil company executives on why energy prices are high.
The unexpected announcement by the chamber's top Republican showed the growing political pressure as American consumers brace for higher winter heating costs at the same time energy companies are reporting fat profits.
"If there are those who abuse the free enterprise system to advantage themselves and their businesses at the expense of all Americans, they ought to be exposed, and they ought to be ashamed," Frist said in a statement.
The Senate leader also asked the chamber's permanent subcommittee on investigations to launch an inquiry into energy price profiteering. "And ultimately, if the facts warrant it, I will support a federal anti-price gouging law," he said.
Democrats have already introduced several proposals to outlaw oil price profiteering. The nationwide average retail gasoline price topped $3 a gallon soon after Hurricane Katrina hit and crude oil soared to a record $70 a barrel.
Prices have since eased somewhat, but the U.S. government forecasts winter heating costs will be sharply higher for consumers.
Frist said he asked the Senate Energy Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee to hold a joint hearing to look at the reasons behind energy prices. He did not say if a date has yet been set.
"I have asked them to call as witnesses executives from the major oil companies and representatives of the state attorneys general, who have the initial responsibility of keeping the behavior of local energy providers on the straight and narrow," Frist said.
Since the hurricanes hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, Republicans have sought to offer more federal incentives to energy companies to build or expand oil refineries. Democrats this week blocked a Senate plan, saying oil companies were making enough profits to fund such expansions themselves.
On Thursday, Exxon Mobil reported third-quarter earnings of $9.9 billion -- one of the largest quarterly profits in U.S. corporate history.
"We need to increase refinement capacity, provide more energy resources, encourage conservation, invest in science and technology, and, most importantly, transition toward energy independence, including the use of more alternative fuels," Frist said.
Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051027/pl_nm/...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
Frist orders oil price probe
52 minutes ago
Amid record-high earnings from oil companies, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on Thursday ordered a Senate hearing with testimony from major oil company executives on why energy prices are high.
The unexpected announcement by the chamber's top Republican showed the growing political pressure as American consumers brace for higher winter heating costs at the same time energy companies are reporting fat profits.
"If there are those who abuse the free enterprise system to advantage themselves and their businesses at the expense of all Americans, they ought to be exposed, and they ought to be ashamed," Frist said in a statement.
The Senate leader also asked the chamber's permanent subcommittee on investigations to launch an inquiry into energy price profiteering. "And ultimately, if the facts warrant it, I will support a federal anti-price gouging law," he said.
Democrats have already introduced several proposals to outlaw oil price profiteering. The nationwide average retail gasoline price topped $3 a gallon soon after Hurricane Katrina hit and crude oil soared to a record $70 a barrel.
Prices have since eased somewhat, but the U.S. government forecasts winter heating costs will be sharply higher for consumers.
Frist said he asked the Senate Energy Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee to hold a joint hearing to look at the reasons behind energy prices. He did not say if a date has yet been set.
"I have asked them to call as witnesses executives from the major oil companies and representatives of the state attorneys general, who have the initial responsibility of keeping the behavior of local energy providers on the straight and narrow," Frist said.
Since the hurricanes hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, Republicans have sought to offer more federal incentives to energy companies to build or expand oil refineries. Democrats this week blocked a Senate plan, saying oil companies were making enough profits to fund such expansions themselves.
On Thursday, Exxon Mobil reported third-quarter earnings of $9.9 billion -- one of the largest quarterly profits in U.S. corporate history.
"We need to increase refinement capacity, provide more energy resources, encourage conservation, invest in science and technology, and, most importantly, transition toward energy independence, including the use of more alternative fuels," Frist said.
Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051027/pl_nm/...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
QUOTE(~*.:Yuki:.*~ @ Oct 27 2005, 04:47 AM) [snapback]450132[/snapback]
The Kyoto Agreement also contributes since global warming is a major pollution to the environment. The combined green house gases (GHG), caught amongst the ozone layer, trapping all the gases within the surface of the earth and therefore, causing a rise in temperature aka global warming.
The problem with Kyoto is that several developing countries are not a part of it.. countries that are rapidly industrializing. Opponents of Kyoto argue "why should we halt our emissions and potentially slow down our economy while our economic rivals don't have to?" Developing nations such as China, India, etc argue "western countries had to pollute, industrialize, etc in order to get where they are at now, so why can't we do that too?". I think it's primarily due to the economical side effects that you'll have politicians and media try to downplay global warming, and even to downright deny such an effect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/business...artner=homepage
October 27, 2005
Doubts Raised on Saudi Vow for More Oil
By JEFF GERTH
WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - Last spring, the White House publicly embraced plans by Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production capacity significantly. But privately, some officials and others advising the government are skeptical about some of those Saudi forecasts.
The United States relies on a few producers to maintain enough spare capacity to keep prices and markets stable, even during war or disaster. As oil prices have climbed over the last few years amid surging demand and tight supplies, the Bush administration has looked to the Persian Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, to pump extra oil.
But doubts about Saudi Arabia's assurances of how much it can expand capacity - and for how long - have been raised in a secret intelligence report and in a separate analysis by a leading government oil adviser, according to a federal government official and the oil expert.
If those skeptical assessments are correct, the administration's hopes of increasing supplies would become still more difficult to fulfill. Washington's expectations about oil production from Iraq and the United Arab Emirates have proved overly optimistic, and the White House has failed to heed advice about both those countries from industry and government specialists, according to documents and interviews.
The challenges facing the Bush administration on energy come as oil companies are set to report record profits resulting from soaring prices for oil and natural gas. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest private oil company, is expected Thursday to announce a quarterly profit exceeding $8.5 billion, more than companies like Intel and Time Warner earn in a full year.
Asked about the profits on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, said "the government and the private sector have a role to play" in restoring the vital infrastructure damaged by the hurricanes this year along the Gulf of Mexico and over Florida. Gasoline prices spiked after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, straining oil markets already tight because of the uncommonly low levels of spare capacity.
But when it comes to oil supply, American companies are limited: the countries that control most of the world's oil keep out private producers. So whatever the political repercussions from high energy costs, the administration has had little choice but to rely on the promises by Saudi Arabia, the world's largest exporter, that it would continue to be the market's linchpin.
"There's always been this tenet on the American side," said Nawaf Obaid, a consultant to Saudi Arabia on energy security, "that the Saudis knew what they were doing and rightfully so."
But a senior intelligence official, who insisted on remaining anonymous because he was not permitted to speak publicly on the issue, said that the Saudi plans to increase production by nearly 14 percent in the next four years were not enough to meet global demand. Even the Energy Information Administration recently scaled back its expectations of how much more oil the Saudis could pump in 20 years.
To be sure, as Mr. McClellan said Wednesday, there is more to President Bush's energy policy than seeking to ensure surplus capacity. The administration has called for increasing domestic production and refineries, development of alternative and renewable fuels, expanding nuclear energy and, recently, greater conservation. Still, the Persian Gulf countries are seen as crucial in moderating future prices.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, when high gasoline prices were an issue, Mr. Bush pledged to do a better job of influencing Persian Gulf producers to pump more oil.
Early on, the administration was mostly interested in whether the Saudis would produce more oil during the anticipated conflict in Iraq. Long before the war began, Saudi spare capacity - roughly three million barrels a day above the seven million barrels being pumped daily in 2002 - seemed adequate.
Productive capacity depends on the amount of oil in the ground as well as the infrastructure required to drill, process, store and transport the oil. In addition, increasing capacity is very costly and time-consuming.
"The long-term capacity was not considered a problem," said Robert W. Jordan, the American ambassador to Riyadh from 2001 to 2003. The Saudis, he added, "never expressed any concern about the need to expand."
"Nor did we, or at least me, engage them on this topic," he said.
In April 2002, when President Bush met Crown Prince Abdullah, now the Saudi king, the focus was not on oil but on Israeli-Palestinian matters, according to Mr. Jordan. The United States did not press the capacity issue because, even two years later, Saudi officials were publicly expressing confidence that there was no need over the next five years to add capacity.
Going to 12 million or 15 million barrels a day was possible, though, because the country had an estimated 150 billion barrels above the 260 billion in proven reserves, Nansen G. Saleri, a senior Saudi oil executive, said at an oil conference in Washington in February 2004.
Soon, though, rising demand from Asia made the need to invest in new production "a front-burner issue," according to Spencer Abraham, energy secretary in the president's first term. By May 2004, under pressure from the United States and other consumers, the Saudis promised to pump more oil. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, was planning to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day by 2009.
Before long, Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, and Saudi oil executives were saying that the country could add 200 billion barrels - from existing fields and yet-to-be-discovered resources - to its reserves, enabling production of 15 million barrels a day for 50 years or perhaps longer.
Just before meeting with Prince Abdullah in April, President Bush said he wanted "a straight answer" about how much extra oil the Saudis could pump.
At that session in Texas, the prince reaffirmed the previously announced expansion plans. Saudi Arabia's capacity now stands at about 11 million barrels a day. The Saudis pump about 9.5 million barrels, leaving a cushion of about 1.5 million barrels, mostly of heavier grades not very usable in the West. There is virtually no other global spare capacity.
Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, told reporters after the meeting that the Saudi program was "a very good plan because it addresses the underlying issue you have when you talk about price, which is an issue of availability of oil and availability of capacity."
But there are doubts about the Saudi assertions about how much oil they have. Data about reserves is tightly guarded, and the Saudis dismiss skeptics as uninformed.
But they do not dismiss Edward O. Price Jr., the former head of exploration for Saudi Aramco and an adviser to the United States government on Persian Gulf oil during both Iraq wars. He questioned future reliance on Saudi capacity in an article in The New York Times last year and wanted to know from his former colleagues how they reached their estimate of more than 150 billion barrels of extra oil. Twenty years ago, a detailed study by geologists from four large American oil companies then in partnership with Aramco found little in the way of undiscovered oil resources, he said.
Mr. Saleri, who manages Saudi reservoirs, met with Mr. Price in the United States last year. Saudi Aramco officials declined to respond to questions about the meeting. But Mr. Price said in an interview that Mr. Saleri told him that the basis for the higher oil figures was a global study in 2000 by the United States Geological Survey estimating Saudi Arabia's undiscovered resources at 87 billion barrels.
Mr. Price said he responded that the estimates "by the U.S.G.S. had no credibility and far exceeded the detailed studies by the old Aramco team." The Aramco study, unlike the survey estimate, involved detailed field work.
Questions about Saudi Arabia's long-term estimates were also raised last year in a report by the National Intelligence Council, an advisory panel that produces the government's most authoritative intelligence estimates, according to a government official who insisted on not being identified because the report was classified.
In addition to Saudi Arabia, the Bush administration has viewed the United Arab Emirates as a supplier with excess capacity. In 2001, the emirates planned to increase capacity to 3 million barrels a day by 2005 from 2.5 million barrels a day then. But capacity has not grown in four years, which one administration official attributes to a lack of urgency by emirates officials and a lack of high-level attention by American officials.
An energy policy report by Vice President Dick Cheney in May 2001 recommended that the president actively support initiatives in Persian Gulf nations allowing foreign investment that could lead to increased production. The United Arab Emirates was cited as one of the few countries that could increase its oil-production capacity.
A status report on Mr. Cheney's task force, released in January by the Energy Department, said administration officials moved to carry out the recommendation in four countries. The U.A.E. was not among them, however, and the president was not mentioned in the report.
When Mr. Bush spoke after the Iraq war with Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the emirates' ruler until his death late last year, he discussed security and Iraq, not oil investment issues, according to a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of not being identified because of the sensitive nature of discussions between heads of state. A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Since the status report in January, the emirates announced that they would increase capacity to 2.7 million barrels a day by 2006, and long-stalled negotiations with Exxon Mobil to develop an offshore field began moving to completion. But the country's capacity remains at 2.5 million barrels a day, with nothing in reserve, according to the Energy Information Administration.
In Iraq, too, the Bush administration's hopes have been disappointed. The removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 changed Iraq from a pariah into a possible backstop for global oil markets. Soon after the invasion, top administration officials were bullish about Iraq's production: they said it would exceed the prewar level of 2.5 million barrels a day and reach 3 million barrels by the end of 2003 or late 2004.
But a report in July by the Government Accountability Office found that Iraqi production had declined since late 2004 to 2.1 million barrels a day from 2.5 million barrels, despite White House legislative requests for almost $3 billion to restore the oil industry there to its prewar abilities.
An important reason for the decline, the report found, was improper management of the reservoirs. Gary Edson, then a deputy national security adviser, was told two years ago that Iraqi production would drop, not increase, according to an outside report presented to him.
A White House spokesman, Frederick Jones, declined to discuss the report. But, according to Wayne Kelley, a petroleum engineer who wrote the report and discussed it with Mr. Edson in November 2003, the message fell on deaf ears.
October 27, 2005
Doubts Raised on Saudi Vow for More Oil
By JEFF GERTH
WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - Last spring, the White House publicly embraced plans by Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production capacity significantly. But privately, some officials and others advising the government are skeptical about some of those Saudi forecasts.
The United States relies on a few producers to maintain enough spare capacity to keep prices and markets stable, even during war or disaster. As oil prices have climbed over the last few years amid surging demand and tight supplies, the Bush administration has looked to the Persian Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, to pump extra oil.
But doubts about Saudi Arabia's assurances of how much it can expand capacity - and for how long - have been raised in a secret intelligence report and in a separate analysis by a leading government oil adviser, according to a federal government official and the oil expert.
If those skeptical assessments are correct, the administration's hopes of increasing supplies would become still more difficult to fulfill. Washington's expectations about oil production from Iraq and the United Arab Emirates have proved overly optimistic, and the White House has failed to heed advice about both those countries from industry and government specialists, according to documents and interviews.
The challenges facing the Bush administration on energy come as oil companies are set to report record profits resulting from soaring prices for oil and natural gas. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest private oil company, is expected Thursday to announce a quarterly profit exceeding $8.5 billion, more than companies like Intel and Time Warner earn in a full year.
Asked about the profits on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, said "the government and the private sector have a role to play" in restoring the vital infrastructure damaged by the hurricanes this year along the Gulf of Mexico and over Florida. Gasoline prices spiked after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, straining oil markets already tight because of the uncommonly low levels of spare capacity.
But when it comes to oil supply, American companies are limited: the countries that control most of the world's oil keep out private producers. So whatever the political repercussions from high energy costs, the administration has had little choice but to rely on the promises by Saudi Arabia, the world's largest exporter, that it would continue to be the market's linchpin.
"There's always been this tenet on the American side," said Nawaf Obaid, a consultant to Saudi Arabia on energy security, "that the Saudis knew what they were doing and rightfully so."
But a senior intelligence official, who insisted on remaining anonymous because he was not permitted to speak publicly on the issue, said that the Saudi plans to increase production by nearly 14 percent in the next four years were not enough to meet global demand. Even the Energy Information Administration recently scaled back its expectations of how much more oil the Saudis could pump in 20 years.
To be sure, as Mr. McClellan said Wednesday, there is more to President Bush's energy policy than seeking to ensure surplus capacity. The administration has called for increasing domestic production and refineries, development of alternative and renewable fuels, expanding nuclear energy and, recently, greater conservation. Still, the Persian Gulf countries are seen as crucial in moderating future prices.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, when high gasoline prices were an issue, Mr. Bush pledged to do a better job of influencing Persian Gulf producers to pump more oil.
Early on, the administration was mostly interested in whether the Saudis would produce more oil during the anticipated conflict in Iraq. Long before the war began, Saudi spare capacity - roughly three million barrels a day above the seven million barrels being pumped daily in 2002 - seemed adequate.
Productive capacity depends on the amount of oil in the ground as well as the infrastructure required to drill, process, store and transport the oil. In addition, increasing capacity is very costly and time-consuming.
"The long-term capacity was not considered a problem," said Robert W. Jordan, the American ambassador to Riyadh from 2001 to 2003. The Saudis, he added, "never expressed any concern about the need to expand."
"Nor did we, or at least me, engage them on this topic," he said.
In April 2002, when President Bush met Crown Prince Abdullah, now the Saudi king, the focus was not on oil but on Israeli-Palestinian matters, according to Mr. Jordan. The United States did not press the capacity issue because, even two years later, Saudi officials were publicly expressing confidence that there was no need over the next five years to add capacity.
Going to 12 million or 15 million barrels a day was possible, though, because the country had an estimated 150 billion barrels above the 260 billion in proven reserves, Nansen G. Saleri, a senior Saudi oil executive, said at an oil conference in Washington in February 2004.
Soon, though, rising demand from Asia made the need to invest in new production "a front-burner issue," according to Spencer Abraham, energy secretary in the president's first term. By May 2004, under pressure from the United States and other consumers, the Saudis promised to pump more oil. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, was planning to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day by 2009.
Before long, Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, and Saudi oil executives were saying that the country could add 200 billion barrels - from existing fields and yet-to-be-discovered resources - to its reserves, enabling production of 15 million barrels a day for 50 years or perhaps longer.
Just before meeting with Prince Abdullah in April, President Bush said he wanted "a straight answer" about how much extra oil the Saudis could pump.
At that session in Texas, the prince reaffirmed the previously announced expansion plans. Saudi Arabia's capacity now stands at about 11 million barrels a day. The Saudis pump about 9.5 million barrels, leaving a cushion of about 1.5 million barrels, mostly of heavier grades not very usable in the West. There is virtually no other global spare capacity.
Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, told reporters after the meeting that the Saudi program was "a very good plan because it addresses the underlying issue you have when you talk about price, which is an issue of availability of oil and availability of capacity."
But there are doubts about the Saudi assertions about how much oil they have. Data about reserves is tightly guarded, and the Saudis dismiss skeptics as uninformed.
But they do not dismiss Edward O. Price Jr., the former head of exploration for Saudi Aramco and an adviser to the United States government on Persian Gulf oil during both Iraq wars. He questioned future reliance on Saudi capacity in an article in The New York Times last year and wanted to know from his former colleagues how they reached their estimate of more than 150 billion barrels of extra oil. Twenty years ago, a detailed study by geologists from four large American oil companies then in partnership with Aramco found little in the way of undiscovered oil resources, he said.
Mr. Saleri, who manages Saudi reservoirs, met with Mr. Price in the United States last year. Saudi Aramco officials declined to respond to questions about the meeting. But Mr. Price said in an interview that Mr. Saleri told him that the basis for the higher oil figures was a global study in 2000 by the United States Geological Survey estimating Saudi Arabia's undiscovered resources at 87 billion barrels.
Mr. Price said he responded that the estimates "by the U.S.G.S. had no credibility and far exceeded the detailed studies by the old Aramco team." The Aramco study, unlike the survey estimate, involved detailed field work.
Questions about Saudi Arabia's long-term estimates were also raised last year in a report by the National Intelligence Council, an advisory panel that produces the government's most authoritative intelligence estimates, according to a government official who insisted on not being identified because the report was classified.
In addition to Saudi Arabia, the Bush administration has viewed the United Arab Emirates as a supplier with excess capacity. In 2001, the emirates planned to increase capacity to 3 million barrels a day by 2005 from 2.5 million barrels a day then. But capacity has not grown in four years, which one administration official attributes to a lack of urgency by emirates officials and a lack of high-level attention by American officials.
An energy policy report by Vice President Dick Cheney in May 2001 recommended that the president actively support initiatives in Persian Gulf nations allowing foreign investment that could lead to increased production. The United Arab Emirates was cited as one of the few countries that could increase its oil-production capacity.
A status report on Mr. Cheney's task force, released in January by the Energy Department, said administration officials moved to carry out the recommendation in four countries. The U.A.E. was not among them, however, and the president was not mentioned in the report.
When Mr. Bush spoke after the Iraq war with Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the emirates' ruler until his death late last year, he discussed security and Iraq, not oil investment issues, according to a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of not being identified because of the sensitive nature of discussions between heads of state. A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Since the status report in January, the emirates announced that they would increase capacity to 2.7 million barrels a day by 2006, and long-stalled negotiations with Exxon Mobil to develop an offshore field began moving to completion. But the country's capacity remains at 2.5 million barrels a day, with nothing in reserve, according to the Energy Information Administration.
In Iraq, too, the Bush administration's hopes have been disappointed. The removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 changed Iraq from a pariah into a possible backstop for global oil markets. Soon after the invasion, top administration officials were bullish about Iraq's production: they said it would exceed the prewar level of 2.5 million barrels a day and reach 3 million barrels by the end of 2003 or late 2004.
But a report in July by the Government Accountability Office found that Iraqi production had declined since late 2004 to 2.1 million barrels a day from 2.5 million barrels, despite White House legislative requests for almost $3 billion to restore the oil industry there to its prewar abilities.
An important reason for the decline, the report found, was improper management of the reservoirs. Gary Edson, then a deputy national security adviser, was told two years ago that Iraqi production would drop, not increase, according to an outside report presented to him.
A White House spokesman, Frederick Jones, declined to discuss the report. But, according to Wayne Kelley, a petroleum engineer who wrote the report and discussed it with Mr. Edson in November 2003, the message fell on deaf ears.
FAREWELL DIEOFF.ORG
Jay Hanson -- j@...
01/12/03
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dieoff/message/29?viscount=100
I am turning the dieoff website over to the moderator of
the "energyresources" mailing list -- a fellow named Tom Robertson
t1r@.... If you are so inclined, Tom could make use of
any support you could give him to keep the dieoff web site going.
I would like to bid you all farewell and present a brief synopsis of
my work over the last ten years or so. Like everything else, it's
all very simple when you really understand it. Unfortunately, I
doubt that more than a few hundred people worldwide (perhaps far
less) would be able to really understand the issues I raise in this
paper. Probably no more than one or two who actually receive this
mailing will really understand it -- for reasons I will attempt to
explain...
SYNOPSIS
--------
I developed an interest in "sustainability" about fifteen years ago
when it became clear to me that our present economic system was
totally unsustainable and self-destructive. It seemed little more
than a well-organized method for converting natural resources into
garbage. I studied modern economic theory on the assumption that our
political leaders would work to change the flaws once I was able to
point them out.
I became aware that something was fundamentally wrong in our
political system when I ran for public office. The more I studied
politics, the more bizarre it looked. I finally realized it wasn't
anything like the "democracy" it claimed to be. It turns out that
America is actually a stealth plutocracy
http://www.dieoff.org/page168.htm !
Working full-time for more than a decade, I studied it all: the
history of our so-called "democracy", the fundamentals and history of
modern economics, sociology, cybernetics, system theory, biology,
ecology, microbiology, evolution theory, physics, and so on.
After several years of research, I concluded that little -- if any --
of the so-called "social sciences" (including economics) taught in
our universities had anything relevant to say about the real world.
Instead of discovering facts and principles, most social science is
little more than a program designed to "rationalize" (invent socially-
acceptable excuses for) the current plutocracy. Moreover, I was
astonished to find that the global economy is based upon Catholic
religious dogma that I was able to trace back to St. Thomas
http://www.dieoff.com/page243.htm ! Eventually I discarded social
science altogether because it had absolutely nothing worthwhile to
say about sustainability.
By placing the results of my research in order of importance for
sustainability, I can simplify over ten years' work down to two sets
of physical "laws". These laws place harsh limits on what is
possible for us: #1 ENERGY LAWS, and #2 BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION LAWS.
For purposes of sustainability, nothing else matters.
#1 ENERGY LAWS
--------------
Once I was able to understand Odum's "eMergy" metric (actually very
simple, but difficult for old minds), I realized there are only three
relevant principles concerning energy: the First Law of
thermodynamics (no creation), the Second Law (always a loss), and
the "Net eMergy" principle ("net energy" converted for "quality")
http://www.dieoff.org/synopsis.htm .
Once one understands the three simple principles outlined in the
paragraph above, then one understands that the only way our society
could actually be "sustainable" would be to continuously reduce our
aggregate energy footprint -- less consumption AND less people --
until the global population level is back to a couple-a-hundred-
million people swinging through the trees. This is also Georgescu-
Roegen's conclusion http://www.dieoff.org/page148.htm . That's the
easy part...
With great reluctance (because it has worked so well for me), I was
forced to conclude that our present system of capitalism is
incompatible with energy laws and can never be sustainable. My only
hope was that some new form of sustainable society might be
possible. So I began studying human nature, intending to discover
what kinds of sustainable societies might work...
#2 BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION LAWS
----------------------------
Human nature is much more difficult to understand than energy laws
for two main reasons: it's not taught, and we are genetically biased
against self-knowledge. In other words, teaching human nature to
someone is something like teaching a dog not to bark
http://www.dieoff.com/page193.htm .
I will reduce several years' research on human nature down to the
essentials: A COMPUTER ANALOG, and A SOCIAL PRINCIPLE. For purposes
of sustainability, everything else about human nature can be ignored -
- it simply doesn't matter.
a. A COMPUTER ANALOG
-------------
Computer software cannot function before it is enabled by the
hardware. In other words, functioning hardware MUST precede
functioning software.
Human thought is analogous to computer software. Any particular
thought (software) cannot precede the neurons, dendrites,
neurotransmitters, etc (hardware) that make that specific thought
possible. Like all computers, human hardware is the physical
prerequisite to human software -- but that's where the similarity
with everyday computers ends.
Human brains are much different than the stored-program, digital,
binary, single processor PCs we use every day. Instead, human brains
are wired (not stored-program), analog (not digital, not binary),
multiprocessor (not single processor) "state machines" (program logic
may permanently modify itself depending upon the data). A human
cannot have a specific thought unless it has been enabled by earlier
brain "wiring" (e.g., pre-programmed, formal education, reflection,
critical thinking). Moreover, older brains are much harder to "wire"
than younger brains.
Brains are mostly hardwired by age 25. By middle age, people may
need two or three years of hard work to understand something
completely new (grow the brain hardware required to think the
thought).
The human brain comes from the factory with a set of empirically
designed pre-programs that have historically (over a billion years)
tended to maximize "inclusive fitness". One of these pre-programs
was specifically designed to inhibit self-knowledge with respect to
social issues. By remaining unaware of our true motives, we are much
more effective at deceiving others. We evolved this way because the
more convincing liar has the advantage in sexual competition (e.g.,
Bill Clinton).
In short, people cannot think a thought unless the brain has been
previously "wired" to think it. This is why civilization after
civilization runs out of energy and collapses
http://dieoff.com/page134.htm . This is also why we are presently
running out of energy and hell-bent for collapse.
Contrary to the received wisdom, people do not think and then act.
They act and then rationalize. New data from the environment is
routinely plugged into existing mental hardware (like entering a
number into a spreadsheet), which is then followed by an appropriate
thought. Since people have no wiring for "peak in oil and gas
production", news of the present energy crisis cannot generate the
appropriate thought. Only prolonged reflection can grow the required
mental hardware to place this critical piece of news in perspective.
Unfortunately, only a few people can invest the thousands-and-
thousands of hours necessary to see both the energy and evolutionary
aspects of the human condition clearly.
b. A SOCIAL PRINCIPLE
-----------------------
Individuals come from the factory pre-programmed to seek inclusive
fitness in ways that have actually worked in the past. In modern
society, economic growth serves as a proxy for increasing fitness.
This is why we "feel good" when we make money, buy a new SUV, and so
on. Unfortunately, when our pre-program determines that inclusive
fitness is best served by violating social norms, we will violate
those norms and seek a fitness advantage. This explains the higher
crime rates in our lower income populations and why nations go to war.
Societies can remain reasonably stable as long as their economies
continue to grow -- continue to serve inclusive fitness for the
majority. But when economic growth becomes physically impossible --
as it must -- societies will disintegrate into anarchy and war, as
individuals and groups seek advantage.
CONCLUSION
----------
Once one understands the three simple energy principles outlined in
this paper, then one understands that the only way our society could
be actually be "sustainable", would be to continuously reduce our
aggregate energy footprint. Put differently, energy laws will force
us to continuously reduce our aggregate footprint whether we choose
to or not.
Once one understands human nature as outlined in this paper, then one
also understands that continued social stability requires us to
continuously INCREASE energy use, which we now know is impossible!
It should not come as a surprise that we have been pre-programmed to
overshoot and crash just like other animals
http://www.dieoff.org/page80.htm .
There are absolutely no humane solutions available to the ruling
elite because it is impossible to solve the problem of human
corruption (i.e., the genetic pre-program to violate norms and seek
advantage). Unfortunately, the best the poor can hope for is a
painless death.
Jay Hanson -- j@...
01/12/03
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dieoff/message/29?viscount=100
I am turning the dieoff website over to the moderator of
the "energyresources" mailing list -- a fellow named Tom Robertson
t1r@.... If you are so inclined, Tom could make use of
any support you could give him to keep the dieoff web site going.
I would like to bid you all farewell and present a brief synopsis of
my work over the last ten years or so. Like everything else, it's
all very simple when you really understand it. Unfortunately, I
doubt that more than a few hundred people worldwide (perhaps far
less) would be able to really understand the issues I raise in this
paper. Probably no more than one or two who actually receive this
mailing will really understand it -- for reasons I will attempt to
explain...
SYNOPSIS
--------
I developed an interest in "sustainability" about fifteen years ago
when it became clear to me that our present economic system was
totally unsustainable and self-destructive. It seemed little more
than a well-organized method for converting natural resources into
garbage. I studied modern economic theory on the assumption that our
political leaders would work to change the flaws once I was able to
point them out.
I became aware that something was fundamentally wrong in our
political system when I ran for public office. The more I studied
politics, the more bizarre it looked. I finally realized it wasn't
anything like the "democracy" it claimed to be. It turns out that
America is actually a stealth plutocracy
http://www.dieoff.org/page168.htm !
Working full-time for more than a decade, I studied it all: the
history of our so-called "democracy", the fundamentals and history of
modern economics, sociology, cybernetics, system theory, biology,
ecology, microbiology, evolution theory, physics, and so on.
After several years of research, I concluded that little -- if any --
of the so-called "social sciences" (including economics) taught in
our universities had anything relevant to say about the real world.
Instead of discovering facts and principles, most social science is
little more than a program designed to "rationalize" (invent socially-
acceptable excuses for) the current plutocracy. Moreover, I was
astonished to find that the global economy is based upon Catholic
religious dogma that I was able to trace back to St. Thomas
http://www.dieoff.com/page243.htm ! Eventually I discarded social
science altogether because it had absolutely nothing worthwhile to
say about sustainability.
By placing the results of my research in order of importance for
sustainability, I can simplify over ten years' work down to two sets
of physical "laws". These laws place harsh limits on what is
possible for us: #1 ENERGY LAWS, and #2 BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION LAWS.
For purposes of sustainability, nothing else matters.
#1 ENERGY LAWS
--------------
Once I was able to understand Odum's "eMergy" metric (actually very
simple, but difficult for old minds), I realized there are only three
relevant principles concerning energy: the First Law of
thermodynamics (no creation), the Second Law (always a loss), and
the "Net eMergy" principle ("net energy" converted for "quality")
http://www.dieoff.org/synopsis.htm .
Once one understands the three simple principles outlined in the
paragraph above, then one understands that the only way our society
could actually be "sustainable" would be to continuously reduce our
aggregate energy footprint -- less consumption AND less people --
until the global population level is back to a couple-a-hundred-
million people swinging through the trees. This is also Georgescu-
Roegen's conclusion http://www.dieoff.org/page148.htm . That's the
easy part...
With great reluctance (because it has worked so well for me), I was
forced to conclude that our present system of capitalism is
incompatible with energy laws and can never be sustainable. My only
hope was that some new form of sustainable society might be
possible. So I began studying human nature, intending to discover
what kinds of sustainable societies might work...
#2 BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION LAWS
----------------------------
Human nature is much more difficult to understand than energy laws
for two main reasons: it's not taught, and we are genetically biased
against self-knowledge. In other words, teaching human nature to
someone is something like teaching a dog not to bark
http://www.dieoff.com/page193.htm .
I will reduce several years' research on human nature down to the
essentials: A COMPUTER ANALOG, and A SOCIAL PRINCIPLE. For purposes
of sustainability, everything else about human nature can be ignored -
- it simply doesn't matter.
a. A COMPUTER ANALOG
-------------
Computer software cannot function before it is enabled by the
hardware. In other words, functioning hardware MUST precede
functioning software.
Human thought is analogous to computer software. Any particular
thought (software) cannot precede the neurons, dendrites,
neurotransmitters, etc (hardware) that make that specific thought
possible. Like all computers, human hardware is the physical
prerequisite to human software -- but that's where the similarity
with everyday computers ends.
Human brains are much different than the stored-program, digital,
binary, single processor PCs we use every day. Instead, human brains
are wired (not stored-program), analog (not digital, not binary),
multiprocessor (not single processor) "state machines" (program logic
may permanently modify itself depending upon the data). A human
cannot have a specific thought unless it has been enabled by earlier
brain "wiring" (e.g., pre-programmed, formal education, reflection,
critical thinking). Moreover, older brains are much harder to "wire"
than younger brains.
Brains are mostly hardwired by age 25. By middle age, people may
need two or three years of hard work to understand something
completely new (grow the brain hardware required to think the
thought).
The human brain comes from the factory with a set of empirically
designed pre-programs that have historically (over a billion years)
tended to maximize "inclusive fitness". One of these pre-programs
was specifically designed to inhibit self-knowledge with respect to
social issues. By remaining unaware of our true motives, we are much
more effective at deceiving others. We evolved this way because the
more convincing liar has the advantage in sexual competition (e.g.,
Bill Clinton).
In short, people cannot think a thought unless the brain has been
previously "wired" to think it. This is why civilization after
civilization runs out of energy and collapses
http://dieoff.com/page134.htm . This is also why we are presently
running out of energy and hell-bent for collapse.
Contrary to the received wisdom, people do not think and then act.
They act and then rationalize. New data from the environment is
routinely plugged into existing mental hardware (like entering a
number into a spreadsheet), which is then followed by an appropriate
thought. Since people have no wiring for "peak in oil and gas
production", news of the present energy crisis cannot generate the
appropriate thought. Only prolonged reflection can grow the required
mental hardware to place this critical piece of news in perspective.
Unfortunately, only a few people can invest the thousands-and-
thousands of hours necessary to see both the energy and evolutionary
aspects of the human condition clearly.
b. A SOCIAL PRINCIPLE
-----------------------
Individuals come from the factory pre-programmed to seek inclusive
fitness in ways that have actually worked in the past. In modern
society, economic growth serves as a proxy for increasing fitness.
This is why we "feel good" when we make money, buy a new SUV, and so
on. Unfortunately, when our pre-program determines that inclusive
fitness is best served by violating social norms, we will violate
those norms and seek a fitness advantage. This explains the higher
crime rates in our lower income populations and why nations go to war.
Societies can remain reasonably stable as long as their economies
continue to grow -- continue to serve inclusive fitness for the
majority. But when economic growth becomes physically impossible --
as it must -- societies will disintegrate into anarchy and war, as
individuals and groups seek advantage.
CONCLUSION
----------
Once one understands the three simple energy principles outlined in
this paper, then one understands that the only way our society could
be actually be "sustainable", would be to continuously reduce our
aggregate energy footprint. Put differently, energy laws will force
us to continuously reduce our aggregate footprint whether we choose
to or not.
Once one understands human nature as outlined in this paper, then one
also understands that continued social stability requires us to
continuously INCREASE energy use, which we now know is impossible!
It should not come as a surprise that we have been pre-programmed to
overshoot and crash just like other animals
http://www.dieoff.org/page80.htm .
There are absolutely no humane solutions available to the ruling
elite because it is impossible to solve the problem of human
corruption (i.e., the genetic pre-program to violate norms and seek
advantage). Unfortunately, the best the poor can hope for is a
painless death.
^filled with more errors than I have time to address
Note that he can't even read http://www.dieoff.com/page243.htm correctly.
http://www.energybulletin.net/10115.html
From 'Peak Oil' to 'Transition One'
by Ali Samsan Bakhtiari
In my humble opinion, we should now have reached 'Peak Oil'. So, it is high time to close this critical chapter in the history of international oil industry and bid the mighty 'Peak' farewell.
At present, global oil output fluctuates around 82 mb/d as some institutions try vainly to push 2005 statistics towards 83 and 84 mb/d (as they always do). But they will be obliged to backtrack as 'actual' oil supplies fail to follow their 'paper' ones.
So that, in the 'Peak Oil' aftermath, we are about to enter what I call 'Transition One' [T1] --- a rather bizarre phase akin to a vague 'no-man's-land' between still adequate oil supplies and the clear realization that demand has definitely left supply behind. I see the tragic '2004 Tsunami' and the heart-breaking '2005 Katrina and Rita' as the precursors signs to 'T1'. This fresh phase might come to burst on the global stage during the coming winter 2005-2006 --- maybe taking large swaths of the public by surprise.
Fortunately, the hidden advantage of 'T1' is that worldwide oil supplies will remain almost constant during this initial phase, allowing those with foresight, intelligence and agility to begin preparing for the next, more-turbulent phases: 'T2', 'T3', ..
Because 'preparation' is going to be the new name of the game henceforward. I am now putting forward my first list of 'to do' summarized in the 'Five Rs' below:
(1) RE-PROGRAM: first and foremost, re-program 'the mind'; duly throw out 'business-as-usual' and similar rosy scenarios (nothing will remain 'usual'); take on as much as 'lateral thinking' (see super- guru 'Edward de Bono'); devise not only 'Plan B', but Plans 'C, 'D' and 'E' as well; also begin 'Thinking the Unthinkable' and to 'Expect the Unexpected'. (I have just seen a picture of 'greater Phoenix' [Arizona] by night which sent a shudder down my spine with its 'sea of lights' (while I simply imagined the hidden and humming air-conditioning) for this sprawling urban agglomeration of 163 kms by 173 kms (no less than 28,200 km2 !) housing some 4m people --- with an average daily intake of 500 newcomers !).
(2) REDUCE : first cut waste mercilessly: the normal 30% should be shed offhand; compress debt level as swiftly as possible ('T1' will inevitably bring higher inflation along); bring down traveling of all sorts to economize on ever precious fuels (optimize Internet use); gradually reduce all types of consumptions (getting leaner and ready for big cuts); revise home lighting and heating systems (investing wherever necessary, as investment once cheaper than yearly operating costs); reduce size and number of cars as soon as possible. (I met with an Australian family living in plush suburbia which owned no less than five cars --- one for every family member.
I told them that was great come 'Peak Oil'; they were flabbergasted, asking how come with prices skyrocketing ? Well, I replied: "Then, you can easily get rid of two cars with minimal pain, by just a little more planning, but cutting your overall car expenses by at least a third with a single stroke, not taking into account savings in gasoline.").
(3) REUSE : so many things are easily reusable, just requires a little attention to achieve an enormous effect: from plastic bags to packings; retreading tires; most important might prove to be innocuous 'water' which is bound to be in short supply; and 'wood' as well. (The 'reuse' philosophy requires a brand-new mindset as no one is used to reusing).
(4) RECYCLE : tomorrow's industrial boom will be in 'recycling' industries; recycling of garbage should be made mandatory (as in Germany or a handful of US cities such as Seattle or Pittsburgh ); many of today's 'throw-aways' could be made 'recyclable'; eventually many goods will be made in view of being later recycled. (Recycling of cars should be given top priority as enormous benefits can be thereby achieved).
(5) REWARD : reward every massive action for reducing, reusing or recycling; better to make use of 'positive' subsidies instead of 'negative' ones.(One example would be to reward the 19m Americans who have purchased a bicycle over past 12 months).
With my personal best wishes for 'Transition One'...
Note that he can't even read http://www.dieoff.com/page243.htm correctly.
http://www.energybulletin.net/10115.html
From 'Peak Oil' to 'Transition One'
by Ali Samsan Bakhtiari
In my humble opinion, we should now have reached 'Peak Oil'. So, it is high time to close this critical chapter in the history of international oil industry and bid the mighty 'Peak' farewell.
At present, global oil output fluctuates around 82 mb/d as some institutions try vainly to push 2005 statistics towards 83 and 84 mb/d (as they always do). But they will be obliged to backtrack as 'actual' oil supplies fail to follow their 'paper' ones.
So that, in the 'Peak Oil' aftermath, we are about to enter what I call 'Transition One' [T1] --- a rather bizarre phase akin to a vague 'no-man's-land' between still adequate oil supplies and the clear realization that demand has definitely left supply behind. I see the tragic '2004 Tsunami' and the heart-breaking '2005 Katrina and Rita' as the precursors signs to 'T1'. This fresh phase might come to burst on the global stage during the coming winter 2005-2006 --- maybe taking large swaths of the public by surprise.
Fortunately, the hidden advantage of 'T1' is that worldwide oil supplies will remain almost constant during this initial phase, allowing those with foresight, intelligence and agility to begin preparing for the next, more-turbulent phases: 'T2', 'T3', ..
Because 'preparation' is going to be the new name of the game henceforward. I am now putting forward my first list of 'to do' summarized in the 'Five Rs' below:
(1) RE-PROGRAM: first and foremost, re-program 'the mind'; duly throw out 'business-as-usual' and similar rosy scenarios (nothing will remain 'usual'); take on as much as 'lateral thinking' (see super- guru 'Edward de Bono'); devise not only 'Plan B', but Plans 'C, 'D' and 'E' as well; also begin 'Thinking the Unthinkable' and to 'Expect the Unexpected'. (I have just seen a picture of 'greater Phoenix' [Arizona] by night which sent a shudder down my spine with its 'sea of lights' (while I simply imagined the hidden and humming air-conditioning) for this sprawling urban agglomeration of 163 kms by 173 kms (no less than 28,200 km2 !) housing some 4m people --- with an average daily intake of 500 newcomers !).
(2) REDUCE : first cut waste mercilessly: the normal 30% should be shed offhand; compress debt level as swiftly as possible ('T1' will inevitably bring higher inflation along); bring down traveling of all sorts to economize on ever precious fuels (optimize Internet use); gradually reduce all types of consumptions (getting leaner and ready for big cuts); revise home lighting and heating systems (investing wherever necessary, as investment once cheaper than yearly operating costs); reduce size and number of cars as soon as possible. (I met with an Australian family living in plush suburbia which owned no less than five cars --- one for every family member.
I told them that was great come 'Peak Oil'; they were flabbergasted, asking how come with prices skyrocketing ? Well, I replied: "Then, you can easily get rid of two cars with minimal pain, by just a little more planning, but cutting your overall car expenses by at least a third with a single stroke, not taking into account savings in gasoline.").
(3) REUSE : so many things are easily reusable, just requires a little attention to achieve an enormous effect: from plastic bags to packings; retreading tires; most important might prove to be innocuous 'water' which is bound to be in short supply; and 'wood' as well. (The 'reuse' philosophy requires a brand-new mindset as no one is used to reusing).
(4) RECYCLE : tomorrow's industrial boom will be in 'recycling' industries; recycling of garbage should be made mandatory (as in Germany or a handful of US cities such as Seattle or Pittsburgh ); many of today's 'throw-aways' could be made 'recyclable'; eventually many goods will be made in view of being later recycled. (Recycling of cars should be given top priority as enormous benefits can be thereby achieved).
(5) REWARD : reward every massive action for reducing, reusing or recycling; better to make use of 'positive' subsidies instead of 'negative' ones.(One example would be to reward the 19m Americans who have purchased a bicycle over past 12 months).
With my personal best wishes for 'Transition One'...
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 31 2005, 01:54 PM) [snapback]509790[/snapback]
^filled with more errors than I have time to address
Please document any "errors", or retract your allegation until you have time to do so.
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 31 2005, 01:54 PM) [snapback]509790[/snapback]
The author of my post, Jay Hanson, wrote http://www.dieoff.com/page243.htm , so I'm not sure what you mean. However, this is only one sentence in his article and is relatively unimportant to the larger energy/evolutionary/ecological issues he presents.
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Moreover, I was astonished to find that the global economy is based upon Catholic religious dogma that I was able to trace back to St. Thomas
from http://www.dieoff.com/page243.htm:
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"Modern economics is shrouded in idiosyncratic self-serving definitions, arcane mathematics, and circular arguments which make it very difficult to understand. But if one removes the math and jargon from modern economics, one finds the revealed truth of eighteenth century liberalism codified in the economic dogma of the French Physiocrats -- which was "nothing but reformulations of scholastic doctrine"
From the work by Joseph Schumpeter, presumably:
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"Quesnay's theories of state and society were nothing but reformulations of scholastic doctrine. The motto, Ex natura jus, ordo, et leges might have been, though it presumably was not, taken from St. Thomas. The physiocrat odre naturel (to which there corresponds in the world of real phenomena an odre positif) is the ideal dictate of human nature as revealed by human reason. What difference there is between Quesnay and the scholastics is not to the formers credit...
And the difference is perhaps great--a comparison is Locke's account of Natural Law; Locke has a "Natural Law theory" but his account of it diverges from that of St. Thomas and cannot be traced to St. Thomas. Anyone who interprets St. Thomas as endorsing a globalism needs to read St. Thomas in the first place.
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"In his paper on Droit naturel, Quesnay defined Physical Law as the 'regulated (regle) course of all physical events which is evidently the most advantageous to mankind,' and Moral Law as 'the rule (regle) of every human action conforming to the physical order evidently most advantageous to mankind': these 'laws' form together what is called 'natural law,' and they are all immutable and the 'best possible ones' (les meilleures lois possibles). In the case of the scholastic doctors, such principles were confined to the realm of metaphysics and not directly applied to historically conditioned patterns. In the case of Quesnay they were directly applied to particular institutions, such as property. And Quesnay's political theory -- both analytically and normatively -- turned upon a monarchical absolutism in an uncritical and unhistoric manner that, as we have seen, was also quite foreign to the scholastics.
A lousy reading of the scholastics on the part of the author, who apparently does not understand what Aquinas et al. taught about Natural Law. If this account of Quesnay is correct, then Quesnay's understanding of law is probably tied to contemporary conceptions of scientific law and to the development of modern scientific theory. Just because they use the same words, "Natural Law" it does not mean they use them in the same way (i.e. with the same meaning).
No time for the rest--his conclusions may be somewhat true, but they flow from bad premises. With respect to human psychology, it rests on determinism and materialism, and of course the assumption that evolution is true. With respect to his misapplication of the laws of thermodynamics, that's nothing more to create pseudo-scientific window dressing--it would be much better to just simply look at the sources of energy available, how much is consumed in an industralized or post-industrialized economy, and the energy deficit that is present if one or more sources of energy is used up and not replaced. The phenomena his social principle attempts to describe is nothing new in human history, and certainly did not arise only with modernity. His social principle is however tied to fitness, and an accepted means of explanation for only sociobiologists and those dedicated to a certain theory of evolution. It is no surprise that some humans seek happiness through the accumulation of wealth or external goods, anyone with an understanding of history can see this in the rise and decline of civilizations. To fit this in within his schema he has to write deterministic nonsense, as if human beings do not have intellectual recognition and choice.
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There are absolutely no humane solutions available to the ruling
elite because it is impossible to solve the problem of human
corruption (i.e., the genetic pre-program to violate norms and seek
advantage). Unfortunately, the best the poor can hope for is a
painless death.
elite because it is impossible to solve the problem of human
corruption (i.e., the genetic pre-program to violate norms and seek
advantage). Unfortunately, the best the poor can hope for is a
painless death.
If determinism is true, then there is no "violation" of norms--the norm is whatever members of x do, and that is to accumulate or engage in whatever behavior they engage in--nor are there norms as he would understand it, because they are rendered intelligible by his materialism. In fact it is not only the ruling elite who are stuck, the same is true of those who are ruled--if they have no choice then there is nothing to be done except what them cause their own destruction. A fundamental incoherence which underlies the difficulties of his account and the inner contradictions upon which it rests. (And a sign that his opinion is not trustworthy.) Others have written in a more reasonable manner and with a better grasp of truth than the author, such as Wendell Berry.
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 31 2005, 05:46 PM) [snapback]511619[/snapback]
No time for the rest--his conclusions may be somewhat true, but they flow from bad premises. With respect to human psychology, it rests on determinism and materialism, and of course the assumption that evolution is true.
I've taken genetics, anthropology, and evolutionary biology courses at one of the top 25 Universities in the United States (The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), and all the Ph.D. professors that have spent their careers studying these subjects understand that evolution is true. This is why homo sapiens share roughly 98% of their genetic make-up with chimpanzees. DNA is composed of double helixes of four nucleotides - adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine. The order in which these nucleotides exist in a DNA strand is what makes the DNA sequence unique. There are over 3 million nucleotides in man's genetic code. Roughly 98% of homo sapien's 3-million nucleotide DNA code is identicle to that of a chimpanzee. This is because Homo Sapiens and Chimpanzees shared a common ancestor around 7 million years ago. The odds of this occuring by chance are infinitesimally close to zero. I simply do not understand what there is to debate.
QUOTE(papabear @ Oct 31 2005, 05:46 PM) [snapback]511619[/snapback]
To fit this in within his schema he has to write deterministic nonsense, as if human beings do not have intellectual recognition and choice.
Jay Hanson's understanding of evolution pretty much mirrors what I learned in my evolutionary biology course (which I took before discovering peak oil). All Hanson does is go a step further to explain the current oil bonanza in the context of evolution, (e.g. how it occurred that Homo Sapiens overshot their resource base and thus are destined for population crash to back within carrying capacity). Once oil and gas were discovered and began being exploited, yes, I think Hanson would agree that genetic determinism came into play. Once any fitness-enhancing resource is discovered by any animal population, the resource is exploited until it is exhausted. This applies to bacteria in a petri dish, reindeer on an island, and the population of Easter Island. There was no way to moderate the consumption of oil and gas to the degree that it could have prevented overshoot and eventual collapse because of human corruption, i.e., there would always be someone that would break the rules to get more for him or herself to increase his/her fitness advantage. And thus you have the mostly unrestrained oil and gas bonanza we've witnessed for the past 150 years. Government efforts at conservation are utterly meaningless if they are not accompanied by restrictions on birth rates and population. As Jay Hanson says, the "people problem" is far more difficult than the oil problem. Again, you would need to research evolutionary theory to understand these issues, which Jay notes at the beginning of the paper.
So when it comes to exploiting oil and gas and everything oil and gas have been able to offer, no, human beings did not have intellectual recognition (they did not recognize that they were overshooting their resource base and necessitating collapse). Hanson doesn't say that human's dont have choice, only that nearly all of them couldn't help but take part in the fruits of the oil bonanza and associated economic wealth/prosperity. I don't see that there is any "inner contradiction" here. In American society, some exceptions (those who choose to avoid oil and gas related advantages) would be the Amish and Mennonites - and this is due more to strictly enforced religious doctrine rather than "choice". Pretty much everyone uses (or tries to use) oil and gas or oil and gas related amenities (including petroleum-fertilized food), or benefits from some aspect of our oil based economy.
Again, the sentence about economic theory and St. Thomas was irrelevant to the energetic/evolutionary issues presented in the paper. Jay may have a different interpretation or he may simply be wrong but it is not relevant to the energy/evolution discussion. Regarding predominant economic theory, Hanson proves it to be fundamentally flawed:
http://dieoff.org/page240.htm "Five Fundamental Errors: The Short Version"
There is far more information on this in his synopsis, which I would highly recommend: http://www.dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
Maybe you can point me to some of Wendell Berry's better works, or post them here. I like what I've found so far.
Jesse
QUOTE(reveille91 @ Nov 1 2005, 01:46 PM) [snapback]521820[/snapback]
I've taken genetics, anthropology, and evolutionary biology courses at one of the top 25 Universities in the United States (The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), and all the Ph.D. professors that have spent their careers studying these subjects understand that evolution is true. This is why homo sapiens share roughly 98% of their genetic make-up with chimpanzees. DNA is composed of double helixes of four nucleotides - adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine. The order in which these nucleotides exist in a DNA strand is what makes the DNA sequence unique. There are over 3 million nucleotides in man's genetic code. Roughly 98% of homo sapien's 3-million nucleotide DNA code is identicle to that of a chimpanzee. This is because Homo Sapiens and Chimpanzees shared a common ancestor around 7 million years ago. The odds of this occuring by chance are infinitesimally close to zero. I simply do not understand what there is to debate.
Just an instance of genetic reductionism--you're better off reading structuralists to get a better grasp of what is at stake when it comes to development and the determining of the mature form. Just because the 'establishment' thinks evolution is true doesn't mean they're right, especially if they can't make heads or tails about where observation ends and speculation begins. It's no surprise geneticists want to promote it as much as possible--they make their living from exaggerated claims about practical and speculative benefits. Same with anthropologists and evolutionary biologists.
QUOTE
Again, you would need to research evolutionary theory to understand these issues, which Jay notes at the beginning of the paper.
No thanks, I've had my fill of evolutionary theory and sociobiology--insofar as both are premised upon materialism and genetic reductionism, they're not worth the time of anyone who really wants to understand reality. One doesn't need evolutionary theory to see the problem with unrestrained desire--any 'world philosophy' that has lasted until today, Buddhism, Greek, Confucianism, etc. acknowledges that appetite must be restrained and that unrestrained desire has a social impact, not just consequences for the individual. At least they don't contradict our 'common sense' knowledge that choice exists, unlike determinism.
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I don't see that there is any "inner contradiction" here.
Because determinism is incompatible with intellectual cognition and choice, though it is compatible with behaviorism and the reduction of human knowledge to sensation and sense desire.
QUOTE
In American society, some exceptions (those who choose to avoid oil and gas related advantages) would be the Amish and Mennonites - and this is due more to strictly enforced religious doctrine rather than "choice".
Sorry, that's a lifestyle choice, even if you don't agree with it. There are community standards and those who don't agree with them are free to leave.
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Again, the sentence about economic theory and St. Thomas was irrelevant to the energetic/evolutionary issues presented in the paper.
It's a sign of intellectual sloppiness and a hint that his reasoning elsewhere may be flawed.
QUOTE
Regarding predominant economic theory, Hanson proves it to be fundamentally flawed:
http://dieoff.org/page240.htm "Five Fundamental Errors: The Short Version"
http://dieoff.org/page240.htm "Five Fundamental Errors: The Short Version"
A poorly-written refutation of economics, and a failure to distinguish between what is descriptive and what is normative within liberal economic theory.
QUOTE
Any ONE fundamental error in neoclassical theory should be sufficient reason to reject conclusions based upon that theory. Here are five fundamental errors in the theory:
Actually, it's not--errors in premises merely warrant recognition that the argument is unsound and that conclusion does not follow--it says nothing directly about the conclusions themselves. Elementary logic here.
#1. A fundamentally incorrect "method": the economist uses "correlation" and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after-the-fact) reasoning, rather than the "scientific method".
He does not give a description fo scientific method, but merely assumes that it is valid in all cases. It's not. And even if it is not used, it does not imply that the theory is false or invalid, merely that it does not have the same sort of epistemic status as reasoning which employs the "scientific method." Then again, that is to grant too much to the scientific method.
#2. A fundamentally inverted worldview: the economist sees the environment as a subsystem of the economy, rather than the other way around. In other words, economists are trained to believe that natural resources come from "markets" rather than the "environment". The corollary is that "man-made capital" can substitute for "natural capital". But the First Law of thermodynamics tells us there is no "creation" -- there is no such thing as "man-made capital". Thus, ALL capital is "natural capital", and the economy is 100% dependent on the "environment" for everything.
Not a problem if economics remains essentially subordinate to politics, and has as part of its proper subject what comes about through human labor. The problem comes in when political knowledge fails to recognize natural resources for what they are, or if economics becomes a normative political theory unto itself.
#3. A fundamentally incorrect view of "money": the economist sees "money" as nothing more than a medium of exchange, rather than as social power -- or "political power". But even the casual observer can see that money is social power because it "empowers" people to buy and do the things they want -- including buying and doing other people: politics.
Again, not a problem if economics has a limited object for its study. How money is used and the evaluation of these uses is a part of political theory.
#4. A fundamentally incorrect view of his raison d'etre: the economist sees "Homo economicus" as a "Bayesian utility maximizer", rather than "Homo sapiens" as a "primate".
A generalization that does not apply to all economic theories, and not to all liberals. The problem is when economists overstep their bounds and make normative judgments based on their limited area of study--again, economics replacing politics.
#5. A fundamentally incorrect view of economic élan vital: the economist sees economic activity as a function of infinite "money creation", rather than a function of finite "energy stocks" and finite "energy flows".
A failure to distinguish between the goal of activity and the material of the activity. He is pointing to a problem with a principle in normative theory, not merely a speculative problem, which involves not a misunderstanding of the nature of activity but with its goal, and a failure of those being criticized that the goal cannot be contained given the intrinsic limitations of the material involved.
QUOTE
Maybe you can point me to some of Wendell Berry's better works, or post them here. I like what I've found so far.
Check out Amazon.com--nothing that isn't worth reading, unless you don't care for his fiction or poems.
one last note--i'm sympathetic to his critique of the dominant social forces at work in society and government and his aversion to certain schools of economic thought (which are often nothing more than political philosophies in disguise), but his critiques really need more work and tend to over-simplification
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-6om/Dowie.html
Mark Dowie
Conservation Refugees
A LOW FOG ENVELOPES the steep and remote valleys of southwestern Uganda most mornings, as birds found only in this small corner of the continent rise in chorus and the great apes drink from clear streams. Days in the dense montane forest are quiet and steamy. Nights are an exaltation of insects and primate howling. For thousands of years the Batwa people thrived in this soundscape, in such close harmony with the forest that early-twentieth-century wildlife biologists who studied the flora and fauna of the region barely noticed their existence. They were, as one naturalist noted, "part of the fauna."
In the 1930s, Ugandan leaders were persuaded by international conservationists that this area was threatened by loggers, miners, and other extractive interests. In response, three forest reserves were created—the Mgahinga, the Echuya, and the Bwindi—all of which overlapped with the Batwa's ancestral territory. For sixty years these reserves simply existed on paper, which kept them off-limits to extractors. And the Batwa stayed on, living as they had for generations, in reciprocity with the diverse biota that first drew conservationists to the region.
However, when the reserves were formally designated as national parks in 1991 and a bureaucracy was created and funded by the World Bank's Global Environment Facility to manage them, a rumor was in circulation that the Batwa were hunting and eating silverback gorillas, which by that time were widely recognized as a threatened species and also, increasingly, as a featured attraction for ecotourists from Europe and America. Gorillas were being disturbed and even poached, the Batwa admitted, but by Bahutu, Batutsi, Bantu, and other tribes who invaded the forest from outside villages. The Batwa, who felt a strong kinship with the great apes, adamantly denied killing them. Nonetheless, under pressure from traditional Western conservationists, who had come to believe that wilderness and human community were incompatible, the Batwa were forcibly expelled from their homeland.
Photograph | John Martin / Conservation International
These forests are so dense that the Batwa lost perspective when they first came out. Some even stepped in front of moving vehicles. Now they are living in shabby squatter camps on the perimeter of the parks, without running water or sanitation. In one more generation their forest-based culture—songs, rituals, traditions, and stories—will be gone.
It's no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.
In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft declaration states: "Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option to return." During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and biggest enemy was "conservation."
Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed a declaration stating that the "activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands." These rhetorical jabs have shaken the international conservation community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.
"We are enemies of conservation," declared Maasai leader Martin Saning'o, standing before a session of the November 2004 World Conservation Congress sponsored by IUCN in Bangkok, Thailand. The nomadic Maasai, who have over the past thirty years lost most of their grazing range to conservation projects throughout eastern Africa, hadn't always felt that way. In fact, Saning'o reminded his audience, "...we were the original conservationists." The room was hushed as he quietly explained how pastoral and nomadic cattlemen have traditionally protected their range: "Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems." Then he tried to fathom the strange version of land conservation that has impoverished his people, more than one hundred thousand of whom have been displaced from southern Kenya and the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Like the Batwa, the Maasai have not been fairly compensated. Their culture is dissolving and they live in poverty.
"We don't want to be like you," Saning'o told a room of shocked white faces. "We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You cannot accomplish conservation without us."
Although he might not have realized it, Saning'o was speaking for a growing worldwide movement of indigenous peoples who think of themselves as conservation refugees. Not to be confused with ecological refugees—people forced to abandon their homelands as a result of unbearable heat, drought, desertification, flooding, disease, or other consequences of climate chaos—conservation refugees are removed from their lands involuntarily, either forcibly or through a variety of less coercive measures. The gentler, more benign methods are sometimes called "soft eviction" or "voluntary resettlement," though the latter is contestable. Soft or hard, the main complaint heard in the makeshift villages bordering parks and at meetings like the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok is that relocation often occurs with the tacit approval or benign neglect of one of the five big international nongovernmental conservation organizations, or as they have been nicknamed by indigenous leaders, the BINGOs. Indigenous peoples are often left out of the process entirely.
Curious about this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people, I set out last autumn to meet the issue face to face. I visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories I heard.
KHON NO, MATRIARCH OF A REMOTE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, huddles next to an open-pit stove in the loose, brightly colored clothes that identify her as Karen, the most populous of six tribes found in the lush, mountainous reaches of far northern Thailand. Her village of sixty-five families has been in the same wide valley for over two hundred years. She chews betel, spitting its bright red juice into the fire, and speaks softly through black teeth. She tells me I can use her name, as long as I don't identify her village.
Photograph | Jeremy Horner / Corbis
"The government has no idea who I am," she says. "The only person in the village they know by name is the 'headman' they appointed to represent us in government negotiations. They were here last week, in military uniforms, to tell us we could no longer practice rotational agriculture in this valley. If they knew that someone here was saying bad things about them they would come back again and move us out."
In a recent outburst of environmental enthusiasm stimulated by generous financial offerings from the Global Environment Facility, the Thai government has been creating national parks as fast as the Royal Forest Department can map them. Ten years ago there was barely a park to be found in Thailand, and because those few that existed were unmarked "paper parks," few Thais even knew they were there. Now there are 114 land parks and 24 marine parks on the map. Almost twenty-five thousand square kilometers, most of which are occupied by hill and fishing tribes, are now managed by the forest department as protected areas.
"Men in uniform just appeared one day, out of nowhere, showing their guns," Kohn Noi recalls, "and telling us that we were now living in a national park. That was the first we knew of it. Our own guns were confiscated . . . no more hunting, no more trapping, no more snaring, and no more "slash and burn." That's what they call our agriculture. We call it crop rotation and we've been doing it in this valley for over two hundred years. Soon we will be forced to sell rice to pay for greens and legumes we are no longer allowed to grow here. Hunting we can live without, as we raise chickens, pigs, and buffalo. But rotational farming is our way of life."
A week before our conversation, and a short flight south of Noi's village, six thousand conservationists were attending the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok. At that conference and elsewhere, big conservation has denied that they are party to the evictions while generating reams of promotional material about their affection for, and close relationships with, indigenous peoples. "We recognize that indigenous people have perhaps the deepest understanding of the Earth's living resources," says Conservation International chairman and CEO Peter Seligman, adding that, "we firmly believe that indigenous people must have ownership, control and title of their lands." Such messages are carefully projected toward major funders of conservation, which in response to the aforementioned Ford Foundation reports and other press have become increasingly sensitive to indigenous peoples and their struggles for cultural survival.
Financial support for international conservation has in recent years expanded well beyond the individuals and family foundations that seeded the movement to include very large foundations like Ford, MacArthur, and Gordon and Betty Moore, as well as the World Bank, its Global Environment Facility, foreign governments, USAID, a host of bilateral and multilateral banks, and transnational corporations. During the 1990s USAID alone pumped almost $300 million into the international conservation movement, which it had come to regard as a vital adjunct to economic prosperity. The five largest conservation organizations, CI, TNC, and WWF among them, absorbed over 70 percent of that expenditure. Indigenous communities received none of it. The Moore Foundation made a singular ten-year commitment of nearly $280 million, the largest environmental grant in history, to just one organization—Conservation International. And all of the BINGOs have become increasingly corporate in recent years, both in orientation and affiliation. The Nature Conservancy now boasts almost two thousand corporate sponsors, while Conservation International has received about $9 million from its two hundred fifty corporate "partners."
Photograph | Tim Graham / Getty Images
With that kind of financial and political leverage, as well as chapters in almost every country of the world, millions of loyal members, and nine-figure budgets, CI, WWF, and TNC have undertaken a hugely expanded global push to increase the number of so-called protected areas (PAs)—parks, reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, and corridors created to preserve biological diversity. In 1962, there were some 1,000 official PAs worldwide. Today there are 108,000, with more being added every day. The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet's surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That's an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa.
During the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which officially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. World estimates offered by the UN, IUCN, and a few anthropologists range from 5 million to tens of millions. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million.
The true worldwide figure, if it were ever known, would depend upon the semantics of words like "eviction," "displacement," and "refugee," over which parties on all sides of the issue argue endlessly. The larger point is that conservation refugees exist on every continent but Antarctica, and by most accounts live far more difficult lives than they once did, banished from lands they thrived on for hundreds, even thousands of years.
John Muir, a forefather of the American conservation movement, argued that "wilderness" should be cleared of all inhabitants and set aside to satisfy the urbane human's need for recreation and spiritual renewal. It was a sentiment that became national policy with the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined wilderness as a place "where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." One should not be surprised to find hardy residues of these sentiments among traditional conservation groups. The preference for "virgin" wilderness has lingered on in a movement that has tended to value all nature but human nature, and refused to recognize the positive wildness in human beings.
Expulsions continue around the world to this day. The Indian government, which evicted one hundred thousand adivasis (rural peoples) in Assam between April and July of 2002, estimates that 2 or 3 million more will be displaced over the next decade. The policy is largely in response to a 1993 lawsuit brought by WWF, which demanded that the government increase PAs by 8 percent, mostly in order to protect tiger habitat. A more immediate threat involves the impending removal of several Mayan communities from the Montes Azules region of Chiapas, Mexico, a process begun in the mid-1970s with the intent to preserve virgin tropical forest, which could still quite easily spark a civil war. Conservation International is deeply immersed in that controversy, as are a host of extractive industries.
Tribal people, who tend to think and plan in generations, rather than weeks, months, and years, are still waiting to be paid the consideration promised. Of course the UN draft declaration is the prize because it must be ratified by so many nations. The declaration has failed to pass so far mainly because powerful leaders such as Tony Blair and George Bush threaten to veto it, arguing that there is not and should never be such a thing as collective human rights.
Sadly, the human rights and global conservation communities remain at serious odds over the question of displacement, each side blaming the other for the particular crisis they perceive. Conservation biologists argue that by allowing native populations to grow, hunt, and gather in protected areas, anthropologists, cultural preservationists, and other supporters of indigenous rights become complicit in the decline of biological diversity. Some, like the Wildlife Conservation Society's outspoken president, Steven Sanderson, believe that the entire global conservation agenda has been "hijacked" by advocates for indigenous peoples, placing wildlife and biodiversity in peril. "Forest peoples and their representatives may speak for the forest," Sanderson has said, "They may speak for their version of the forest; but they do not speak for the forest we want to conserve." WCS, originally the New York Zoological Society, is a BINGO lesser in size and stature than the likes of TNC and CI, but more insistent than its colleagues that indigenous territorial rights, while a valid social issue, should be of no concern to wildlife conservationists.
Photograph | AFP / Getty Images
Market-based solutions put forth by human rights groups, which may have been implemented with the best of social and ecological intentions, share a lamentable outcome, barely discernible behind a smoke screen of slick promotion. In almost every case indigenous people are moved into the money economy without the means to participate in it fully. They become permanently indentured as park rangers (never wardens), porters, waiters, harvesters, or, if they manage to learn a European language, ecotour guides. Under this model, "conservation" edges ever closer to "development," while native communities are assimilated into the lowest ranks of national cultures.
It should be no surprise, then, that tribal peoples regard conservationists as just another colonizer—an extension of the deadening forces of economic and cultural hegemony. Whole societies like the Batwa, the Maasai, the Ashinika of Peru, the Gwi and Gana Bushmen of Botswana, the Karen and Hmong of Southeast Asia, and the Huarani of Ecuador are being transformed from independent and self-sustaining into deeply dependent and poor communities.
WHEN I TRAVELED THROUGHOUT Mesoamerica and the Andean-Amazon watershed last fall visiting staff members of CI, TNC, WCS, and WWF I was looking for signs that an awakening was on the horizon. The field staff I met were acutely aware that the spirit of exclusion survives in the headquarters of their organizations, alongside a subtle but real prejudice against "unscientific" native wisdom. Dan Campbell, TNC's director in Belize, conceded, "We have an organization that sometimes tries to employ models that don't fit the culture of nations where we work." And Joy Grant, in the same office, said that as a consequence of a protracted disagreement with the indigenous peoples of Belize, local people "are now the key to everything we do."
"We are arrogant," was the confession of a CI executive working in South America, who asked me not to identify her. I was heartened by her admission until she went on to suggest that this was merely a minor character flaw. In fact, arrogance was cited by almost all of the nearly one hundred indigenous leaders I met with as a major impediment to constructive communication with big conservation.
If field observations and field workers' sentiments trickle up to the headquarters of CI and the other BINGOs, there could be a happy ending to this story. There are already positive working models of socially sensitive conservation on every continent, particularly in Australia, Bolivia, Nepal, and Canada, where national laws that protect native land rights leave foreign conservationists no choice but to join hands with indigenous communities and work out creative ways to protect wildlife habitat and sustain biodiversity while allowing indigenous citizens to thrive in their traditional settlements.
Photograph | Joy Tessman / National Geographic
In most such cases it is the native people who initiate the creation of a reserve, which is more likely to be called an "indigenous protected area" (IPA) or a "community conservation area" (CCA). IPAs are an invention of Australian aboriginals, many of whom have regained ownership and territorial autonomy under new treaties with the national government, and CCAs are appearing around the world, from Lao fishing villages along the Mekong River to the Mataven Forest in Colombia, where six indigenous tribes live in 152 villages bordering a four-million-acre ecologically intact reserve.
The Kayapo, a nation of Amazonian Indians with whom the Brazilian government and CI have formed a co-operative conservation project, is another such example. Kayapo leaders, renowned for their militancy, openly refused to be treated like just another stakeholder in a two-way deal between a national government and a conservation NGO, as is so often the case with co-operative management plans. Throughout negotiations they insisted upon being an equal player at the table, with equal rights and land sovereignty. As a consequence, the Xingu National Park, the continent's first Indian-owned park, was created to protect the lifeways of the Kayapo and other indigenous Amazonians who are determined to remain within the park's boundaries.
In many locations, once a CCA is established and territorial rights are assured, the founding community invites a BINGO to send its ecologists and wildlife biologists to share in the task of protecting biodiversity by combining Western scientific methodology with indigenous ecological knowledge. And on occasion they will ask for help negotiating with reluctant governments. For example, the Guarani Izoceños people in Bolivia invited the Wildlife Conservation Society to mediate a comanagement agreement with their government, which today allows the tribe to manage and own part of the new Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park.
TOO MUCH HOPE SHOULD PROBABLY NOT be placed in a handful of successful comanagement models, however. The unrestrained corporate lust for energy, hardwood, medicines, and strategic metals is still a considerable threat to indigenous communities, arguably a larger threat than conservation. But the lines between the two are being blurred. Particularly problematic is the fact that international conservation organizations remain comfortable working in close quarters with some of the most aggressive global resource prospectors, such as Boise Cascade, Chevron-Texaco, Mitsubishi, Conoco-Phillips, International Paper, Rio Tinto Mining, Shell, and Weyerhauser, all of whom are members of a CI-created entity called the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business. Of course if the BINGOs were to renounce their corporate partners, they would forfeit millions of dollars in revenue and access to global power without which they sincerely believe they could not be effective.
Photograph | Joel Sartore / National Geographic
And there are some respected and influential conservation biologists who still strongly support top-down, centralized "fortress" conservation. Duke University's John Terborgh, for example, author of the classic Requiem for Nature, believes that co-management projects and CCAs are a huge mistake. "My feeling is that a park should be a park, and it shouldn't have any resident people in it," he says. He bases his argument on three decades of research in Peru's Manu National Park, where native Machiguenga Indians fish and hunt animals with traditional weapons. Terborgh is concerned that they will acquire motorboats, guns, and chainsaws used by their fellow tribesmen outside the park, and that biodiversity will suffer. Then there's paleontologist Richard Leakey, who at the 2003 World Parks Congress in South Africa set off a firestorm of protest by denying the very existence of indigenous peoples in Kenya, his homeland, and arguing that "the global interest in biodiversity might sometimes trump the rights of local people."
Yet many conservationists are beginning to realize that most of the areas they have sought to protect are rich in biodiversity precisely because the people who were living there had come to understand the value and mechanisms of biological diversity. Some will even admit that wrecking the lives of 10 million or more poor, powerless people has been an enormous mistake—not only a moral, social, philosophical, and economic mistake, but an ecological one as well. Others have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people who describe themselves as "enemies of conservation" are generally doomed to fail.
More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a "protected" land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan—particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas? If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.
This article has been abridged for the web.
To read the full article, Click Here to receive a Free Trial copy
of the current issue of Orion magazine.
MARK DOWIE is the recipient of eighteen journalism awards, including four National Magazine Awards. He teaches science at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and is the author of American Foundations: An Investigative History from MIT Press. His last feature article for Orion, In Law We Trust, appeared in the Jul/Aug 2003 issue.
Mark Dowie
Conservation Refugees
A LOW FOG ENVELOPES the steep and remote valleys of southwestern Uganda most mornings, as birds found only in this small corner of the continent rise in chorus and the great apes drink from clear streams. Days in the dense montane forest are quiet and steamy. Nights are an exaltation of insects and primate howling. For thousands of years the Batwa people thrived in this soundscape, in such close harmony with the forest that early-twentieth-century wildlife biologists who studied the flora and fauna of the region barely noticed their existence. They were, as one naturalist noted, "part of the fauna."
In the 1930s, Ugandan leaders were persuaded by international conservationists that this area was threatened by loggers, miners, and other extractive interests. In response, three forest reserves were created—the Mgahinga, the Echuya, and the Bwindi—all of which overlapped with the Batwa's ancestral territory. For sixty years these reserves simply existed on paper, which kept them off-limits to extractors. And the Batwa stayed on, living as they had for generations, in reciprocity with the diverse biota that first drew conservationists to the region.
However, when the reserves were formally designated as national parks in 1991 and a bureaucracy was created and funded by the World Bank's Global Environment Facility to manage them, a rumor was in circulation that the Batwa were hunting and eating silverback gorillas, which by that time were widely recognized as a threatened species and also, increasingly, as a featured attraction for ecotourists from Europe and America. Gorillas were being disturbed and even poached, the Batwa admitted, but by Bahutu, Batutsi, Bantu, and other tribes who invaded the forest from outside villages. The Batwa, who felt a strong kinship with the great apes, adamantly denied killing them. Nonetheless, under pressure from traditional Western conservationists, who had come to believe that wilderness and human community were incompatible, the Batwa were forcibly expelled from their homeland.
Photograph | John Martin / Conservation International
These forests are so dense that the Batwa lost perspective when they first came out. Some even stepped in front of moving vehicles. Now they are living in shabby squatter camps on the perimeter of the parks, without running water or sanitation. In one more generation their forest-based culture—songs, rituals, traditions, and stories—will be gone.
It's no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.
In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft declaration states: "Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option to return." During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and biggest enemy was "conservation."
Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed a declaration stating that the "activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands." These rhetorical jabs have shaken the international conservation community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.
"We are enemies of conservation," declared Maasai leader Martin Saning'o, standing before a session of the November 2004 World Conservation Congress sponsored by IUCN in Bangkok, Thailand. The nomadic Maasai, who have over the past thirty years lost most of their grazing range to conservation projects throughout eastern Africa, hadn't always felt that way. In fact, Saning'o reminded his audience, "...we were the original conservationists." The room was hushed as he quietly explained how pastoral and nomadic cattlemen have traditionally protected their range: "Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems." Then he tried to fathom the strange version of land conservation that has impoverished his people, more than one hundred thousand of whom have been displaced from southern Kenya and the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Like the Batwa, the Maasai have not been fairly compensated. Their culture is dissolving and they live in poverty.
"We don't want to be like you," Saning'o told a room of shocked white faces. "We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You cannot accomplish conservation without us."
Although he might not have realized it, Saning'o was speaking for a growing worldwide movement of indigenous peoples who think of themselves as conservation refugees. Not to be confused with ecological refugees—people forced to abandon their homelands as a result of unbearable heat, drought, desertification, flooding, disease, or other consequences of climate chaos—conservation refugees are removed from their lands involuntarily, either forcibly or through a variety of less coercive measures. The gentler, more benign methods are sometimes called "soft eviction" or "voluntary resettlement," though the latter is contestable. Soft or hard, the main complaint heard in the makeshift villages bordering parks and at meetings like the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok is that relocation often occurs with the tacit approval or benign neglect of one of the five big international nongovernmental conservation organizations, or as they have been nicknamed by indigenous leaders, the BINGOs. Indigenous peoples are often left out of the process entirely.
Curious about this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people, I set out last autumn to meet the issue face to face. I visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories I heard.
KHON NO, MATRIARCH OF A REMOTE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, huddles next to an open-pit stove in the loose, brightly colored clothes that identify her as Karen, the most populous of six tribes found in the lush, mountainous reaches of far northern Thailand. Her village of sixty-five families has been in the same wide valley for over two hundred years. She chews betel, spitting its bright red juice into the fire, and speaks softly through black teeth. She tells me I can use her name, as long as I don't identify her village.
Photograph | Jeremy Horner / Corbis
"The government has no idea who I am," she says. "The only person in the village they know by name is the 'headman' they appointed to represent us in government negotiations. They were here last week, in military uniforms, to tell us we could no longer practice rotational agriculture in this valley. If they knew that someone here was saying bad things about them they would come back again and move us out."
In a recent outburst of environmental enthusiasm stimulated by generous financial offerings from the Global Environment Facility, the Thai government has been creating national parks as fast as the Royal Forest Department can map them. Ten years ago there was barely a park to be found in Thailand, and because those few that existed were unmarked "paper parks," few Thais even knew they were there. Now there are 114 land parks and 24 marine parks on the map. Almost twenty-five thousand square kilometers, most of which are occupied by hill and fishing tribes, are now managed by the forest department as protected areas.
"Men in uniform just appeared one day, out of nowhere, showing their guns," Kohn Noi recalls, "and telling us that we were now living in a national park. That was the first we knew of it. Our own guns were confiscated . . . no more hunting, no more trapping, no more snaring, and no more "slash and burn." That's what they call our agriculture. We call it crop rotation and we've been doing it in this valley for over two hundred years. Soon we will be forced to sell rice to pay for greens and legumes we are no longer allowed to grow here. Hunting we can live without, as we raise chickens, pigs, and buffalo. But rotational farming is our way of life."
A week before our conversation, and a short flight south of Noi's village, six thousand conservationists were attending the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok. At that conference and elsewhere, big conservation has denied that they are party to the evictions while generating reams of promotional material about their affection for, and close relationships with, indigenous peoples. "We recognize that indigenous people have perhaps the deepest understanding of the Earth's living resources," says Conservation International chairman and CEO Peter Seligman, adding that, "we firmly believe that indigenous people must have ownership, control and title of their lands." Such messages are carefully projected toward major funders of conservation, which in response to the aforementioned Ford Foundation reports and other press have become increasingly sensitive to indigenous peoples and their struggles for cultural survival.
Financial support for international conservation has in recent years expanded well beyond the individuals and family foundations that seeded the movement to include very large foundations like Ford, MacArthur, and Gordon and Betty Moore, as well as the World Bank, its Global Environment Facility, foreign governments, USAID, a host of bilateral and multilateral banks, and transnational corporations. During the 1990s USAID alone pumped almost $300 million into the international conservation movement, which it had come to regard as a vital adjunct to economic prosperity. The five largest conservation organizations, CI, TNC, and WWF among them, absorbed over 70 percent of that expenditure. Indigenous communities received none of it. The Moore Foundation made a singular ten-year commitment of nearly $280 million, the largest environmental grant in history, to just one organization—Conservation International. And all of the BINGOs have become increasingly corporate in recent years, both in orientation and affiliation. The Nature Conservancy now boasts almost two thousand corporate sponsors, while Conservation International has received about $9 million from its two hundred fifty corporate "partners."
Photograph | Tim Graham / Getty Images
With that kind of financial and political leverage, as well as chapters in almost every country of the world, millions of loyal members, and nine-figure budgets, CI, WWF, and TNC have undertaken a hugely expanded global push to increase the number of so-called protected areas (PAs)—parks, reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, and corridors created to preserve biological diversity. In 1962, there were some 1,000 official PAs worldwide. Today there are 108,000, with more being added every day. The total area of land now under conservation protection worldwide has doubled since 1990, when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the planet's surface. That goal has been exceeded, with over 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75 million square miles, now protected. That's an area greater than the entire land mass of Africa.
During the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which officially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. World estimates offered by the UN, IUCN, and a few anthropologists range from 5 million to tens of millions. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million.
The true worldwide figure, if it were ever known, would depend upon the semantics of words like "eviction," "displacement," and "refugee," over which parties on all sides of the issue argue endlessly. The larger point is that conservation refugees exist on every continent but Antarctica, and by most accounts live far more difficult lives than they once did, banished from lands they thrived on for hundreds, even thousands of years.
John Muir, a forefather of the American conservation movement, argued that "wilderness" should be cleared of all inhabitants and set aside to satisfy the urbane human's need for recreation and spiritual renewal. It was a sentiment that became national policy with the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined wilderness as a place "where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." One should not be surprised to find hardy residues of these sentiments among traditional conservation groups. The preference for "virgin" wilderness has lingered on in a movement that has tended to value all nature but human nature, and refused to recognize the positive wildness in human beings.
Expulsions continue around the world to this day. The Indian government, which evicted one hundred thousand adivasis (rural peoples) in Assam between April and July of 2002, estimates that 2 or 3 million more will be displaced over the next decade. The policy is largely in response to a 1993 lawsuit brought by WWF, which demanded that the government increase PAs by 8 percent, mostly in order to protect tiger habitat. A more immediate threat involves the impending removal of several Mayan communities from the Montes Azules region of Chiapas, Mexico, a process begun in the mid-1970s with the intent to preserve virgin tropical forest, which could still quite easily spark a civil war. Conservation International is deeply immersed in that controversy, as are a host of extractive industries.
Tribal people, who tend to think and plan in generations, rather than weeks, months, and years, are still waiting to be paid the consideration promised. Of course the UN draft declaration is the prize because it must be ratified by so many nations. The declaration has failed to pass so far mainly because powerful leaders such as Tony Blair and George Bush threaten to veto it, arguing that there is not and should never be such a thing as collective human rights.
Sadly, the human rights and global conservation communities remain at serious odds over the question of displacement, each side blaming the other for the particular crisis they perceive. Conservation biologists argue that by allowing native populations to grow, hunt, and gather in protected areas, anthropologists, cultural preservationists, and other supporters of indigenous rights become complicit in the decline of biological diversity. Some, like the Wildlife Conservation Society's outspoken president, Steven Sanderson, believe that the entire global conservation agenda has been "hijacked" by advocates for indigenous peoples, placing wildlife and biodiversity in peril. "Forest peoples and their representatives may speak for the forest," Sanderson has said, "They may speak for their version of the forest; but they do not speak for the forest we want to conserve." WCS, originally the New York Zoological Society, is a BINGO lesser in size and stature than the likes of TNC and CI, but more insistent than its colleagues that indigenous territorial rights, while a valid social issue, should be of no concern to wildlife conservationists.
Photograph | AFP / Getty Images
Market-based solutions put forth by human rights groups, which may have been implemented with the best of social and ecological intentions, share a lamentable outcome, barely discernible behind a smoke screen of slick promotion. In almost every case indigenous people are moved into the money economy without the means to participate in it fully. They become permanently indentured as park rangers (never wardens), porters, waiters, harvesters, or, if they manage to learn a European language, ecotour guides. Under this model, "conservation" edges ever closer to "development," while native communities are assimilated into the lowest ranks of national cultures.
It should be no surprise, then, that tribal peoples regard conservationists as just another colonizer—an extension of the deadening forces of economic and cultural hegemony. Whole societies like the Batwa, the Maasai, the Ashinika of Peru, the Gwi and Gana Bushmen of Botswana, the Karen and Hmong of Southeast Asia, and the Huarani of Ecuador are being transformed from independent and self-sustaining into deeply dependent and poor communities.
WHEN I TRAVELED THROUGHOUT Mesoamerica and the Andean-Amazon watershed last fall visiting staff members of CI, TNC, WCS, and WWF I was looking for signs that an awakening was on the horizon. The field staff I met were acutely aware that the spirit of exclusion survives in the headquarters of their organizations, alongside a subtle but real prejudice against "unscientific" native wisdom. Dan Campbell, TNC's director in Belize, conceded, "We have an organization that sometimes tries to employ models that don't fit the culture of nations where we work." And Joy Grant, in the same office, said that as a consequence of a protracted disagreement with the indigenous peoples of Belize, local people "are now the key to everything we do."
"We are arrogant," was the confession of a CI executive working in South America, who asked me not to identify her. I was heartened by her admission until she went on to suggest that this was merely a minor character flaw. In fact, arrogance was cited by almost all of the nearly one hundred indigenous leaders I met with as a major impediment to constructive communication with big conservation.
If field observations and field workers' sentiments trickle up to the headquarters of CI and the other BINGOs, there could be a happy ending to this story. There are already positive working models of socially sensitive conservation on every continent, particularly in Australia, Bolivia, Nepal, and Canada, where national laws that protect native land rights leave foreign conservationists no choice but to join hands with indigenous communities and work out creative ways to protect wildlife habitat and sustain biodiversity while allowing indigenous citizens to thrive in their traditional settlements.
Photograph | Joy Tessman / National Geographic
In most such cases it is the native people who initiate the creation of a reserve, which is more likely to be called an "indigenous protected area" (IPA) or a "community conservation area" (CCA). IPAs are an invention of Australian aboriginals, many of whom have regained ownership and territorial autonomy under new treaties with the national government, and CCAs are appearing around the world, from Lao fishing villages along the Mekong River to the Mataven Forest in Colombia, where six indigenous tribes live in 152 villages bordering a four-million-acre ecologically intact reserve.
The Kayapo, a nation of Amazonian Indians with whom the Brazilian government and CI have formed a co-operative conservation project, is another such example. Kayapo leaders, renowned for their militancy, openly refused to be treated like just another stakeholder in a two-way deal between a national government and a conservation NGO, as is so often the case with co-operative management plans. Throughout negotiations they insisted upon being an equal player at the table, with equal rights and land sovereignty. As a consequence, the Xingu National Park, the continent's first Indian-owned park, was created to protect the lifeways of the Kayapo and other indigenous Amazonians who are determined to remain within the park's boundaries.
In many locations, once a CCA is established and territorial rights are assured, the founding community invites a BINGO to send its ecologists and wildlife biologists to share in the task of protecting biodiversity by combining Western scientific methodology with indigenous ecological knowledge. And on occasion they will ask for help negotiating with reluctant governments. For example, the Guarani Izoceños people in Bolivia invited the Wildlife Conservation Society to mediate a comanagement agreement with their government, which today allows the tribe to manage and own part of the new Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park.
TOO MUCH HOPE SHOULD PROBABLY NOT be placed in a handful of successful comanagement models, however. The unrestrained corporate lust for energy, hardwood, medicines, and strategic metals is still a considerable threat to indigenous communities, arguably a larger threat than conservation. But the lines between the two are being blurred. Particularly problematic is the fact that international conservation organizations remain comfortable working in close quarters with some of the most aggressive global resource prospectors, such as Boise Cascade, Chevron-Texaco, Mitsubishi, Conoco-Phillips, International Paper, Rio Tinto Mining, Shell, and Weyerhauser, all of whom are members of a CI-created entity called the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business. Of course if the BINGOs were to renounce their corporate partners, they would forfeit millions of dollars in revenue and access to global power without which they sincerely believe they could not be effective.
Photograph | Joel Sartore / National Geographic
And there are some respected and influential conservation biologists who still strongly support top-down, centralized "fortress" conservation. Duke University's John Terborgh, for example, author of the classic Requiem for Nature, believes that co-management projects and CCAs are a huge mistake. "My feeling is that a park should be a park, and it shouldn't have any resident people in it," he says. He bases his argument on three decades of research in Peru's Manu National Park, where native Machiguenga Indians fish and hunt animals with traditional weapons. Terborgh is concerned that they will acquire motorboats, guns, and chainsaws used by their fellow tribesmen outside the park, and that biodiversity will suffer. Then there's paleontologist Richard Leakey, who at the 2003 World Parks Congress in South Africa set off a firestorm of protest by denying the very existence of indigenous peoples in Kenya, his homeland, and arguing that "the global interest in biodiversity might sometimes trump the rights of local people."
Yet many conservationists are beginning to realize that most of the areas they have sought to protect are rich in biodiversity precisely because the people who were living there had come to understand the value and mechanisms of biological diversity. Some will even admit that wrecking the lives of 10 million or more poor, powerless people has been an enormous mistake—not only a moral, social, philosophical, and economic mistake, but an ecological one as well. Others have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people who describe themselves as "enemies of conservation" are generally doomed to fail.
More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a "protected" land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan—particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas? If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.
This article has been abridged for the web.
To read the full article, Click Here to receive a Free Trial copy
of the current issue of Orion magazine.
MARK DOWIE is the recipient of eighteen journalism awards, including four National Magazine Awards. He teaches science at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and is the author of American Foundations: An Investigative History from MIT Press. His last feature article for Orion, In Law We Trust, appeared in the Jul/Aug 2003 issue.
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-6om/McKibben.html
Small Change
Bill McKibben
Mad Max Meets American Gothic
Is there a friendlier option for the post-peak future?
Can you feel the mood shifting? I can. A year of spiking speculation about peak oil and the death of suburbia has rattled lots of Americans. Plenty of people suddenly feel that real, civilization-shaking change might be around the next corner. And plenty of them also feel frozen in the headlights, unsure what, if anything, to do about it. Other than wait.
It reminds me a little of the very early days in the fight over global warming. Appalled at the forecasts of global destruction, some of us demanded immediate and strong action—high taxes on carbon emissions, for instance, and never mind the pain. Others—more moderate or more politically realistic—advocated a suite of what they called "no regrets" policies. They suggested, say, gradual rises in gas mileage, higher efficiency standards for appliances. Even if climate change proved to be overblown hooey, they pointed out, such rational and easy measures would still save us money, reduce conventional pollution, and so on. These steps were like taking out a modest amount of insurance; whatever happened we'd have no regrets about having adopted them.
In actual fact, of course, we took neither the urgent nor the more relaxed steps. Instead we bought Ford Explorers. Now everything that was frozen is melting and soon we will have . . . regrets.
Who knows if we're actually going to see oil production peak sometime soon? Not me. I've read persuasive arguments that we will from writers like Michael Klare and James Howard Kunstler and Paul Roberts. I've also read confident counterarguments from people who've been right in the past, like Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Oil depletion is not a straightforward physical law, like the fact that the molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. Instead it's a detective story that turns on questions like, are the Saudis lying about how fast oil is being depleted in their giant field at Ghawar? My suspicion had always been that we'd run out of sinks before sources—that is, run out of atmosphere before oil wells—but it's beginning to look like the race will be tight.
In any event, the real question is what to do in the face of uncertainty. In policy terms, the answer is easy, since cushioning the end of oil would require precisely the same steps as slowing down climate change: raising gas mileage, converting to hybrid cars, building trains, imposing carbon taxes, giving tax breaks for insulation.
But in personal terms? That's how peak oil affects the imagination, after all. You can't hear about it without starting to wonder, what's my life going to be like? Authors have provided helpful guesses about which regions of the country to move to (New England good, suburban Atlanta bad) or what items to install on your homestead. The trouble with such advice, however, is that it's altogether too personal, too private. If the nightmare of a globally warmed world is, say, a storm-raked, mosquito-ridden, sea-besieged city on a tropical shore, then the nightmare of a post-oil world is a lone family holed up on its new farm using its cache of firearms to guard its stockpile of food. You can imagine it coming to that—Mad Max meets American Gothic. It's hard to underestimate the degree of rage that might accompany the end of the cheap-fuel culture in a country as entitled as ours. But the loner option is full of unhappiness, no matter what. At best it offers survival.
The no-regrets options are different, and seductive. They all involve communities learning to fend more powerfully for themselves—communities ratcheting down their dependence on the overstretched and oil-dependent lines of supply that mark a globalized economy, and ratcheting up the semiforgotten, close-to-home economies that might prove more stable in an energy-starved world. Some of this work is already underway, but it will be given a new urgency if the price of oil just keeps on leaping.
Consider, for instance, the fine small city of Burlington, in Vermont. It has its own in-town farming district, the Intervale—land that once served as the town dump and now has about five hundred acres of vegetables and berries and grains, selling mostly to people who appreciate freshness, who think organically, who want to support their neighbors. The Intervale already provides 8 percent of the fresh produce that the town's residents consume, and 8 percent is not insignificant. But it still leaves 92 percent arriving by truck, boat, and plane from around the planet—apples from China, say, even though Burlington lies in the Champlain Valley, one of the planet's finest apple-growing belts. In a cheap-fuel economy you can take advantage of cheap Chinese labor and sell Chinese apples for a cheap forty cents. Say that the price of oil rises to the point where that apple costs fifty cents, and sixty, and seventy—each increase should make it easier to extend the Intervale farms over a few hundred more acres. Oil at a hundred dollars a barrel means fewer bananas and more local apples and blueberries.
But that process needn't wait until shortage requires it—until we're scrambling. With a little lead time, we can put in place the no-regrets kinds of policies that make sense for a less spendthrift society. Consider, for instance, Burlington Bread. That's the local currency that a few people developed in Burlington six or seven years ago—one of several thousand such currencies that have sprung up around the world. But like most of the American experiments, Burlington Bread has never broken out of the backrub and vegan-restaurant ghetto; it's basically a medium of exchange between earnest masseuses. Now, though, locals led by University of Vermont economics professor Bob Costanza are trying to make something more of it. Costanza, one of the founders of ecological economics, has proposed having the city issue Bread. If they could use the currency to pay some municipal expenses, and in turn accept it for taxes and fees, then it would stand a chance of gaining a real foothold. In time, say Costanza's colleagues, 20 percent of Burlington's economy might use Bread instead of greenbacks—which, because it would give people money that only had value in the metro area, would automatically make local goods more competitive. Move that produce number from 8 percent to, say, 28 percent. Suddenly the town is a lot better situated for the post-oil world. And suddenly the town is not just a collection of unrelated individuals living in a vast planetary economy, but a real community in a real place filled with people who depend on one another in real ways.
Right now organizers are trying to persuade some of the city's many vendors to accept Bread in payment for their services—that's the test the city's mayor, Peter Clavelle, will use to decide if the project goes ahead or not. "It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem," says Ed Antczak of the city's Community and Economic Development Office. "The onus is on the local-currency people to prove over the next twelve months that there are vendors willing to take it from the city. It's like, 'Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the West.' Because otherwise it's a little out there for the city to get involved."
Out there, sure. But in a world where business as usual seems less and less likely, that may be the only place beyond regret.
Bill McKibben lives without regrets in the Champlain Valley, which he describes in his new book, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape, Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks.
Small Change
Bill McKibben
Mad Max Meets American Gothic
Is there a friendlier option for the post-peak future?
Can you feel the mood shifting? I can. A year of spiking speculation about peak oil and the death of suburbia has rattled lots of Americans. Plenty of people suddenly feel that real, civilization-shaking change might be around the next corner. And plenty of them also feel frozen in the headlights, unsure what, if anything, to do about it. Other than wait.
It reminds me a little of the very early days in the fight over global warming. Appalled at the forecasts of global destruction, some of us demanded immediate and strong action—high taxes on carbon emissions, for instance, and never mind the pain. Others—more moderate or more politically realistic—advocated a suite of what they called "no regrets" policies. They suggested, say, gradual rises in gas mileage, higher efficiency standards for appliances. Even if climate change proved to be overblown hooey, they pointed out, such rational and easy measures would still save us money, reduce conventional pollution, and so on. These steps were like taking out a modest amount of insurance; whatever happened we'd have no regrets about having adopted them.
In actual fact, of course, we took neither the urgent nor the more relaxed steps. Instead we bought Ford Explorers. Now everything that was frozen is melting and soon we will have . . . regrets.
Who knows if we're actually going to see oil production peak sometime soon? Not me. I've read persuasive arguments that we will from writers like Michael Klare and James Howard Kunstler and Paul Roberts. I've also read confident counterarguments from people who've been right in the past, like Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Oil depletion is not a straightforward physical law, like the fact that the molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. Instead it's a detective story that turns on questions like, are the Saudis lying about how fast oil is being depleted in their giant field at Ghawar? My suspicion had always been that we'd run out of sinks before sources—that is, run out of atmosphere before oil wells—but it's beginning to look like the race will be tight.
In any event, the real question is what to do in the face of uncertainty. In policy terms, the answer is easy, since cushioning the end of oil would require precisely the same steps as slowing down climate change: raising gas mileage, converting to hybrid cars, building trains, imposing carbon taxes, giving tax breaks for insulation.
But in personal terms? That's how peak oil affects the imagination, after all. You can't hear about it without starting to wonder, what's my life going to be like? Authors have provided helpful guesses about which regions of the country to move to (New England good, suburban Atlanta bad) or what items to install on your homestead. The trouble with such advice, however, is that it's altogether too personal, too private. If the nightmare of a globally warmed world is, say, a storm-raked, mosquito-ridden, sea-besieged city on a tropical shore, then the nightmare of a post-oil world is a lone family holed up on its new farm using its cache of firearms to guard its stockpile of food. You can imagine it coming to that—Mad Max meets American Gothic. It's hard to underestimate the degree of rage that might accompany the end of the cheap-fuel culture in a country as entitled as ours. But the loner option is full of unhappiness, no matter what. At best it offers survival.
The no-regrets options are different, and seductive. They all involve communities learning to fend more powerfully for themselves—communities ratcheting down their dependence on the overstretched and oil-dependent lines of supply that mark a globalized economy, and ratcheting up the semiforgotten, close-to-home economies that might prove more stable in an energy-starved world. Some of this work is already underway, but it will be given a new urgency if the price of oil just keeps on leaping.
Consider, for instance, the fine small city of Burlington, in Vermont. It has its own in-town farming district, the Intervale—land that once served as the town dump and now has about five hundred acres of vegetables and berries and grains, selling mostly to people who appreciate freshness, who think organically, who want to support their neighbors. The Intervale already provides 8 percent of the fresh produce that the town's residents consume, and 8 percent is not insignificant. But it still leaves 92 percent arriving by truck, boat, and plane from around the planet—apples from China, say, even though Burlington lies in the Champlain Valley, one of the planet's finest apple-growing belts. In a cheap-fuel economy you can take advantage of cheap Chinese labor and sell Chinese apples for a cheap forty cents. Say that the price of oil rises to the point where that apple costs fifty cents, and sixty, and seventy—each increase should make it easier to extend the Intervale farms over a few hundred more acres. Oil at a hundred dollars a barrel means fewer bananas and more local apples and blueberries.
But that process needn't wait until shortage requires it—until we're scrambling. With a little lead time, we can put in place the no-regrets kinds of policies that make sense for a less spendthrift society. Consider, for instance, Burlington Bread. That's the local currency that a few people developed in Burlington six or seven years ago—one of several thousand such currencies that have sprung up around the world. But like most of the American experiments, Burlington Bread has never broken out of the backrub and vegan-restaurant ghetto; it's basically a medium of exchange between earnest masseuses. Now, though, locals led by University of Vermont economics professor Bob Costanza are trying to make something more of it. Costanza, one of the founders of ecological economics, has proposed having the city issue Bread. If they could use the currency to pay some municipal expenses, and in turn accept it for taxes and fees, then it would stand a chance of gaining a real foothold. In time, say Costanza's colleagues, 20 percent of Burlington's economy might use Bread instead of greenbacks—which, because it would give people money that only had value in the metro area, would automatically make local goods more competitive. Move that produce number from 8 percent to, say, 28 percent. Suddenly the town is a lot better situated for the post-oil world. And suddenly the town is not just a collection of unrelated individuals living in a vast planetary economy, but a real community in a real place filled with people who depend on one another in real ways.
Right now organizers are trying to persuade some of the city's many vendors to accept Bread in payment for their services—that's the test the city's mayor, Peter Clavelle, will use to decide if the project goes ahead or not. "It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem," says Ed Antczak of the city's Community and Economic Development Office. "The onus is on the local-currency people to prove over the next twelve months that there are vendors willing to take it from the city. It's like, 'Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the West.' Because otherwise it's a little out there for the city to get involved."
Out there, sure. But in a world where business as usual seems less and less likely, that may be the only place beyond regret.
Bill McKibben lives without regrets in the Champlain Valley, which he describes in his new book, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape, Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks.
QUOTE(papabear @ Nov 1 2005, 01:56 PM) [snapback]521856[/snapback]
Just an instance of genetic reductionism--you're better off reading structuralists to get a better grasp of what is at stake when it comes to development and the determining of the mature form. Just because the 'establishment' thinks evolution is true doesn't mean they're right, especially if they can't make heads or tails about where observation ends and speculation begins. It's no surprise geneticists want to promote it as much as possible--they make their living from exaggerated claims about practical and speculative benefits. Same with anthropologists and evolutionary biologists.
No thanks, I've had my fill of evolutionary theory and sociobiology--insofar as both are premised upon materialism and genetic reductionism, they're not worth the time of anyone who really wants to understand reality. One doesn't need evolutionary theory to see the problem with unrestrained desire--any 'world philosophy' that has lasted until today, Buddhism, Greek, Confucianism, etc. acknowledges that appetite must be restrained and that unrestrained desire has a social impact, not just consequences for the individual. At least they don't contradict our 'common sense' knowledge that choice exists, unlike determinism.
Because determinism is incompatible with intellectual cognition and choice, though it is compatible with behaviorism and the reduction of human knowledge to sensation and sense desire.
You have totally mischaracterized evolution theory. Evolution theory is not "determinism" as you allege, and it is far more complicated than you acknowledge. You have admitted that you have not done substantial research into evolution theory and do not care to. That is your choice. However, it is quite clear that you and I are not going to have any fruitful discussion about anything relating to evolution.
QUOTE(papabear @ Nov 1 2005, 01:56 PM) [snapback]521856[/snapback]
It's a sign of intellectual sloppiness and a hint that his reasoning elsewhere may be flawed.
Let's grant that his reasoning is flawed in regards to ties between religious doctrine and neoclassical economic theory. I would encourage you to read the synopsis on the main dieoff page, which is most heavily focused on oil and gas production and depletion, and evaluate it on it's own accord. I comment on your critique of Hanson's "Five Fundamental Flaws" paper below.
QUOTE(papabear @ Nov 1 2005, 01:56 PM) [snapback]521856[/snapback]
A poorly-written refutation of economics, and a failure to distinguish between what is descriptive and what is normative within liberal economic theory.
#1. A fundamentally incorrect "method": the economist uses "correlation" and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after-the-fact) reasoning, rather than the "scientific method".
He does not give a description fo scientific method, but merely assumes that it is valid in all cases. It's not. And even if it is not used, it does not imply that the theory is false or invalid, merely that it does not have the same sort of epistemic status as reasoning which employs the "scientific method." Then again, that is to grant too much to the scientific method.
#2. A fundamentally inverted worldview: the economist sees the environment as a subsystem of the economy, rather than the other way around. In other words, economists are trained to believe that natural resources come from "markets" rather than the "environment". The corollary is that "man-made capital" can substitute for "natural capital". But the First Law of thermodynamics tells us there is no "creation" -- there is no such thing as "man-made capital". Thus, ALL capital is "natural capital", and the economy is 100% dependent on the "environment" for everything.
Not a problem if economics remains essentially subordinate to politics, and has as part of its proper subject what comes about through human labor. The problem comes in when political knowledge fails to recognize natural resources for what they are, or if economics becomes a normative political theory unto itself.
"A poorly-written refutation of economics..."
The way a refutation is "written" is irrelevant to the strength of the arguments it contains.
Even if we ignore points 3 through 5, Hanson's first two points are still incontrovertible. Regarding point #1:
Ok, for the sake of argument, lets say that the scientific method is irrelevant. Neoclassical economic theory is still based on correlation and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after-the-fact) reasoning - meaning it is impossible to derive any sound conclusions from it. You said yourself that "errors in premises merely warrant recognition that the argument is unsound and that conclusion does not follow". Economic theory relies on a fundamentally flawed, unsound method, and you are incorrect to not acknowledge this.
Regarding point #2:
YES, it IS a problem that the operative economic theory fails to understand that the economy is 100% dependent on the environment for everything. This is THE achilles heel of neoclassical economic theory. We live on a FINITE sphere (the Earth) with FINITE resources. Thus, the implicit assumption (and forecasts) of continuous economic growth by the foremost economic "experts" are a fantasy, based on a fundamentally flawed theory (neoclassical economics).
You write that "The problem comes in when political knowledge fails to recognize natural resources for what they are...". And how could political knowledge be otherwise as long as neoclassical economics is the predominant economic system? If our political system were to recognize natural resources for what they are, then politicians would have to scrap our entire capitalist/economic system in favor of a steady-state (zero-growth) economy. They would also have to impose population controls. This is the ONLY type of economy that is sustainable. The 'received' political knowledge has ALWAYS failed to recognize natural resources for what they are. It couldn't have been otherwise as long as the established economic theory denies that there are limits to growth and assumes that energy is just another commodity.
QUOTE(reveille91 @ Nov 3 2005, 07:39 PM) [snapback]549978[/snapback]
You have totally mischaracterized evolution theory. Evolution theory is not "determinism" as you allege, and it is far more complicated than you acknowledge. You have admitted that you have not done substantial research into evolution theory and do not care to. That is your choice. However, it is quite clear that you and I are not going to have any fruitful discussion about anything relating to evolution.
Sorry, now you're jumping to conclusions--did I say I have not done any substantial research? No. I implied I wouldn't care to do any more. Given that you have jumped to unwarranted conclusions (and your attachment to one particular author), there probably isn't any point in responding. Nonetheless, evolution theory is not the same as 'determinism' with regards to the main propositions which are used to characterize and identify each, but it can certainly very much imply it, when both are built upon materialistic and naturalistic assumptions, and deny the difference between intellectual knowledge and sense knowledge.
QUOTE
"A poorly-written refutation of economics..."
The way a refutation is "written" is irrelevant to the strength of the arguments it contains.
The way a refutation is "written" is irrelevant to the strength of the arguments it contains.
Being poorly-written does not exclude being poorly-reasoned or poorly-argued.
QUOTE
Even if we ignore points 3 through 5, Hanson's first two points are still incontrovertible. Regarding point #1:
Ok, for the sake of argument, lets say that the scientific method is irrelevant. Neoclassical economic theory is still based on correlation and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after-the-fact) reasoning - meaning it is impossible to derive any sound conclusions from it. You said yourself that "errors in premises merely warrant recognition that the argument is unsound and that conclusion does not follow". Economic theory relies on a fundamentally flawed, unsound method, and you are incorrect to not acknowledge this.
Ok, for the sake of argument, lets say that the scientific method is irrelevant. Neoclassical economic theory is still based on correlation and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after-the-fact) reasoning - meaning it is impossible to derive any sound conclusions from it. You said yourself that "errors in premises merely warrant recognition that the argument is unsound and that conclusion does not follow". Economic theory relies on a fundamentally flawed, unsound method, and you are incorrect to not acknowledge this.
My original point was to point out his lack of understanding of the basics of logic and what is required for a refutation of a conclusion, and to take issue with his understanding of what is needed to render something 'scientific'; I was not addressing his characterization of the method of economics as such.
If you want to make this critique of the method, cite an authoritative source that makes this claim about the method employed in neoclassical economic theory, or show it being used by the leading thinkers as the primary method. Otherwise not only is it a bad generalization, but a mischaracterization of said economic theory.
Any other discussion of economics as such should be in a new thread.
http://www.kva.se/KVA_Root/swe/_news/detai...5&br=ie&ver=4up
Statement on the oil situation by the Energy committee
KVA,10/17/2005 4:55:00 PM
The newly-formed Energy Committee at the Academy has issued a statement on the dwindling oil resources. It urges for better preparedness and stresses the responsibility of more technically advanced countries.
The statement has been presented at a press meeting at the Academy, and can be downloaded below.
http://www.kva.se/KVA_Root/files/newspics/...atement1_05.pdf
http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/3212/a/51058
Article
Dagens Nyheter, 01 October 2005
Mona Sahlin, Minister for Sustainable Development
Sweden first to break dependence on oil! New programme presented
In recent weeks we have read about and anguished over the devastation in the United States. These natural disasters have also reminded us how vulnerable we are to the forces of the weather. A hurricane that puts a number of oil rigs out of action affects the availability of oil, the economies and the price of petrol around the world.
We have seen the consequences in every country. In light of the oil supply disruptions, the Swedish Government recently decided to allow withdrawals from the country's emergency stocks of petroleum products. The whole world is now dreading the problems brought about by dependence on oil. In a situation where President Bush speaks to the nation about using cars less - and where Ford and Toyota demand that the President takes steps to reduce dependence on oil - each and every one of us can see how the devastation created by the hurricanes rapidly changes the attitude towards fuel. It is as though the idea that oil is a finite resource is only now seriously having an impact on the debate. But there is reason to believe that this awareness will also remain on the agenda in the slightly longer term.
Climate change is the greatest and most important environmental challenge of our time. Most of the world's climate researchers agree that the Earth's climate system is changing - and in order to slow down these changes, emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced. The Government is therefore setting a new policy target: the creation of the conditions necessary to break Sweden's dependence on fossil fuels by 2020. A Sweden free of fossil fuels would give us enormous advantages, not least by reducing the impact from fluctuations in oil prices. The price of oil has tripled since 1996! Old oil price records are now being beaten at a rapid rate.
It is already a major competitive advantage for Sweden's industry and the economy that, by international standards, the country has such a small dependence on oil. Swedish policy instruments such as investment grants, norms for energy use, loans with interest subsidies and information drives have formed the basis of a conscious policy to gradually reduce oil use. Since 1994 the use of oil in the housing and services sector has decreased by 15.2 TWh. The use of oil in industry has remained largely unchanged - although industrial production has increased by 70 per cent! Measures to increase energy efficiency and to promote the development of district heating continue to be politically important tools. An increasing number of households are taking advantage of the benefits of district heating and heating pellets; car industry order books are being filled with hybrid and ethanol cars. This trend must be speeded up. The Government is therefore presenting a national programme against dependence on oil with the following main features.
. Tax relief for conversion from oil. It is unacceptable that many owners of single-family homes are dependent on oil for their heating and are thus hard hit by high oil prices. In the next few weeks I will be presenting a Government Bill on financial support for the owners of single-family homes and multi-dwelling buildings in order to encourage conversion from oil heating to renewable energy heating, beginning next year. The public sector must take the lead and set a good example. For some time now, therefore, special support has been available to libraries, public swimming baths and hospitals, for example, that become more fuel efficient by converting to renewable energy.
. More renewable energy. Oil and coal are finite fuels. The target must be that we base our entire energy supply on renewable fuels. The EU trading system represents an important step towards improved competitiveness in renewable energy at European level. In our country, renewable electricity has increased by approximately 4.5 TWh since 2002, not least by means of the green certificate system. We will give a longer term perspective on electricity certificates in a Government Bill to be presented next spring. The level of ambition has been set very high - by 2016, renewable electricity production will have increased by 15 TWh from the 2002 level. A directive to state-owned Vattenfall means the company will be responsible for major investments in renewable energy for the future. A new inquiry will submit proposals to the Government on how also agricultural production of renewable energy can be increased.
. Measures for renewable fuels. Breaking dependence on oil in the transport sector will be a great challenge and the Government therefore has an ambitious policy to increase the percentage of renewable fuels. For the individual, it will pay to choose an environmentally friendly car. Carbon dioxide neutral fuels will be cheap - they are exempt from both carbon dioxide tax and energy tax for a five-year period. Environmental cars will be exempted from the Stockholm Trial with environmental charges and will have access to free parking in some municipalities. Cars that are classified as a taxable benefit and run on environmentally friendly fuel will continue to enjoy tax relief. The Government will give priority to purchasing environmentally friendly cars. Sweden is also working actively in the EU for us to permit a higher blend of ethanol in petrol, a measure which would quickly have a great positive effect. The readjustment of the transport sector requires both international and national efforts with broad contributions by researchers, industry, users and the state.
. Research and new knowledge for a renewable society. Resources for energy research will now be increased substantially - the level advised in the budget amounts to some SEK 815 million per year. Next year the Government will therefore present a new Bill in this area. The purpose of these measures is to achieve more renewable energy production and more efficient energy use. Special research projects in areas such as energy use in built environments, biofuels, gasification of biomass, and commercialisation and risk capital provision may also be called for.
. Continued investment in district heating. District heating has increased radically in Sweden in recent years and the Government wants this trend to continue. The Government will thus offer clear financial incentives where biofuels and environmentally friendly heating will be economically advantageous. New money for climate investment programmes in all the municipalities in the country will also be significant in reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Along with high oil prices and climate change, an increasing number of countries are recognising the problem with fossil fuels. Sweden has the chance to be an international model and a successful actor in export markets for alternative solutions. But this requires conscious investments - not a reactionary policy that obstructs the transition to alternative energy sources and investments in the environment of the future. Breaking dependence on oil brings many opportunities for strengthened competitiveness, technological development and progress. The aim is to break dependence on fossil fuels by 2020. By then no home will need oil for heating. By then no motorist will be obliged to use petrol as the sole option available. By then there will always be better alternatives to oil.
Mona Sahlin
Minister for Sustainable Development
Statement on the oil situation by the Energy committee
KVA,10/17/2005 4:55:00 PM
The newly-formed Energy Committee at the Academy has issued a statement on the dwindling oil resources. It urges for better preparedness and stresses the responsibility of more technically advanced countries.
The statement has been presented at a press meeting at the Academy, and can be downloaded below.
http://www.kva.se/KVA_Root/files/newspics/...atement1_05.pdf
http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/3212/a/51058
Article
Dagens Nyheter, 01 October 2005
Mona Sahlin, Minister for Sustainable Development
Sweden first to break dependence on oil! New programme presented
In recent weeks we have read about and anguished over the devastation in the United States. These natural disasters have also reminded us how vulnerable we are to the forces of the weather. A hurricane that puts a number of oil rigs out of action affects the availability of oil, the economies and the price of petrol around the world.
We have seen the consequences in every country. In light of the oil supply disruptions, the Swedish Government recently decided to allow withdrawals from the country's emergency stocks of petroleum products. The whole world is now dreading the problems brought about by dependence on oil. In a situation where President Bush speaks to the nation about using cars less - and where Ford and Toyota demand that the President takes steps to reduce dependence on oil - each and every one of us can see how the devastation created by the hurricanes rapidly changes the attitude towards fuel. It is as though the idea that oil is a finite resource is only now seriously having an impact on the debate. But there is reason to believe that this awareness will also remain on the agenda in the slightly longer term.
Climate change is the greatest and most important environmental challenge of our time. Most of the world's climate researchers agree that the Earth's climate system is changing - and in order to slow down these changes, emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced. The Government is therefore setting a new policy target: the creation of the conditions necessary to break Sweden's dependence on fossil fuels by 2020. A Sweden free of fossil fuels would give us enormous advantages, not least by reducing the impact from fluctuations in oil prices. The price of oil has tripled since 1996! Old oil price records are now being beaten at a rapid rate.
It is already a major competitive advantage for Sweden's industry and the economy that, by international standards, the country has such a small dependence on oil. Swedish policy instruments such as investment grants, norms for energy use, loans with interest subsidies and information drives have formed the basis of a conscious policy to gradually reduce oil use. Since 1994 the use of oil in the housing and services sector has decreased by 15.2 TWh. The use of oil in industry has remained largely unchanged - although industrial production has increased by 70 per cent! Measures to increase energy efficiency and to promote the development of district heating continue to be politically important tools. An increasing number of households are taking advantage of the benefits of district heating and heating pellets; car industry order books are being filled with hybrid and ethanol cars. This trend must be speeded up. The Government is therefore presenting a national programme against dependence on oil with the following main features.
. Tax relief for conversion from oil. It is unacceptable that many owners of single-family homes are dependent on oil for their heating and are thus hard hit by high oil prices. In the next few weeks I will be presenting a Government Bill on financial support for the owners of single-family homes and multi-dwelling buildings in order to encourage conversion from oil heating to renewable energy heating, beginning next year. The public sector must take the lead and set a good example. For some time now, therefore, special support has been available to libraries, public swimming baths and hospitals, for example, that become more fuel efficient by converting to renewable energy.
. More renewable energy. Oil and coal are finite fuels. The target must be that we base our entire energy supply on renewable fuels. The EU trading system represents an important step towards improved competitiveness in renewable energy at European level. In our country, renewable electricity has increased by approximately 4.5 TWh since 2002, not least by means of the green certificate system. We will give a longer term perspective on electricity certificates in a Government Bill to be presented next spring. The level of ambition has been set very high - by 2016, renewable electricity production will have increased by 15 TWh from the 2002 level. A directive to state-owned Vattenfall means the company will be responsible for major investments in renewable energy for the future. A new inquiry will submit proposals to the Government on how also agricultural production of renewable energy can be increased.
. Measures for renewable fuels. Breaking dependence on oil in the transport sector will be a great challenge and the Government therefore has an ambitious policy to increase the percentage of renewable fuels. For the individual, it will pay to choose an environmentally friendly car. Carbon dioxide neutral fuels will be cheap - they are exempt from both carbon dioxide tax and energy tax for a five-year period. Environmental cars will be exempted from the Stockholm Trial with environmental charges and will have access to free parking in some municipalities. Cars that are classified as a taxable benefit and run on environmentally friendly fuel will continue to enjoy tax relief. The Government will give priority to purchasing environmentally friendly cars. Sweden is also working actively in the EU for us to permit a higher blend of ethanol in petrol, a measure which would quickly have a great positive effect. The readjustment of the transport sector requires both international and national efforts with broad contributions by researchers, industry, users and the state.
. Research and new knowledge for a renewable society. Resources for energy research will now be increased substantially - the level advised in the budget amounts to some SEK 815 million per year. Next year the Government will therefore present a new Bill in this area. The purpose of these measures is to achieve more renewable energy production and more efficient energy use. Special research projects in areas such as energy use in built environments, biofuels, gasification of biomass, and commercialisation and risk capital provision may also be called for.
. Continued investment in district heating. District heating has increased radically in Sweden in recent years and the Government wants this trend to continue. The Government will thus offer clear financial incentives where biofuels and environmentally friendly heating will be economically advantageous. New money for climate investment programmes in all the municipalities in the country will also be significant in reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Along with high oil prices and climate change, an increasing number of countries are recognising the problem with fossil fuels. Sweden has the chance to be an international model and a successful actor in export markets for alternative solutions. But this requires conscious investments - not a reactionary policy that obstructs the transition to alternative energy sources and investments in the environment of the future. Breaking dependence on oil brings many opportunities for strengthened competitiveness, technological development and progress. The aim is to break dependence on fossil fuels by 2020. By then no home will need oil for heating. By then no motorist will be obliged to use petrol as the sole option available. By then there will always be better alternatives to oil.
Mona Sahlin
Minister for Sustainable Development
http://www.museletter.com/archive/159.html
No. 159 - July 2005
by Richard Heinberg
Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply
A paper presented at the FEASTA Conference, "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?", June 23-25, 2005, Dublin Ireland
Food is energy. And it takes energy to get food. These two facts, taken together, have always established the biological limits to the human population and always will.
The same is true for every other species: food must yield more energy to the eater than is needed in order to acquire the food. Woe to the fox who expends more energy chasing rabbits than he can get from eating the rabbits he catches. If this energy balance remains negative for too long, death results; for an entire species, the outcome is a die-off event, perhaps leading even to extinction.
Humans have become champions at developing new strategies for increasing the amount of energy - and food - they capture from the environment. The harnessing of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, the adoption of ards and plows, the deployment of irrigation networks, and the harnessing of traction animals - developments that occurred over tens of thousands of years - all served this end.
The process was gradual and time-consuming. Not only were new tools developed, but, over centuries, small inventions and tiny modifications of existing tools - from scythes to horse-collars - enabled human and animal muscle power to be leveraged more effectively.
This entire exercise took place within a framework of natural limits. The yearly input of solar radiation to the planet was always immense relative to human needs (and still is), but it was finite nevertheless, and while humans directly appropriated only a tiny proportion of this abundance the vast majority of that radiation served functions that indirectly supported human existence - giving rise to air currents by warming the surface of the planet, and maintaining the lives of countless other kinds of creatures in the oceans and on land.
The amount of available human muscle power was limited by the number of humans, who, of course, had to be fed. Draft animals (bred for their muscle-power) also entailed energy costs, as they likewise needed to eat but also had to be cared for in various ways. Therefore, even with clever refinements in tools and techniques, in crops development and animal breeding, it was inevitable that humans would reach a point of diminishing returns in their ability to continue increasing their energy harvest, and therefore the size of their population.
By the nineteenth century these limits were beginning to become apparent. Famine and hunger had long been common throughout even the wealthiest regions of the planet. But, for Europeans, the migration of surplus populations to other nations, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were gradually making those events less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was again in view.
But again crisis was narrowly averted, this time due to fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process produces 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, equaling the total amount of available nitrogen introduced annually by all natural sources combined.
Fossil fuels went on to offer still other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.
Early steam-driven tractors came into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the size and effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia from the 1920s through the '50s. In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of US cropland had to be set aside for the growing of grain to feed horses - most of which worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans.
Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after WWII, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.
In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.
At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way.
The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.
William Catton, in his classic book Overshoot, terms the trade of essential life-support commodities "scope expansion."1 Carrying capacity is always limited by whatever necessity is in least supply, as Justus von Liebig realized nearly a century-and-a-half ago. If one region can grow food but has no exploitable metal deposits, its carrying capacity is limited by the lack of metals for the production of farm tools. Another region may have metals but insufficient topsoil or rain; there, carrying capacity is limited by the lack of food. If a way can be found to make up for local scarcity by taking advantage of distant abundance (as by exporting metal ores or finished tools from region A to help with food production in region B, and then exporting food from B to A), the total carrying capacity of the two regions combined can be increased substantially. We can put this into a crude formula:
CC of A+B > (CC of A) + (CC of B)
From an ecological as well as an economic point of view, this is why people trade. But trade has historically been limited by the amount of energy that could be applied to the transport of materials. Fossil fuels temporarily but enormously expanded that limit.
The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just a three-fold leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown five-fold since dawn of industrial revolution.
Agriculture at a Crossroads
All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but, if it proves not to be, then a temporary exuberance of the human species will have been purchased by an eventual, unprecedented human die-off. So how long can the present regime be sustained? Let us briefly survey some of the current trends in global food production and how they are related to the increased use of inexpensive fossil fuels.
Arable cropland: For millennia, the total amount of arable cropland gradually increased due to the clearing of forests and brush, and the irrigation of land that would otherwise be too arid for cultivation. That amount reached a maximum within the past two decades and is now decreasing because of the salinization of irrigated soils and the relentless growth of cities, with their buildings, roads, and parking lots. Irrigation has become more widespread because of the availability of cheap energy to operate pumps, while urbanization is largely a result of cheap fuel-fed transportation and the flushing of the peasantry from the countryside as a consequence of their inability to buy or to compete with fuel-fed agricultural machinery. Roads that cover former cropland are built from oil, and the erection of buildings has been facilitated by the mechanization of construction processes and the easy transport of materials.
Topsoil: The world's existing soils were generated over thousands and millions of years at a rate averaging an inch per 500 years. The amount of soil available to farmers is now decreasing at an alarming rate, due mostly to wind and water erosion. In the US Great Plains, roughly half the quantity in place at the beginning of the last century is now gone. In Australia, after two centuries of European land-use, more than 70 percent of land has become seriously degraded.2 Erosion is largely a function of tillage, which fractures and loosens soil; thus, as the introduction of fuel-fed tractors has increased the ease of tillage, the rate of soil loss has increased dramatically.
The number of farmers as a percentage of the population: In the US at the turn of the last century, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas and farmed. Today less than two percent of Americans farm for a living. This change came primarily because fuel-fed farm machinery replaced labor, which meant that fewer farmers were needed. Hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of families that desperately wanted to farm could not continue to do so because they could not afford the new machines, or could not compete with their neighbors who had them. Another way of saying this is that economies of scale (driven by mechanization) gave an advantage to ever-larger farms. But the loss of farmers also meant a gradual loss of knowledge of how to farm and a loss of rural farming culture. Many farmers today merely follow the directions on bags of fertilizer or pesticide, and live so far from their neighbors that their children have no desire to continue the agricultural way of life.
The genetic diversity of domesticated crop varieties: This is decreasing dramatically due to the consolidation of the seed industry. Farmers on the island of Bali in Indonesia once planted 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a different microclimate; now only four varieties are grown. In 2000, Semenis, the world's largest vegetable seed corporation, eliminated 25 percent of its product line as a cost-cutting measure. This ongoing, massive genetic consolidation is also being driven by the centralization of the seed industry (the largest three field seed companies - DuPont, Monsanto, and Novartis - now account for 20 percent of the global seed trade), which is in turn consequent upon fuel-fed globalization.
Grain production per capita: A total of 2,029 million tons of grain were produced globally in 2004; this was a record in absolute numbers. But for the past two decades population has grown faster than grain production, so there is actually less available on a per-head basis. In addition, grain stocks are being drawn down: According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, "in each of the last four . . . years production fell short of consumption. The shortfalls of nearly 100 million tons in 2002 and again in 2003 were the largest on record."3 This trend suggests that the strategy of boosting food production by the use of fossil fuels is already yielding diminishing returns.
Global climate: This is being increasingly destabilized as a result of the famous greenhouse effect, resulting in problems for farmers that are relatively minor now but that are likely to grow to catastrophic proportions within the next decade or two. Global warming is now almost universally acknowledged as resulting from CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Available fresh water: In the US, 85 percent of fresh water use goes toward agricultural production, requiring the drawing down of ancient aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall, ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water, requiring ever more energy usage. By 2020, according to the Worldwatch Institute and the UN, virtually every country will face shortages of fresh water.
The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides: In the US, over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold, yet, each year a greater amount of crops is lost to pests, which are evolving immunities faster than chemists can invent new poisons. Like falling grain production per capita, this trend suggests a declining return from injecting the process of agricultural production with still more fossil fuels.
Now, let us add to this picture the imminent peak in world oil production. This will make machinery more expensive to operate, fertilizers more expensive to produce, and transportation more expensive. While the adoption of fossil fuels created a range of problems for global food production, as we have just seen, the decline in the availability of cheap oil will not immediately solve those problems; in fact, over the short term they will exacerbate them, bringing simmering crises to a boil.
That is because the scale of our dependency on fossil fuels has grown to enormous proportions.
In the US, agriculture is directly responsible for well over 10 percent of all national energy consumption. Over 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer production, 20 percent to operate machinery, 16 percent for transportation, 13 percent for irrigation, 8 percent for livestock raising, (not including the feed), and 5 percent for pesticide production. This does not include energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retailers, or cooking.
Trucks move most of the world's food, even though trucking is ten times more energy-intensive than moving food by train or barge. Refrigerated jets move a small but growing proportion of food, almost entirely to wealthy industrial nations, at 60 times the energy cost of sea transport.
Processed foods make up three-quarters of global food sales by price (though not by quantity). This adds dramatically to energy costs: for example, a one-pound box of breakfast cereal may require over 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing, while the cereal itself provides only 1,100 kilocalories of food energy.
Over all - including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, and processing, and oil and natural gas used as feedstocks for agricultural chemicals - the modern food system consumes roughly ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.4
But the single most telling gauge of our dependency is the size of the global population. Without fossil fuels, the stupendous growth in human numbers that has occurred over the past century would have been impossible. Can we continue to support so many people as the availability of cheap oil declines?
Feeding a Growing Multitude
The problems associated with the modern global food system are widely apparent, there is widespread concern over the sustainability of the enterprise, and there is growing debate over the question of how to avoid an agricultural Armageddon. Within this debate two viewpoints have clearly emerged.
The first advises further intensification of industrial food production, primarily via the genetic engineering of new crop and animal varieties. The second advocates ecological agriculture in its various forms - including organic, biodynamic, Permaculture, and Biointensive methods.
Critics of the latter contend that traditional, chemical-free forms of agriculture are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. Here is a passage by John John Emsley of University of Cambridge, from his review of Vaclav Smil's Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food:
If crops are rotated and the soil is fertilized with compost, animal manure and sewage, thereby returning as much fixed nitrogen as possible to the soil, it is just possible for a hectare of land to feed 10 people - provided they accept a mainly vegetarian diet. Although such farming is almost sustainable, it falls short of the productivity of land that is fertilized with "artificial" nitrogen; this can easily support 40 people, and on a varied diet.5
This seems unarguable on its face. However, given the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, it will be increasingly difficult to continue to supply chemical fertilizers in present quantities. Nitrogen can be synthesized using hydrogen produced from the electrolysis of water, with solar or wind power as a source of electricity. But currently no ammonia is being commercially produced this way because of the uncompetitive cost of doing so. To introduce and scale up the process will require many years and considerable investment capital.
The bioengineering of crop and animal varieties does little or nothing to solve this problem. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, the genetic engineering of complex life forms on a commercial scale appears to pose unprecedented environmental hazards, as has been amply documented by Dr. Mae Wan-Ho among many others.6 And the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.
Those arguing in favor of small-scale, ecological agriculture tend to be optimistic about its ability to support large populations. For example, the 2002 Greenpeace report, "The Real Green Revolution: Organic and Agroecological Farming in the South," while acknowledging the lack of comparative research on the subject, nevertheless notes:
In general . . . it is thought that [organic and agroecological farming] can bring significant increases in yields in comparison to conventional farming practices. Compared to "Green Revolution'"farming systems, OAA is thought to be neutral in terms of yields, although it brings other benefits, such as reducing the need for external inputs.7
Eco-agricultural advocates often contend that there is plenty of food in the world; existing instances of hunger are due to bad policy and poor distribution. With better policy and distribution, all could easily be fed. Thus, given the universally admitted harmful environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming, the choice should be simple.
Some eco-ag proponents are even more sanguine, and suggest that their methods can produce far higher yields than can mechanized, chemical-based agriculture. Experiments have indeed shown that small-scale, biodiverse gardening or farming can be considerably more productive on a per-hectare basis than monocropped megafarms.8 However, some of these studies have ignored the energy and land-productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the study plots. In any case, and there is no controversy on this point, Permaculture and Biointensive forms of horticulture are dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture. Thus the adoption of these methods will require an economic transformation of societies.
Therefore even if the nitrogen problem can be solved in principle by agro-ecological methods and/or hydrogen production from renewable energy sources, there may be a carrying-capacity bottleneck ahead in any case, simply because of the inability of societies to adapt to these very different energy and economic needs quickly enough, and also because of the burgeoning problems mentioned above (loss of fresh water resources, unstable climate, etc.). According to widely-accepted calculations, humans are presently appropriating at least 40 percent of Earth's primary biological productivity.9 It seems unlikely that we, a single species after all, can do much more than that. Even though it may not be politically correct in many circles to discuss the population problem, we must recognize that we are nearing or past fundamental natural limits, no matter which course we pursue.
Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and we are already in view of the global oil production peak, the debate over the potential productivity of chemical-gene engineered agriculture versus that of organic and agroecological farming may be relatively pointless. We must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if it does prove to be less productive.
The Example of Cuba
How we might do that is suggested by perhaps the best recent historical example of a society experiencing a fossil-fuel famine. In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their American counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The population lost 20 pounds on average and malnutrition was nearly universal, especially among young children. The Cuban GDP fell by 85 percent and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.
Cuban authorities responded by breaking up large state-owned farms, offering land to farming families, and encouraging the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.
As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine. Today the nation is changing from an industrial to an agrarian society. While energy use in Cuba is now one-twentieth of that in the US, the economy is growing at a slow but steady rate. Food production has returned to 90 percent of its pre-crisis levels.10
The Way Ahead
The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. And it must be emphasized that we are discussing a systemic transformation - we cannot just remove oil in the forms of agrochemicals from the current food system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a rapid pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.
Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations on their regional resource base. One has only to contemplate the local productivity of a place like Nevada, to appreciate the enormous challenge of continuing to feed people in such a city such as Las Vegas without easy transportation.
We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Currently, Oakland California is debating a food policy initiative that would mandate by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.11 If the example of Cuba were followed, rooftop gardens would result, as well as rooftop raising of food animals like chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs.
Localization of the food process means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.
Clearly, we must minimize chemical inputs to agriculture (direct and indirect - such as those introduced in packaging and processing).
We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains.
Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake simply to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks, and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding.
Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.
It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap grain. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.
In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might in itself be advantageous; but, given the fact that a rapid transition is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.
Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.
All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying more technological intensification - will almost certainly result in dire consequences. In that case, existing farmers would fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worrisome existing trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.
In sum, the transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a utopian proposal. It is an immense challenge and will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. But in the end it is the only rational option for averting human calamity on a scale never before seen.
Notes
1. William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980), University of Illinois Press.
2. Flannery, T. F., The Future Eaters (1994), Reed Books.
3. Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (2004), Norton & Norton, p. 4.
4. David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro, "Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy" (1994). See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Eating Fossil Fuels," .
5.www.home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/ pdf_reviews/Nature%202001.pdf
6. See, for example, Mae Wan-Ho, Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare?: Turning the Tide on the Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (2000), Continuum.
7. www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/ Live/FullReport/4526.pdf
8. See, for example, www.growbiointensive.org/biointensive/brocolli.html
9. P. M. Vitousek, et al., "Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis," Bioscience 36 (1986)
10. See, for example, Bill McKibben, "What Will You Be Eating when the Revolution Comes?", Harper's, April 2005. See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Drawing Lessons from Experience,"
11. Conversation with Randy Hayes, Sustainability Director of the City of Oakland, June 2005.
Richard Heinberg is the author of Powerdown - Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. He is a journalist, educator, editor, and lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community."
No. 159 - July 2005
by Richard Heinberg
Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply
A paper presented at the FEASTA Conference, "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?", June 23-25, 2005, Dublin Ireland
Food is energy. And it takes energy to get food. These two facts, taken together, have always established the biological limits to the human population and always will.
The same is true for every other species: food must yield more energy to the eater than is needed in order to acquire the food. Woe to the fox who expends more energy chasing rabbits than he can get from eating the rabbits he catches. If this energy balance remains negative for too long, death results; for an entire species, the outcome is a die-off event, perhaps leading even to extinction.
Humans have become champions at developing new strategies for increasing the amount of energy - and food - they capture from the environment. The harnessing of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, the adoption of ards and plows, the deployment of irrigation networks, and the harnessing of traction animals - developments that occurred over tens of thousands of years - all served this end.
The process was gradual and time-consuming. Not only were new tools developed, but, over centuries, small inventions and tiny modifications of existing tools - from scythes to horse-collars - enabled human and animal muscle power to be leveraged more effectively.
This entire exercise took place within a framework of natural limits. The yearly input of solar radiation to the planet was always immense relative to human needs (and still is), but it was finite nevertheless, and while humans directly appropriated only a tiny proportion of this abundance the vast majority of that radiation served functions that indirectly supported human existence - giving rise to air currents by warming the surface of the planet, and maintaining the lives of countless other kinds of creatures in the oceans and on land.
The amount of available human muscle power was limited by the number of humans, who, of course, had to be fed. Draft animals (bred for their muscle-power) also entailed energy costs, as they likewise needed to eat but also had to be cared for in various ways. Therefore, even with clever refinements in tools and techniques, in crops development and animal breeding, it was inevitable that humans would reach a point of diminishing returns in their ability to continue increasing their energy harvest, and therefore the size of their population.
By the nineteenth century these limits were beginning to become apparent. Famine and hunger had long been common throughout even the wealthiest regions of the planet. But, for Europeans, the migration of surplus populations to other nations, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were gradually making those events less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was again in view.
But again crisis was narrowly averted, this time due to fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process produces 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, equaling the total amount of available nitrogen introduced annually by all natural sources combined.
Fossil fuels went on to offer still other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.
Early steam-driven tractors came into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the size and effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia from the 1920s through the '50s. In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of US cropland had to be set aside for the growing of grain to feed horses - most of which worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans.
Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after WWII, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.
In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.
At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way.
The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.
William Catton, in his classic book Overshoot, terms the trade of essential life-support commodities "scope expansion."1 Carrying capacity is always limited by whatever necessity is in least supply, as Justus von Liebig realized nearly a century-and-a-half ago. If one region can grow food but has no exploitable metal deposits, its carrying capacity is limited by the lack of metals for the production of farm tools. Another region may have metals but insufficient topsoil or rain; there, carrying capacity is limited by the lack of food. If a way can be found to make up for local scarcity by taking advantage of distant abundance (as by exporting metal ores or finished tools from region A to help with food production in region B, and then exporting food from B to A), the total carrying capacity of the two regions combined can be increased substantially. We can put this into a crude formula:
CC of A+B > (CC of A) + (CC of B)
From an ecological as well as an economic point of view, this is why people trade. But trade has historically been limited by the amount of energy that could be applied to the transport of materials. Fossil fuels temporarily but enormously expanded that limit.
The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just a three-fold leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown five-fold since dawn of industrial revolution.
Agriculture at a Crossroads
All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but, if it proves not to be, then a temporary exuberance of the human species will have been purchased by an eventual, unprecedented human die-off. So how long can the present regime be sustained? Let us briefly survey some of the current trends in global food production and how they are related to the increased use of inexpensive fossil fuels.
Arable cropland: For millennia, the total amount of arable cropland gradually increased due to the clearing of forests and brush, and the irrigation of land that would otherwise be too arid for cultivation. That amount reached a maximum within the past two decades and is now decreasing because of the salinization of irrigated soils and the relentless growth of cities, with their buildings, roads, and parking lots. Irrigation has become more widespread because of the availability of cheap energy to operate pumps, while urbanization is largely a result of cheap fuel-fed transportation and the flushing of the peasantry from the countryside as a consequence of their inability to buy or to compete with fuel-fed agricultural machinery. Roads that cover former cropland are built from oil, and the erection of buildings has been facilitated by the mechanization of construction processes and the easy transport of materials.
Topsoil: The world's existing soils were generated over thousands and millions of years at a rate averaging an inch per 500 years. The amount of soil available to farmers is now decreasing at an alarming rate, due mostly to wind and water erosion. In the US Great Plains, roughly half the quantity in place at the beginning of the last century is now gone. In Australia, after two centuries of European land-use, more than 70 percent of land has become seriously degraded.2 Erosion is largely a function of tillage, which fractures and loosens soil; thus, as the introduction of fuel-fed tractors has increased the ease of tillage, the rate of soil loss has increased dramatically.
The number of farmers as a percentage of the population: In the US at the turn of the last century, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas and farmed. Today less than two percent of Americans farm for a living. This change came primarily because fuel-fed farm machinery replaced labor, which meant that fewer farmers were needed. Hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of families that desperately wanted to farm could not continue to do so because they could not afford the new machines, or could not compete with their neighbors who had them. Another way of saying this is that economies of scale (driven by mechanization) gave an advantage to ever-larger farms. But the loss of farmers also meant a gradual loss of knowledge of how to farm and a loss of rural farming culture. Many farmers today merely follow the directions on bags of fertilizer or pesticide, and live so far from their neighbors that their children have no desire to continue the agricultural way of life.
The genetic diversity of domesticated crop varieties: This is decreasing dramatically due to the consolidation of the seed industry. Farmers on the island of Bali in Indonesia once planted 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a different microclimate; now only four varieties are grown. In 2000, Semenis, the world's largest vegetable seed corporation, eliminated 25 percent of its product line as a cost-cutting measure. This ongoing, massive genetic consolidation is also being driven by the centralization of the seed industry (the largest three field seed companies - DuPont, Monsanto, and Novartis - now account for 20 percent of the global seed trade), which is in turn consequent upon fuel-fed globalization.
Grain production per capita: A total of 2,029 million tons of grain were produced globally in 2004; this was a record in absolute numbers. But for the past two decades population has grown faster than grain production, so there is actually less available on a per-head basis. In addition, grain stocks are being drawn down: According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, "in each of the last four . . . years production fell short of consumption. The shortfalls of nearly 100 million tons in 2002 and again in 2003 were the largest on record."3 This trend suggests that the strategy of boosting food production by the use of fossil fuels is already yielding diminishing returns.
Global climate: This is being increasingly destabilized as a result of the famous greenhouse effect, resulting in problems for farmers that are relatively minor now but that are likely to grow to catastrophic proportions within the next decade or two. Global warming is now almost universally acknowledged as resulting from CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Available fresh water: In the US, 85 percent of fresh water use goes toward agricultural production, requiring the drawing down of ancient aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall, ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water, requiring ever more energy usage. By 2020, according to the Worldwatch Institute and the UN, virtually every country will face shortages of fresh water.
The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides: In the US, over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold, yet, each year a greater amount of crops is lost to pests, which are evolving immunities faster than chemists can invent new poisons. Like falling grain production per capita, this trend suggests a declining return from injecting the process of agricultural production with still more fossil fuels.
Now, let us add to this picture the imminent peak in world oil production. This will make machinery more expensive to operate, fertilizers more expensive to produce, and transportation more expensive. While the adoption of fossil fuels created a range of problems for global food production, as we have just seen, the decline in the availability of cheap oil will not immediately solve those problems; in fact, over the short term they will exacerbate them, bringing simmering crises to a boil.
That is because the scale of our dependency on fossil fuels has grown to enormous proportions.
In the US, agriculture is directly responsible for well over 10 percent of all national energy consumption. Over 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer production, 20 percent to operate machinery, 16 percent for transportation, 13 percent for irrigation, 8 percent for livestock raising, (not including the feed), and 5 percent for pesticide production. This does not include energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retailers, or cooking.
Trucks move most of the world's food, even though trucking is ten times more energy-intensive than moving food by train or barge. Refrigerated jets move a small but growing proportion of food, almost entirely to wealthy industrial nations, at 60 times the energy cost of sea transport.
Processed foods make up three-quarters of global food sales by price (though not by quantity). This adds dramatically to energy costs: for example, a one-pound box of breakfast cereal may require over 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing, while the cereal itself provides only 1,100 kilocalories of food energy.
Over all - including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, and processing, and oil and natural gas used as feedstocks for agricultural chemicals - the modern food system consumes roughly ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.4
But the single most telling gauge of our dependency is the size of the global population. Without fossil fuels, the stupendous growth in human numbers that has occurred over the past century would have been impossible. Can we continue to support so many people as the availability of cheap oil declines?
Feeding a Growing Multitude
The problems associated with the modern global food system are widely apparent, there is widespread concern over the sustainability of the enterprise, and there is growing debate over the question of how to avoid an agricultural Armageddon. Within this debate two viewpoints have clearly emerged.
The first advises further intensification of industrial food production, primarily via the genetic engineering of new crop and animal varieties. The second advocates ecological agriculture in its various forms - including organic, biodynamic, Permaculture, and Biointensive methods.
Critics of the latter contend that traditional, chemical-free forms of agriculture are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. Here is a passage by John John Emsley of University of Cambridge, from his review of Vaclav Smil's Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food:
If crops are rotated and the soil is fertilized with compost, animal manure and sewage, thereby returning as much fixed nitrogen as possible to the soil, it is just possible for a hectare of land to feed 10 people - provided they accept a mainly vegetarian diet. Although such farming is almost sustainable, it falls short of the productivity of land that is fertilized with "artificial" nitrogen; this can easily support 40 people, and on a varied diet.5
This seems unarguable on its face. However, given the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, it will be increasingly difficult to continue to supply chemical fertilizers in present quantities. Nitrogen can be synthesized using hydrogen produced from the electrolysis of water, with solar or wind power as a source of electricity. But currently no ammonia is being commercially produced this way because of the uncompetitive cost of doing so. To introduce and scale up the process will require many years and considerable investment capital.
The bioengineering of crop and animal varieties does little or nothing to solve this problem. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, the genetic engineering of complex life forms on a commercial scale appears to pose unprecedented environmental hazards, as has been amply documented by Dr. Mae Wan-Ho among many others.6 And the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.
Those arguing in favor of small-scale, ecological agriculture tend to be optimistic about its ability to support large populations. For example, the 2002 Greenpeace report, "The Real Green Revolution: Organic and Agroecological Farming in the South," while acknowledging the lack of comparative research on the subject, nevertheless notes:
In general . . . it is thought that [organic and agroecological farming] can bring significant increases in yields in comparison to conventional farming practices. Compared to "Green Revolution'"farming systems, OAA is thought to be neutral in terms of yields, although it brings other benefits, such as reducing the need for external inputs.7
Eco-agricultural advocates often contend that there is plenty of food in the world; existing instances of hunger are due to bad policy and poor distribution. With better policy and distribution, all could easily be fed. Thus, given the universally admitted harmful environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming, the choice should be simple.
Some eco-ag proponents are even more sanguine, and suggest that their methods can produce far higher yields than can mechanized, chemical-based agriculture. Experiments have indeed shown that small-scale, biodiverse gardening or farming can be considerably more productive on a per-hectare basis than monocropped megafarms.8 However, some of these studies have ignored the energy and land-productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the study plots. In any case, and there is no controversy on this point, Permaculture and Biointensive forms of horticulture are dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture. Thus the adoption of these methods will require an economic transformation of societies.
Therefore even if the nitrogen problem can be solved in principle by agro-ecological methods and/or hydrogen production from renewable energy sources, there may be a carrying-capacity bottleneck ahead in any case, simply because of the inability of societies to adapt to these very different energy and economic needs quickly enough, and also because of the burgeoning problems mentioned above (loss of fresh water resources, unstable climate, etc.). According to widely-accepted calculations, humans are presently appropriating at least 40 percent of Earth's primary biological productivity.9 It seems unlikely that we, a single species after all, can do much more than that. Even though it may not be politically correct in many circles to discuss the population problem, we must recognize that we are nearing or past fundamental natural limits, no matter which course we pursue.
Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and we are already in view of the global oil production peak, the debate over the potential productivity of chemical-gene engineered agriculture versus that of organic and agroecological farming may be relatively pointless. We must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if it does prove to be less productive.
The Example of Cuba
How we might do that is suggested by perhaps the best recent historical example of a society experiencing a fossil-fuel famine. In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their American counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The population lost 20 pounds on average and malnutrition was nearly universal, especially among young children. The Cuban GDP fell by 85 percent and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.
Cuban authorities responded by breaking up large state-owned farms, offering land to farming families, and encouraging the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.
As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine. Today the nation is changing from an industrial to an agrarian society. While energy use in Cuba is now one-twentieth of that in the US, the economy is growing at a slow but steady rate. Food production has returned to 90 percent of its pre-crisis levels.10
The Way Ahead
The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. And it must be emphasized that we are discussing a systemic transformation - we cannot just remove oil in the forms of agrochemicals from the current food system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a rapid pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.
Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations on their regional resource base. One has only to contemplate the local productivity of a place like Nevada, to appreciate the enormous challenge of continuing to feed people in such a city such as Las Vegas without easy transportation.
We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Currently, Oakland California is debating a food policy initiative that would mandate by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.11 If the example of Cuba were followed, rooftop gardens would result, as well as rooftop raising of food animals like chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs.
Localization of the food process means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.
Clearly, we must minimize chemical inputs to agriculture (direct and indirect - such as those introduced in packaging and processing).
We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains.
Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake simply to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks, and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding.
Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.
It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap grain. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.
In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might in itself be advantageous; but, given the fact that a rapid transition is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.
Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.
All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying more technological intensification - will almost certainly result in dire consequences. In that case, existing farmers would fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worrisome existing trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.
In sum, the transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a utopian proposal. It is an immense challenge and will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. But in the end it is the only rational option for averting human calamity on a scale never before seen.
Notes
1. William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980), University of Illinois Press.
2. Flannery, T. F., The Future Eaters (1994), Reed Books.
3. Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (2004), Norton & Norton, p. 4.
4. David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro, "Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy" (1994). See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Eating Fossil Fuels," .
5.www.home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/ pdf_reviews/Nature%202001.pdf
6. See, for example, Mae Wan-Ho, Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare?: Turning the Tide on the Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (2000), Continuum.
7. www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/ Live/FullReport/4526.pdf
8. See, for example, www.growbiointensive.org/biointensive/brocolli.html
9. P. M. Vitousek, et al., "Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis," Bioscience 36 (1986)
10. See, for example, Bill McKibben, "What Will You Be Eating when the Revolution Comes?", Harper's, April 2005. See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Drawing Lessons from Experience,"
11. Conversation with Randy Hayes, Sustainability Director of the City of Oakland, June 2005.
Richard Heinberg is the author of Powerdown - Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. He is a journalist, educator, editor, and lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community."
QUOTE(papabear @ Nov 4 2005, 08:15 AM) [snapback]556954[/snapback]
Sorry, now you're jumping to conclusions--did I say I have not done any substantial research? No. I implied I wouldn't care to do any more. Given that you have jumped to unwarranted conclusions (and your attachment to one particular author), there probably isn't any point in responding. Nonetheless, evolution theory is not the same as 'determinism' with regards to the main propositions which are used to characterize and identify each, but it can certainly very much imply it, when both are built upon materialistic and naturalistic assumptions, and deny the difference between intellectual knowledge and sense knowledge.
Being poorly-written does not exclude being poorly-reasoned or poorly-argued.
The coming oil crisis is about far more than just oil and gas. It is about energy and energetic limits to growth. It is about people; overpopulation, overconsumption, war, destruction of the environment, and destruction of other species. The study of oil production and depletion is worthless in and of itself. It is only relevant as it relates to the plight of homo sapiens. So yes, it is relevant that our entire economic system ignores energetic limits to growth and teaches a fundamental misunderstanding of natural resources, and no, this does not belong in another thread.
QUOTE(papabear @ Nov 4 2005, 08:15 AM) [snapback]556954[/snapback]
My original point was to point out his lack of understanding of the basics of logic and what is required for a refutation of a conclusion, and to take issue with his understanding of what is needed to render something 'scientific'; I was not addressing his characterization of the method of economics as such.
The fact that you're not addressing the issue (the fundamental flaws in neoclassical economic theory) is the problem.
QUOTE(papabear @ Nov 4 2005, 08:15 AM) [snapback]556954[/snapback]
If you want to make this critique of the method, cite an authoritative source that makes this claim about the method employed in neoclassical economic theory, or show it being used by the leading thinkers as the primary method. Otherwise not only is it a bad generalization, but a mischaracterization of said economic theory.
"Should we be taking steps to limit the use of these most precious stocks of society's capital so that they will still be available for our grandchildren? … Economists ask, Would future generations benefit more from larger stocks of natural capital such as oil, gas, and coal or from more produced capital such as additional scientists, better laboratories, and libraries linked together by information superhighways? … in the long run, oil and gas are not essential."
-- Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus
Source: http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
Excerpted from "A Means of Control" by Jay Hanson (http://dieoff.org/page185.htm):
Economists are trained to believe there are no "limits to growth". Because they abstract everything to money, even leading economists like William Nordhaus can't imagine an economy that is physically limited by energy. The best Nordhaus can do is to model increasing energy prices:
"The estimate is based on an energy model I constructed several years ago. To estimate the drag on economic growth, I calculated the difference between the economic growth rate with actual energy supplies versus a case in which current (low cost) fuels were available in infinite quantities. In the first case, energy prices would be rising, while in the second case of superabundence, relative energy prices would be constant. This study indicated that the resource-limited case would lower net output in the middle of the next century by about 10 percent."
Although Nordhaus thinks he is modeling "energy", he is actually modeling "energy prices". There is a big difference!
QUOTE(reveille91 @ Nov 5 2005, 12:14 PM) [snapback]570688[/snapback]
The coming oil crisis is about far more than just oil and gas. It is about energy and energetic limits to growth. It is about people; overpopulation, overconsumption, war, destruction of the environment, and destruction of other species. The study of oil production and depletion is worthless in and of itself. It is only relevant as it relates to the plight of homo sapiens. So yes, it is relevant that our entire economic system ignores energetic limits to growth and teaches a fundamental misunderstanding of natural resources, and no, this does not belong in another thread.
Sorry, you're not the mod here. And yes, a discussion of economic theory and its limitations or falsehoods belongs elsewhere. If you want to debate what the supposed limits are to population growth and so on, insofar as it impacts the use of resources, that might belong here. End of discussion.
QUOTE
The fact that you're not addressing the issue (the fundamental flaws in neoclassical economic theory) is the problem.
"Should we be taking steps to limit the use of these most precious stocks of society's capital so that they will still be available for our grandchildren? … Economists ask, Would future generations benefit more from larger stocks of natural capital such as oil, gas, and coal or from more produced capital such as additional scientists, better laboratories, and libraries linked together by information superhighways? … in the long run, oil and gas are not essential."
-- Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus
Source: http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
Excerpted from "A Means of Control" by Jay Hanson (http://dieoff.org/page185.htm):
Economists are trained to believe there are no "limits to growth". Because they abstract everything to money, even leading economists like William Nordhaus can't imagine an economy that is physically limited by energy. The best Nordhaus can do is to model increasing energy prices:
"The estimate is based on an energy model I constructed several years ago. To estimate the drag on economic growth, I calculated the difference between the economic growth rate with actual energy supplies versus a case in which current (low cost) fuels were available in infinite quantities. In the first case, energy prices would be rising, while in the second case of superabundence, relative energy prices would be constant. This study indicated that the resource-limited case would lower net output in the middle of the next century by about 10 percent."
"Should we be taking steps to limit the use of these most precious stocks of society's capital so that they will still be available for our grandchildren? … Economists ask, Would future generations benefit more from larger stocks of natural capital such as oil, gas, and coal or from more produced capital such as additional scientists, better laboratories, and libraries linked together by information superhighways? … in the long run, oil and gas are not essential."
-- Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus
Source: http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
Excerpted from "A Means of Control" by Jay Hanson (http://dieoff.org/page185.htm):
Economists are trained to believe there are no "limits to growth". Because they abstract everything to money, even leading economists like William Nordhaus can't imagine an economy that is physically limited by energy. The best Nordhaus can do is to model increasing energy prices:
"The estimate is based on an energy model I constructed several years ago. To estimate the drag on economic growth, I calculated the difference between the economic growth rate with actual energy supplies versus a case in which current (low cost) fuels were available in infinite quantities. In the first case, energy prices would be rising, while in the second case of superabundence, relative energy prices would be constant. This study indicated that the resource-limited case would lower net output in the middle of the next century by about 10 percent."
This is a non-response to the point I made in response to your critique of the method being used by economists--
QUOTE
If you want to make this critique of the method, cite an authoritative source that makes this claim about the method employed in neoclassical economic theory, or show it being used by the leading thinkers as the primary method. Otherwise not only is it a bad generalization, but a mischaracterization of said economic theory.
If you want to show the method is nothing more than fallacious reasoning, support it with citations from authoritative sources. Here you have done nothing but to show that certain assumptions/premises are at work which are false. This I have already agreed to.
However, at this point I am terminating this digression. Feel free to start a new thread if you want to talk about economics.
The original Hirsch report:
http://www.netl.doe.gov/otiic/World_Oil_Is...eaking_NETL.pdf
or
http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/T...t_Proj_Cens.pdf
(intro to the report: http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/441)
Other stuff by Hirsch
"The Peaking of World Oil Production," http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/pdf/hirsch_oil_peaking.pdf
“The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production,” http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/pdf/hirsch_world_oil_production.pdf
http://www.netl.doe.gov/otiic/World_Oil_Is...eaking_NETL.pdf
or
http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/T...t_Proj_Cens.pdf
(intro to the report: http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/441)
Other stuff by Hirsch
"The Peaking of World Oil Production," http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/pdf/hirsch_oil_peaking.pdf
“The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production,” http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/pdf/hirsch_world_oil_production.pdf
http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display...3/42c0db19e37f4
Toward An Ignorance-Based World View (LR81)
Wes Jackson
Presented October 3, 2004
This is adapted from a talk at The Land Institute's 2004 Prairie Festival, published in The Land Report, Spring 2005, Number 81, Pages 14-16 and reprinted by permission.
At The Land Institute several of us get a great deal of joy from looking for the relatedness of the seemingly unrelated. Here is an example: In 1859 Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published. The same year Colonel Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania. And John Brown was hanged at Harper's Ferry. Now let's connect the dots.
Darwin's idea of evolution through natural selection was sponsored by coal. If it hadn't been for coal and the infrastructure that gave slack to this country gentleman, the idea would have had to wait. Its refinement was sponsored further by coal, and by oil and natural gas. The important ideas in ecology really took off after 1859.
What about John Brown? Coal again. The industrial North could afford to be pretty self-righteous about opposing slavery in the much more sun-powered plantation South. Before the fossil carbon era, slavery of some form or another was widespread. The slack from energy-rich carbon pools is what has made civilization possible. First it was agriculture and soil carbon, later the cutting of forests. The king of Tyre struck a deal with Solomon for the cedars of Lebanon to build the temple. The Greeks had already done in thousands of acres of their trees. By the time of Charlemagne the onslaught against Europe's forests was well under way. Carbon pools exploited. So it went, and so it goes today. Our fossil fuel epoch — some 250 years old — is dependent on highly dense and vast pools of coal, oil and natural gas.
We tend to think that the ideas of humanity arise rather intrinsically. We seldom pay attention to their sponsorship, to the slack made available by our species skating from one energy-rich carbon pool to another.
Why is this a prologue to what I have to say about ignorance? Simply this: Before agriculture, long before the industrial revolution, we could afford to be very ignorant about what supported us. We didn't need to know about nutrient cycling and energy flow within the ecosystems of the ecosphere. We didn't need to know that the earth goes around the sun — and still don't.
Do we really need to know Einstein's equations? How much do we really need Newton's calculus? A harder question. As creatures of the upper Paleolithic we certainly didn't need Newton's calculus back then. We don't need to know about plate tectonics now, though I'm glad to know about plate tectonics. In fact, I'm glad to know what's come in from the Hubble telescope.
But as a consequence of scientific and technological tampering, we have created ignorance of things we now do need to know.
This is part of what led to a conference we held in 2004 called "Toward an Ignorance-based Worldview." The inspiration started with a letter Wendell Berry wrote to me in 1982. Here are parts of it:
I want to try to complete the thought about "randomness" that I was working on when we talked the other day. The Hans Jenny paragraph that started me off is the last on page 21 of The Soil Resource:
"Raindrops that pass in random fashion through an imaginary plain above the forest canopy are intercepted by leaves and twigs and channeled into distinctive vert space patterns of through-drip, crown-drip and stem flow. The soil surface, as receiver, transmits the "rain message" downward, but as the subsoils lack a power source to mold a flow design, the water tends to leave the ecosystem as it entered it, in randomized fashion."
My question is: Does "random" in this (or any) context describe a verifiable condition or a limit of perception?
My answer is: It describes a limit of perception. This is, of course, not a scientist's answer, but it may be that anybody's answer would be unscientific. My answer is based on the belief that pattern is verifiable by limited information, whereas the information required to verify randomness is unlimited. As I think you said when we talked, what is perceived as random within a given limit may be seen as a part of a pattern within a wider limit.
If this is so, then Dr. Jenny, for accuracy's sake, should have said that rainwater moves from mystery through pattern back into mystery.
To call the unknown "random" is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. (A result that our friend Dr. Jenny, of course, did not propose and would not condone.)
To call the unknown by its right name, "mystery," is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns.
This respecting of mystery obviously has something or other to do with religion, and we moderns have defended ourselves against it by turning it over to religion specialists, who take advantage of our indifference by claiming to know a lot about it.
What impresses me about it, however, is the insistent practicality implicit in it. If we are up against mystery, then we dare act only on the most modest assumptions. The modern scientific program has held that we must act on the basis of knowledge, which, because its effects are so manifestly large, we have assumed to be ample. But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance. Acting on the basis of ignorance, paradoxically, requires one to know things, remember things — for instance, that failure is possible, that error is possible, that second chances are desirable (so don't risk everything on the first chance), and so on.
What I think you and I and a few others are working on is a definition of agriculture as up against mystery and ignorance-based. I think we think that this is its necessary definition, just as I think we think that several kinds of ruin are the necessary result of an agriculture defined as knowledge-based and up against randomness. Such an agriculture conforms exactly to what the ancient program, or programs, understood as evil or hubris. Both the Greeks and the Hebrews told us to watch out for humans who assume that they make all the patterns.
How'd you like to receive a letter like that? It took 22 years to digest it and to finally put together a conference.
As you can imagine, when we announced "Toward an Ignorance-based Worldview," it was a source of great mirth.
To get ready for this conference, I sent out sort of an invitation. Here's what it said: "Imagine an ignorance-based science and technology in which practitioners would be ever conscious that we are billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable and always will be."
Now, if you know that knowledge is not adequate to run the world, what do you do? What do you do if you recognize that you are up against ignorance?
You ask before launching a scientific or technological venture: How many people will be involved? At what level of culture? Will we be able to back out? Scientists, technologists and policy-makers would be assiduous students of exits.
I have spent a fair amount of my life studying exits, starting with classrooms. How are we going to get out of here in case something goes wrong? Such students of exits would want to know not only how to exit, but also how to not leave irrevocable damage.
Knowledge seeking would not stop, but would, as Wendell Berry has said, "force us to remember things, cause us to hope for second chances and provide an incentive to keep the scale small." Acknowledging ignorance might be the secular mind's only way to humility.
Harvard's Dick Levins, a sort of a mathematical modeler ecologist, wrote, "Structured ignorance is a prerequisite for knowledge." Also, "Ignorance is not passive. It requires energy to sustain it."
By embracing an ignorance-based worldview, at least we go with our long suit. Knowledge and insight accumulate fastest in the minds of those who hold an ignorance-based worldview. Having studied the exits, their imaginations are less narrow. Darting eyes have the potential to see more.
At the conference, Wendell said, "Our purpose here is to worry about the predominance of the supposition in a time of great technological power that humans either know enough already or can learn enough soon enough to foresee and forestall any bad consequences." He said this supposition is typified by Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins' assertion in an open letter to Prince Charles: "Our brains are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences."
Wendell said, "When we consider how often and how recently our most advanced experts have been wrong about the future and how often the future has shown up sooner than expected with bad news about our past, Mr. Dawkins' assessment of our ability to know is revealed as a superstition of the most primitive sort."
Several people brought to the conference something Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a news briefing: "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
Believe it or not, some thought Mr. Rumsfeld was really right on. Mario Rizzo, an author of The Economics of Time and Ignorance, said Rumsfeld's distinctions are important: "I know that I do not know Rumsfeld's home telephone number. On the other hand, I may arrive in a foreign country and be completely unaware that there are books or directories available that will tell me where to find other English speakers." So as a result of this uncertainty the poor tourist doesn't know where to search for those English speakers or how long it's worthwhile to keep searching. You can see that soon he'll be wondering how to find the restroom — and studying exits.
The conference then took up a Harvard Business Review piece called "Wanted: A Chief Ignorance Officer." It said that ignorance management is arguably a more important skill than knowledge management.
What interests me the most about ignorance is the kind that The Land Institute is willing to embrace as we think about building an agriculture based on the way a natural ecosystem works.
I think I can help you understand by reading from an Aldo Leopold essay called "The Last Stand." It describes a forest in the Alps that had produced quality timber since the 1600s by selective harvesting. A contiguous forest of the same kind of timber was clear-cut in the 1600s and never recovered, despite intensive care. Here's what Leopold says:
Despite this rigid protection, the old slashing now produces only mediocre pine, while the unslashed portion grows the finest cabinet oak in the world; one of those oaks fetches a higher price than a whole acre of the old slashings. On the old slashings the litter accumulates without rotting, stumps and limbs disappear slowly, natural reproduction is slow. On the unslashed portion litter disappears as it falls, stumps and limbs rot at once, natural reproduction is automatic. Foresters attribute the inferior performance of the old slashing to its depleted microflora, meaning that underground community of bacteria, molds, fungi, insects and burrowing mammals which constitute half the environment of a tree.
The existence of the term microflora implies, to the layman, that science knows all the citizens of the underground community, and is able to push them around at will. As a matter of fact, science knows little more than that the community exists, and that it is important. In a few simple communities like alfalfa, science knows how to add certain bacteria to make the plants grow. In a complex forest, science knows only that it is best to let well enough alone.
What we are acknowledging here is the integration of nature's life forms over a long evolutionary history, and that the entropy law has forced the efficiencies inherent to those natural integrities. We can't keep track of this. We have not even named most of the fungi or bacteria. To plow this information-rich world and simplify it and then treat it as though there's only phosphorus, potassium, manganese, iron, calcium and so on, and then presume you can just keep on, is acting as though knowledge is adequate to run that world.
We live in a very exciting time, but we need a different way of thinking. That means we need a kind of house arrest on the destructively dominating thoughts from the architects of the Enlightenment and beyond, to the Greek and Hebrew dualists. For example, in the early 17th century Rene Descartes' Meditations on the First Philosophy said that we can remake the world in the interests of humanity with no discussion of negative consequences. Imagine if in the 21st century we could see the end of the idea that knowledge is adequate to run the world. This would cause us to feature questions that go beyond the available answers. We would learn patience, and we would enjoy a kind of yeastiness for thought. I think this also would do the absolutely necessary job of driving knowledge out of its categories.
I have an example. Several years ago in the New York Review of Books, Harvard zoologist Dick Lewinton told about how he and Carl Sagan visited a church related college to take the evolutionist view in debate with a creationist. The creationist had a doctorate in zoology from the University of Texas — not a creationist department, but he was teaching in the church school. Afterward they asked for a show of hands, and found that the creationist won overwhelmingly. Lewinton wrote that in the cab going back to the airport, Sagan said this was obviously a problem of education. Lewinton said it was about cultural and regional history. Then he told how Sagan spent his life trying to change things through education.
I've been around a fair number of universities, and I've witnessed friends and the children of friends from creationist homes go to college and graduate, some of them cum laude, and they're still creationists. Cultural and regional history overrode education.
I give this example because here is a question that goes beyond the available answers: Why? If cultural and regional history overrides educational power, what do we do? If education isn't good enough, what do educators do?
Well, maybe it's time to start with a certain amount of humility and say we're fundamentally ignorant about the way minds change. Acknowledging that we are fundamentally ignorant, we now can ask a question that goes beyond the available answers, and that's going to force knowledge out of its categories.
We would be fundamentally respectful of our original relationship with the universe. There might even be a more joyful participation in our engagement with the world.
Toward An Ignorance-Based World View (LR81)
Wes Jackson
Presented October 3, 2004
This is adapted from a talk at The Land Institute's 2004 Prairie Festival, published in The Land Report, Spring 2005, Number 81, Pages 14-16 and reprinted by permission.
At The Land Institute several of us get a great deal of joy from looking for the relatedness of the seemingly unrelated. Here is an example: In 1859 Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published. The same year Colonel Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania. And John Brown was hanged at Harper's Ferry. Now let's connect the dots.
Darwin's idea of evolution through natural selection was sponsored by coal. If it hadn't been for coal and the infrastructure that gave slack to this country gentleman, the idea would have had to wait. Its refinement was sponsored further by coal, and by oil and natural gas. The important ideas in ecology really took off after 1859.
What about John Brown? Coal again. The industrial North could afford to be pretty self-righteous about opposing slavery in the much more sun-powered plantation South. Before the fossil carbon era, slavery of some form or another was widespread. The slack from energy-rich carbon pools is what has made civilization possible. First it was agriculture and soil carbon, later the cutting of forests. The king of Tyre struck a deal with Solomon for the cedars of Lebanon to build the temple. The Greeks had already done in thousands of acres of their trees. By the time of Charlemagne the onslaught against Europe's forests was well under way. Carbon pools exploited. So it went, and so it goes today. Our fossil fuel epoch — some 250 years old — is dependent on highly dense and vast pools of coal, oil and natural gas.
We tend to think that the ideas of humanity arise rather intrinsically. We seldom pay attention to their sponsorship, to the slack made available by our species skating from one energy-rich carbon pool to another.
Why is this a prologue to what I have to say about ignorance? Simply this: Before agriculture, long before the industrial revolution, we could afford to be very ignorant about what supported us. We didn't need to know about nutrient cycling and energy flow within the ecosystems of the ecosphere. We didn't need to know that the earth goes around the sun — and still don't.
Do we really need to know Einstein's equations? How much do we really need Newton's calculus? A harder question. As creatures of the upper Paleolithic we certainly didn't need Newton's calculus back then. We don't need to know about plate tectonics now, though I'm glad to know about plate tectonics. In fact, I'm glad to know what's come in from the Hubble telescope.
But as a consequence of scientific and technological tampering, we have created ignorance of things we now do need to know.
This is part of what led to a conference we held in 2004 called "Toward an Ignorance-based Worldview." The inspiration started with a letter Wendell Berry wrote to me in 1982. Here are parts of it:
I want to try to complete the thought about "randomness" that I was working on when we talked the other day. The Hans Jenny paragraph that started me off is the last on page 21 of The Soil Resource:
"Raindrops that pass in random fashion through an imaginary plain above the forest canopy are intercepted by leaves and twigs and channeled into distinctive vert space patterns of through-drip, crown-drip and stem flow. The soil surface, as receiver, transmits the "rain message" downward, but as the subsoils lack a power source to mold a flow design, the water tends to leave the ecosystem as it entered it, in randomized fashion."
My question is: Does "random" in this (or any) context describe a verifiable condition or a limit of perception?
My answer is: It describes a limit of perception. This is, of course, not a scientist's answer, but it may be that anybody's answer would be unscientific. My answer is based on the belief that pattern is verifiable by limited information, whereas the information required to verify randomness is unlimited. As I think you said when we talked, what is perceived as random within a given limit may be seen as a part of a pattern within a wider limit.
If this is so, then Dr. Jenny, for accuracy's sake, should have said that rainwater moves from mystery through pattern back into mystery.
To call the unknown "random" is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. (A result that our friend Dr. Jenny, of course, did not propose and would not condone.)
To call the unknown by its right name, "mystery," is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns.
This respecting of mystery obviously has something or other to do with religion, and we moderns have defended ourselves against it by turning it over to religion specialists, who take advantage of our indifference by claiming to know a lot about it.
What impresses me about it, however, is the insistent practicality implicit in it. If we are up against mystery, then we dare act only on the most modest assumptions. The modern scientific program has held that we must act on the basis of knowledge, which, because its effects are so manifestly large, we have assumed to be ample. But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance. Acting on the basis of ignorance, paradoxically, requires one to know things, remember things — for instance, that failure is possible, that error is possible, that second chances are desirable (so don't risk everything on the first chance), and so on.
What I think you and I and a few others are working on is a definition of agriculture as up against mystery and ignorance-based. I think we think that this is its necessary definition, just as I think we think that several kinds of ruin are the necessary result of an agriculture defined as knowledge-based and up against randomness. Such an agriculture conforms exactly to what the ancient program, or programs, understood as evil or hubris. Both the Greeks and the Hebrews told us to watch out for humans who assume that they make all the patterns.
How'd you like to receive a letter like that? It took 22 years to digest it and to finally put together a conference.
As you can imagine, when we announced "Toward an Ignorance-based Worldview," it was a source of great mirth.
To get ready for this conference, I sent out sort of an invitation. Here's what it said: "Imagine an ignorance-based science and technology in which practitioners would be ever conscious that we are billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable and always will be."
Now, if you know that knowledge is not adequate to run the world, what do you do? What do you do if you recognize that you are up against ignorance?
You ask before launching a scientific or technological venture: How many people will be involved? At what level of culture? Will we be able to back out? Scientists, technologists and policy-makers would be assiduous students of exits.
I have spent a fair amount of my life studying exits, starting with classrooms. How are we going to get out of here in case something goes wrong? Such students of exits would want to know not only how to exit, but also how to not leave irrevocable damage.
Knowledge seeking would not stop, but would, as Wendell Berry has said, "force us to remember things, cause us to hope for second chances and provide an incentive to keep the scale small." Acknowledging ignorance might be the secular mind's only way to humility.
Harvard's Dick Levins, a sort of a mathematical modeler ecologist, wrote, "Structured ignorance is a prerequisite for knowledge." Also, "Ignorance is not passive. It requires energy to sustain it."
By embracing an ignorance-based worldview, at least we go with our long suit. Knowledge and insight accumulate fastest in the minds of those who hold an ignorance-based worldview. Having studied the exits, their imaginations are less narrow. Darting eyes have the potential to see more.
At the conference, Wendell said, "Our purpose here is to worry about the predominance of the supposition in a time of great technological power that humans either know enough already or can learn enough soon enough to foresee and forestall any bad consequences." He said this supposition is typified by Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins' assertion in an open letter to Prince Charles: "Our brains are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences."
Wendell said, "When we consider how often and how recently our most advanced experts have been wrong about the future and how often the future has shown up sooner than expected with bad news about our past, Mr. Dawkins' assessment of our ability to know is revealed as a superstition of the most primitive sort."
Several people brought to the conference something Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a news briefing: "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
Believe it or not, some thought Mr. Rumsfeld was really right on. Mario Rizzo, an author of The Economics of Time and Ignorance, said Rumsfeld's distinctions are important: "I know that I do not know Rumsfeld's home telephone number. On the other hand, I may arrive in a foreign country and be completely unaware that there are books or directories available that will tell me where to find other English speakers." So as a result of this uncertainty the poor tourist doesn't know where to search for those English speakers or how long it's worthwhile to keep searching. You can see that soon he'll be wondering how to find the restroom — and studying exits.
The conference then took up a Harvard Business Review piece called "Wanted: A Chief Ignorance Officer." It said that ignorance management is arguably a more important skill than knowledge management.
What interests me the most about ignorance is the kind that The Land Institute is willing to embrace as we think about building an agriculture based on the way a natural ecosystem works.
I think I can help you understand by reading from an Aldo Leopold essay called "The Last Stand." It describes a forest in the Alps that had produced quality timber since the 1600s by selective harvesting. A contiguous forest of the same kind of timber was clear-cut in the 1600s and never recovered, despite intensive care. Here's what Leopold says:
Despite this rigid protection, the old slashing now produces only mediocre pine, while the unslashed portion grows the finest cabinet oak in the world; one of those oaks fetches a higher price than a whole acre of the old slashings. On the old slashings the litter accumulates without rotting, stumps and limbs disappear slowly, natural reproduction is slow. On the unslashed portion litter disappears as it falls, stumps and limbs rot at once, natural reproduction is automatic. Foresters attribute the inferior performance of the old slashing to its depleted microflora, meaning that underground community of bacteria, molds, fungi, insects and burrowing mammals which constitute half the environment of a tree.
The existence of the term microflora implies, to the layman, that science knows all the citizens of the underground community, and is able to push them around at will. As a matter of fact, science knows little more than that the community exists, and that it is important. In a few simple communities like alfalfa, science knows how to add certain bacteria to make the plants grow. In a complex forest, science knows only that it is best to let well enough alone.
What we are acknowledging here is the integration of nature's life forms over a long evolutionary history, and that the entropy law has forced the efficiencies inherent to those natural integrities. We can't keep track of this. We have not even named most of the fungi or bacteria. To plow this information-rich world and simplify it and then treat it as though there's only phosphorus, potassium, manganese, iron, calcium and so on, and then presume you can just keep on, is acting as though knowledge is adequate to run that world.
We live in a very exciting time, but we need a different way of thinking. That means we need a kind of house arrest on the destructively dominating thoughts from the architects of the Enlightenment and beyond, to the Greek and Hebrew dualists. For example, in the early 17th century Rene Descartes' Meditations on the First Philosophy said that we can remake the world in the interests of humanity with no discussion of negative consequences. Imagine if in the 21st century we could see the end of the idea that knowledge is adequate to run the world. This would cause us to feature questions that go beyond the available answers. We would learn patience, and we would enjoy a kind of yeastiness for thought. I think this also would do the absolutely necessary job of driving knowledge out of its categories.
I have an example. Several years ago in the New York Review of Books, Harvard zoologist Dick Lewinton told about how he and Carl Sagan visited a church related college to take the evolutionist view in debate with a creationist. The creationist had a doctorate in zoology from the University of Texas — not a creationist department, but he was teaching in the church school. Afterward they asked for a show of hands, and found that the creationist won overwhelmingly. Lewinton wrote that in the cab going back to the airport, Sagan said this was obviously a problem of education. Lewinton said it was about cultural and regional history. Then he told how Sagan spent his life trying to change things through education.
I've been around a fair number of universities, and I've witnessed friends and the children of friends from creationist homes go to college and graduate, some of them cum laude, and they're still creationists. Cultural and regional history overrode education.
I give this example because here is a question that goes beyond the available answers: Why? If cultural and regional history overrides educational power, what do we do? If education isn't good enough, what do educators do?
Well, maybe it's time to start with a certain amount of humility and say we're fundamentally ignorant about the way minds change. Acknowledging that we are fundamentally ignorant, we now can ask a question that goes beyond the available answers, and that's going to force knowledge out of its categories.
We would be fundamentally respectful of our original relationship with the universe. There might even be a more joyful participation in our engagement with the world.
http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display...03/28/3accb0712
Energy in Agriculture and Society: Insights from the Sunshine Farm
Marty Bender
Biodiesel tractor at the Sunshine Farm.
Released March 28, 2001
Accompanying Tables 1-3 found here are available in downloadable PDF format. Click here and the PDF will automatically begin downloading. To read a PDF file you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer—it's available for free from Adobe Systems. Links to the tables also appear in text and each open a pop-up window to view individually.
Farming, in industrial countries, has generally become an industry itself. As such, it has national energy demands comparable with other industries and thus competes for energy supplies, particularly petroleum. Annual global oil production has been rising for many years, but an important economic transition period for all industries will arrive when annual production peaks, then declines as discovery drops off and the remaining oil becomes harder to extract. That time is not far off, even by optimistic estimates. For example, a recent assessment by the US Geological Survey increased its previous global estimate of remaining oil, both discovered and undiscovered, by an unprecedented 37 percent.1 During the century ending in 1990, the world consumed an amount of oil equal to this increase, 625 billion barrels of oil. In stark contrast to the 100 years, using current annual production as a guide, 27 billion barrels, the increase will last little more than 25 years during the early part of the twenty-first century. Since oil production will be approximately symmetric on both sides of the peak, the increase will delay the peak of annual global oil production by half this period, or 12 years.2 Added onto current estimates of the peak year, the 12-year delay would place the peak only one human generation from now, or about three decades. The highly touted Caspian Sea oilfields in the former Soviet Union would postpone the peak only a year.
The importance of national food security dictates that we should reduce farming's dependence on fossil fuels. As part of The Land Institute's mission to use nature as measure for developing sustainable agriculture and culture, the Sunshine Farm Project has been exploring the possibilities of farming without fossil fuels, fertilizers or pesticides. We have been conducting energy accounting on the Sunshine Farm to assess the extent to which modern farms can run, essentially, on sunlight. As late as the 1950s, many farms ran mostly on sunlight, relying on draft horses and using crop rotations for soil fertility instead of commercial fertilizers. Nowadays however, agriculture uses far more energy nowadays in the form of farm inputs, while at the same time, there are current renewable energy technologies that were not available in traditional farming. Energy accounting reveals patterns of energy consumption that can be examined to determine which changes in farming practices would save energy. For example, the use of animal manure as a source of nitrogen requires less energy than that required to manufacture commercial fertilizer.
The accounting on the Sunshine Farm is done by determining the weight of everything going into and out of the farm and by entering this information into an accounting framework that we established for our computer database. The weights of inputs are converted into values of energy by computer calculations based on embodied energy factors (the energy used in industry to mine, process and fabricate raw materials and ores into farm inputs) from the professional literature. Likewise, the literature is used to provide caloric energy factors for converting our marketed farm outputs into calories, like in our daily diet.
Our energy accounting shows that the Sunshine Farm could supply about 40 percent of its embodied energy needs through animal feed, electricity, and biodiesel fuel for the tractor and vehicles. That is, a 4.5-kilowatt photovoltaic array on the Sunshine Farm has been converting sunlight into electricity required for the workshop tools, electric fencing, water pumping, and chick brooding. About one-fourth of the cropland on the Sunshine Farm has been devoted to soybeans and sunflowers for biodiesel fuel that could be commercially produced to meet all our field operations and off-farm transportation. Both the array and biodiesel are renewable energy; they produce more energy than they consume.3 Almost three-fourths of the animal feed consumed on the Sunshine Farm has been supplied by the oats, grain sorghum and alfalfa produced on the farm for the draft horses, beef cattle and poultry. The remaining 60 percent of the farm's embodied energy needs is imported onto the farm through purchased inputs including amortized capital, such as supplies, commercial feed and seed, buildings, fences, water lines, tractors, vehicles, equipment, and the photovoltaic array.
These results do not include the lifestyle energy support for a farm family, a large unknown ranging from the austere Amish to typically affluent Americans, although we do keep track of human labor on the Sunshine Farm. Nor do they include some prorated part of the food processing, marketing, distribution and preparation sectors that nationally consume more energy than farming.4 Our focus is to determine how much energy farms can supply for their inputs. Family support and commercial sectors are not unique to agriculture but are common to all industrial activity; hence, they are social considerations beyond the scope of our project.
The purpose of the renewable energy technologies in our project is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels but not our dependence on local energy systems. Virtually all farms are part of the local community in many ways, energy being no exception. For example, from our exploration of biodiesel production, we have learned that biodiesel fuel with quality satisfactory to engine manufacturers can be produced by farmers' co-operatives but not by individual farms producing various, unregulated home-brews of biodiesel fuel. Also, although our photovoltaic array has a bank of batteries and could stand alone, it is connected to the electric grid of the local power company to sell excess electricity.
Just as important as the monetary income from the sale is the fact that the excess electricity is now on the grid for use by the local community. In other words, in an all-solar future, given certain limits of energy production by solar technologies compared to current conventional technologies (see below), it will likely be considered uncivic to own a personal electrical technology located near a grid but not connected to it. This would prevent the use of the technology's potential excess electricity by other people, and in effect, would be squandering some of the hard-won, solar-based energy embodied in the manufacture of that technology. Since any solar technology exposed to the weather will slowly deteriorate whether or not it is used, there would be little to be gained from the selfish idea of operating a personal solar technology only when the owner needs its energy. The obligation to sell excess electricity would be quite contrary to the current popular notion of achieving energy self-sufficiency in order to disconnect oneself from the grid. This notion is made possible by the present industrial economy with its abundance of fossil fuels and mineral resources.
Some important consequences for farming result from some differences between fuel crops and solar technologies such as heat collectors, photovoltaics, wind turbines and hydroelectric. The annual energy efficiency of crop production by photosynthesis is less than 1 percent, far below the range of 10-25 percent for the conversion of sunlight into useful energy by solar technologies. Hence, to produce a given amount of useful energy, fuel crops require ten to 100 times more land area than solar technologies.5 Solar's smaller land requirement is why the Sunshine Farm uses a photovoltaic array as its primary source of electricity instead of a generator operated on a renewable fuel. Fuel crops' larger land requirement explains why the national production of ethanol from corn grain for use in gasohol raised a furious ethical debate over diverting substantial cropland from food to fuel production. Moreover, solar's smaller land requirement would make it more desirable than fuel crops for powering tractors on farms of about 100 acres or less in an all-solar future, but the technology will require further development.6
In the energy accounting of a farm, solar technologies are treated in the same manner as conventional energy technologies. As an imaginary example, if a farmer built a coal-fired electric plant on his/her farm, it would be ludicrous to count its marketed electricity as an output of farming. Instead, we note the amount of electricity consumed annually by the farm (absent the plant) and calculate the embodied energy of the coal required to provide that electricity through the farmer's plant. The coal's embodied energy is the farm input representing the electricity consumed by the farm. This is the same conventional procedure used for electrical consumption by any farm; i.e., the coal-fired plant is usually owned by a utility company and is located far away from the farm. Analogous to the imaginary example, we do not regard the output of a farmer-owned solar technology as a farm output. Instead, we note what percentage of the technology's output is consumed by the farm. We then take the energy embodied in the mining and manufacture of that technology and adjust it by the output percentage to obtain a reduced value that becomes the farm input representing the electrical consumption of the farm.
Agriculture's potential to provide energy as well as food for society can be ascertained by the energy balance of various farms and national agricultural systems. We determine the energy balance of a farm by comparing the caloric energy of its marketed outputs with the embodied energy of its purchased inputs. Not counting the photovoltaic array, the Sunshine Farm marketed 1.7 calories for every calorie purchased. The outputs and inputs are qualitatively different types of energy, but since their units are the same, this is an energy ratio of 1.7 to 1 for outputs to inputs, or simply 1.7. Inclusion of the photovoltaic array by the above accounting procedure had little effect on the Sunshine Farm's energy ratio, but this was because the energy ratios for the array and the farm were about the same to begin with.3
The Sunshine Farm's energy ratio is comparable to values at the upper end of the range for mixed crop and livestock farms (Table 1).7 A conventional Pennsylvania dairy farm had a ratio of 1.8. Amish farms from six communities had ratios of 0.7-1.6, greater than the ratios of 0.3-0.6 for nearby conventional farms, except for a group of mixed farms in the Illinois Corn-Belt region that averaged 2.0. This strong contrast between Amish and conventional farms is all the more remarkable considering that the former also energetically provide their own field traction while the latter do not. That is, Amish farmers raise draft horses fed by their crops, while conventional farms do not make their tractors and fuel, but purchase them.
The Pennsylvania dairy farm, Illinois Corn-Belt farms, and Sunshine Farm had the greatest farm energy ratios, partly because most of their marketed output (69-95 percent of caloric energy) was crops (Table 1). In contrast, crops on the other farms constituted only 14-29 percent of marketed output, and animal products accounted for the remaining share. On the other farms, feeding much of the crops to animals incurred large metabolic energy losses and thus lower farm energy ratios. Another reason for the large farm energy ratios of the Pennsylvania dairy farm, Sunshine Farm, and some communities of Amish farms was the low amount of purchased inputs per acre of cropland (Table 1). In other words, less energy-intensive production helps yield a higher farm energy ratio. The average per-acre marketed crop output of the Illinois Corn-Belt farms was so great that they had the largest farm energy ratio despite a large amount of purchased inputs per acre (Table 1). These results are corroborated by 15 hypothetical farm energy budgets computed by Gerald Leach in his 1976 book, Energy and Food Production: the greater farm energy ratios were clearly associated with fewer purchased inputs and with a larger proportion of outputs devoted to crops.
National energy ratios for farming in various countries display a range of values similar to mixed farms (Table 2). Industrial countries, such as the US and those in Europe, have energy ratios near 1.0 or less, like conventional mixed farms. This is not surprising because the agricultural structure of industrial countries is generally a mix of energy-intensive crop and livestock production. For example, about three-fourths of the crops in the US are fed to livestock.8 While much of it is fed in large feedlots and operations, this value is a common proportion on individual mixed farms, thus resulting in similar energy ratios at the national and individual levels of farming. As an example of the effect of adopting capitalism, China's agriculture has rapidly increased its use of commercial fertilizers and other inputs, resulting in a national energy ratio of 1.2 in 1978. This value is surely lower now and reflects an industrial economy instead of one that relied on peasant farming methods not that long ago, as described in Farmers of Forty Centuries.9
Although the energy ratio of 1.0 for US agriculture is based on data a quarter century old (Table 2), this data is nearly the latest available from which an energy ratio can be readily calculated. It was computed from summary data reported by Stanhill that, in turn, was based on the extensive 1974 USDA national survey of agricultural energy inputs.10,11 The USDA survey repeated in 1978 also gives the same energy ratio.12 Since then, less detailed estimates of some agricultural energy inputs have been made, but with no computation of the embodied energy in the inputs.13,14 Recent econometric studies have shown that energy productivity in US agriculture has increased since 1980 due to improvement in technology and farm management stimulated by the energy price shocks of the 1970s, the withdrawal of energy-requiring marginal cropland through the federal Conservation Reserve Program, and the economy of scale accrued from continuing increases in average farm size (although the latter is not desirable for rural communities).15,16 Hence the current energy ratio for US agriculture must be greater than 1.0, but it cannot be directly calculated from these econometric studies because the measures of energy productivity were based in part on financial data or indices.
National energy ratios for farming are higher in less-industrialized countries. For example, agriculture in Egypt, Pakistan and Australia have respective ratios of 1.8, 2.9, and 3.1, again because of fewer purchased inputs and fewer crops fed to animals (Table 2). Australia relies mostly on low-input crops (e.g., wheat), free-range animal rearing, and extensive use of leys (i.e., grazed legume cover crops) instead of commercial fertilizer for cropland nitrogen needs. Likewise in America, before the tremendous increase in commercial fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation after World War II, American farming in 1940 had a national energy ratio of 2.3 (Table 2).
To understand the challenge of obtaining energy from agriculture, the energy ratios for mixed crop and livestock agriculture can be compared with energy ratios that industrial society has obtained from nonrenewable and renewable energy sources. The highest energy returns have come from nonrenewable fossil fuels. Drilling for petroleum and natural gas currently yields an energy ratio of 10, well below the ratio of 100 or more in the 1940s when oil was literally gushing out of the wells (Table 3 ). The energy ratio for coal also declined during that time with a current value of 30 at the mine mouth or stripped coalfield. Including combustion of coal in electric power plants drops this value to a national average of 9. The ratio can go as low as 2.5 for western, strip-mined coal that is transported more than 1,000 miles to Midwestern power plants outfitted with pollution scrubbers. Nearly the same energy ratio applies to the current extraction and use of natural gas in electric power plants.
The mining and processing of uranium ore and its use in nuclear light-water reactors to produce electricity result in an energy ratio of only 4, which includes storage of spent fuel (Table 3 ). This value certainly will not justify the future exposure of society to the inherent risks of nuclear reactors and their fuel cycle from mining to burial. The risk is simply too great for large-scale civilian or military accidents, sabotage, or mismanagement with huge economic, environmental, and social costs. None of the energy ratios in Table 3 include decommissioning of a technology (i.e., moth-balling, dismantling, or disposal) at the end of its useful life, and this energy input, relative to the other inputs, will be far larger for nuclear reactors than for the other technologies.
The energy ratios for renewable liquid fuels are much lower than for extraction of petroleum. Conventional agricultural production of grain, starch, or sugar crops and some chemical processing yield ethanol fuel with small energy ratios in the neighborhood of 1-2, with methanol from tree production slightly higher (Table 3 ). The energy ratios for biodiesel fuel, which can be chemically processed from various vegetable oils, would not be much higher than ethanol and methanol. The ratios for ethanol and vegetable oil also include an energy credit for the by-product spent mash and meal cake, respectively.3
The energy ratios for renewable solid fuels, namely 6-13 for biomass production by intensive farming of crops and trees, are lower than for mining of coal, the analogous fossil fuel (Table 3 ). The energy ratios for biomass production are higher than renewable liquid fuels because the latter require chemical processing that introduces either substantial energy inputs or chemical losses for the liquid fuels and thus lowers their energy ratios. Moreover, the output of fuels derived from seed, like ethanol and biodiesel, is lower than biomass because seed is only a small portion of the above-ground plant that constitutes biomass.
Subsequent use of biomass further reduces the energy ratios resulting from biomass production. Gasification of biomass crops to produce a gaseous fuel results in values of 2-5, lower than the current ratio for extraction of natural gas, the analogous fossil fuel (Table 3 ). These values are also not much better than the above ratios for renewable liquid fuels. Direct combustion of biomass crops for heat might give slightly higher ratios, including an energy input for the embodied energy in the furnace or boiler. Heat can also be obtained by flat-plate solar collectors, including storage, with energy ratios of 2-5, the lower values including fuel-operated heating systems as back-up. Direct combustion of crop residues or biomass for electricity results in energy ratios between 3 and 4, although advanced cogeneration of electricity and heat, not yet commercialized for biomass, may yield values twice as high.
Another renewable fuel is biogas, mostly methane, produced from anaerobic digestion of agricultural materials such as manure, crop residues, or wastes. The range of energy ratios in a table of results from eight European countries was 1.7-5.6, the higher values in southern countries with warmer climates that reduce the energy input required to keep the digester warm enough for sufficient microbial digestion.17 However, if we use some other studies to add estimates for collection of agricultural materials and for amortized embodied energy in digesters, then the range becomes 1.5-3.1, less than the ratio for extraction of natural gas, but comparable to renewable liquid fuels (Table 3 ).18,19 The lower values, associated with northern countries, do not decrease much because the two additional inputs are small compared to the heating requirement for the digesters. Finally, if an agricultural material is going to be regularly dedicated to biogas production, or some other renewable fuel, then it should be regarded not as a secondary by-product with just collection costs but as a primary product with its prorated share of the production inputs for its source. Using prorated production inputs for crop residues as representative of agricultural materials in general, the range of energy ratios for the European countries would then become 1.4-2.0.
Analogous to the results for renewable fuels, most solar-related technologies for the production of electricity, including reliable back-ups, generally have energy ratios less than the national average for coal-fired electricity including coal mining. One exception is hydroelectric systems with dammed water as inherent energy storage, which commonly attain an energy ratio of about 10. Upper values of 8-10 have been reported in energy ratios for photovoltaic arrays that electrochemically convert sunlight directly into electricity and for parabolic-thermal reflectors that collect heat for driving steam or gas turbines to generate electricity (Table 3 ). In comparison, wind-electric turbines have achieved upper values twice as high. However, it remains to be seen if these upper values can be typically achieved so as to become averages. Unlike current centralized power plants, these smaller technologies will be distributed in location and thus will have less embodied energy in transmission lines. However, despite being connected to local electric grids, some technologies may require energy storage and/or back-up systems.
Energy conservation and efficiency reduce the consumption of energy with the result that energy savings effectively constitute an output available for other uses. The energy ratios for conservation are comparable to nonrenewable energy sources and are often an order of magnitude greater than renewable fuels and solar technologies. For example, double-pane windows and ceiling insulation prevent losses of heat in winter and coolness in summer that are equal to 136 and 61 times, respectively, the energy expended in producing and installing the windows and insulation (Table 3 ). Passive solar design reduces heating and cooling in new houses by an amount equal to 10-25 times the energy spent in manufacturing the passive components from raw materials and in constructing new houses with them. In other words, much more energy would generally be made available from a given amount of energy inputs invested in conservation and efficiency than in renewable energy sources. As documented by the US Department of Energy, during 1979-1986 the US obtained 7 times as much new energy from savings through conservation and efficiency than from all net increases in domestic energy supplies based on fossil fuels, nuclear power, and renewable sources.20,21 Hence conservation and efficiency should be fully developed, as well as renewable energy sources.
This brief review shows that industrial society has been powered by nonrenewable energy sources with energy ratios much greater than the values of 2.0 or less for mixed crop and livestock farms. With energy ratios this low, agriculture will not be a net source of renewable fuels or electricity. Simply, if outputs from mixed farms were converted into fuels or electricity, typically half of the energy in the outputs would be lost during the conversion processes.22 In conjunction with the energy ratios of 2.0 or less, this implies that for any mixed farm the potential output of marketed fuel or electricity would be less than the embodied energy required in the manufacture of the farm's purchased inputs. Hence, beyond the food and feed already marketed by mixed farms, there would be no net output available as energy for society. The same conclusion also applies to US agriculture for which the energy ratio is greater than 1 but probably less than 2, as elaborated above. The nation exports one-fourth of its grain production, and one might think that it could be converted into a lot of energy for society, but the resulting converted energy would provide less than one-half of the embodied energy in the farm inputs used by US agriculture.4,8
For mixed farms or US agriculture to have some net output available as energy for society, the energy ratios must be raised by reducing purchased inputs and increasing marketed outputs. Many farmers have been using less purchased fertilizers and pesticides, mainly to cut expenses. Farms could someday, like the Sunshine Farm, energetically supply their own fuels and electricity instead of purchasing them. Inputs can also be reduced by utilizing biological efficiencies in crops and animals, such as letting animals obtain their own feed through grazing and foraging which involve no embodied energy, in contrast to feeding them machine-harvested grain and hay.
As far as increasing the amount of marketed outputs from mixed farms, increased crop yields will not be an option under a regime of fewer commercial inputs in farming. It is envisioned that yields will be maintained not quite as high as current levels by diverse farming practices that will require more use of land, biological efficiencies, and human labor. Also, substitution of fuel crops in place of feed and food crops will have little effect since they have fairly similar yields under equivalent farming practices.
Large increases in marketed outputs could be achieved by diverting cropland from supplemental animal feed to crops for direct human consumption. The potential increase is large because slightly more than half of US crop production is fed to animals.8 Since the feed conversion efficiency of animals is only 10-20 percent on a weight or energy basis, each pound less of animal products derived from supplemental feed would permit an output of 5-10 pounds of directly consumed crops substituted for the displaced feed crops.8 There is plenty of slack for reducing the consumption of animal products in our diet because the average American currently consumes twice the average minimum daily protein recommended by the international Food and Agriculture Organization, and two-thirds of our daily protein intake is animal protein.8,23
By these strategies for inputs and outputs, mixed farms and US agriculture should be able to increase their energy ratios to 3, perhaps 4, the former figure already achieved by Australia (Table 2). An energy ratio of 4 implies 4 units of marketed farm outputs in the numerator of the ratio for every 1 unit of embodied energy in the manufacture of purchased farm inputs in the denominator. Provision of 1 unit of embodied energy would require conversion of 2 units of farm outputs into fuel and electricity because of the aforementioned conversion losses of about 50 percent. Subtraction of the 2 converted units from the 4 units of marketed outputs would leave 2 units of farm outputs, or effectively an energy ratio of 2 after agriculture has met the embodied energy requirements of its own farm inputs. Considering that this value is double the above energy ratio of 1.0 for US agriculture, in absolute amounts this ratio should provide sufficient food and maybe a small amount of energy for the nation's society. Hence, national agriculture must achieve at least an energy ratio of roughly 4 to be a net source of commercial energy beyond the food demands of society and the energy requirements of its own farm inputs. Otherwise, an energy ratio less than 4 means that manufacture of some agricultural inputs will require energy subsidy from society such as electricity from photovoltaic arrays or wind-electric turbines.
The above review also demonstrates that nonrenewable energy sources, namely fossil fuels and nuclear power, have energy ratios that are generally greater than the analogous renewable energy sources. Furthermore, they former sources yield a lot of power from the little land area required for mining, fuel processing, and power production. In other words, fossil fuels and nuclear power yield much greater power densities, or power per acre, than renewable energy sources because the latter are derived from sunlight that is dispersed across the landscape.5 Hence, fuel crops and solar technologies would require much more land to meet the current energy consumption of various US sectors.
An aggressive national program of energy conservation and efficiency will be required to sufficiently reduce energy consumption such that the US economy could be powered by renewable energy sources without using too much land. Absent such measures, for example, if the nation's current transportation sector were to be fueled solely by the gross yield of ethanol from corn grain, then half of the entire US must be planted to corn.24.25.26 This result assumes an average corn yield 90 percent of the current Midwest corn yield and that the energy inputs for corn production and ethanol processing in an all-solar future would be met by solar technologies. Since solar technologies have greater power densities than fuel crops, they require less land than fuel crops.5
We cannot look to America's forests for much woody biomass unless we increase the recycling of paper and wood products. The current annual net growth of America's forests is already entirely accounted for by the national consumption of wood and paper products.8 Extra biomass could be gained initially by improvement of forest productivity through conventional intensive practices such as fertilization and introduction of nonnative species, but this would result in a loss of biodiversity and a concomitant, long-term decrease in biological efficiencies that would offset the initial extra productivity.27,28,29
Nonetheless, some energy scholars believe that energy conservation and efficiency will make it quite possible to power our current standard of living with renewable energy sources.30,31 Solar technologies would be particularly important in meeting US energy needs since they have much greater energy ratios and power densities than renewable fuels derived from agriculture. An all-solar future with solar technologies would be radically different than one without them. The research and infrastructure needed for an all-solar future should be developed now while we have the luxury of high energy ratios from fossil fuels.
1. USGS. 2000. U.S. Geological Survey World Petroleum Assessment 2000 ? Description and Results. US Department of Interior, Washington, DC. Available, http://greenwood.cr.usgs. gov/energy/WorldEnergy/DDS-60 [8 Aug. 2000]. This is conventional oil that does not include tar sands and oil shales. The large increase is mainly from a new category, reserve growth, in which the USGS estimated how much the apparent sizes of known oil fields are likely to grow as drilling hits previously unrecognized pockets of oil within and just beyond the edges of fields already producing oil. By the mid-1990s, USGS analysts realized that reserve growth was substantial and thus included it in the recent assessment. In the previous USGS estimate of remaining global oil, discovered reserves and undiscovered resources (mean) were 1100 and 580 billion barrels of oil, respectively.
2. This rough estimate was confirmed by a more complex analysis in: A.A. Bartlett. 2000. An analysis of US and world oil production patterns using Hubbert-style curves. Mathematical Geology 32 (1).
3. Over its projected 20-year lifetime, we calculated that the photovoltaic array will produce 1.6 times more energy than was consumed in its manufacture and installation, including a bank of batteries and a prorated portion of the power company grid to which it is connected. The 25% of the farm's cropland devoted to oilseeds was determined on a net-energy basis in which the gross energy content of the biodiesel fuel is reduced by the energy inputs for raising the oilseed crops and chemically converting them into biodiesel, including amortized embodied energy in machinery and buildings. It is also increased by an energy credit for high-protein meal cake, a by-product from biodiesel production that would be fed to livestock.
4. A.B. Lovins, L.H. Lovins, and M.H. Bender. 1995. Agriculture and energy. Pp. 11-18 in: Encyclopedia of Energy Technology and Environment. Vol. 1. John Wiley and Sons, NY. The proportion of energy use in the US food system is (%): farming, 18; food processing, 30; distribution, 10; commercial food service, 17; and home food preparation, 25.
5. V. Smil. 1991. General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization. John Wiley and Sons, NY.
6. Electricity from solar technologies would power electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen fuel that could either be spark-ignited in internal combustion tractor engines or be converted by fuel cells into electricity to run electric tractor motors. Since tractors require a lot of power, more technological advancement must be achieved in hydrogen storage tanks in either case and also in hydrogen fuel cells in the latter case. An accessible reference is: J.J. MacKenzie. 1994. The Keys to the Car: Electric and Hydrogen Vehicles for the 21st Century. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC.
7. In contrast to the actual measurement of the weight of inputs and outputs on the Sunshine Farm that were converted by energy factors, the data in the other studies were obtained through extensive interviews with farmers and farm businesses, farm financial records, and state or national farm business surveys. Some of this data is based on actual measurement of weight, but much of it was expenses that authors translated from dollars to embodied energy values by means of energy conversion factors from research publications in energy analysis.
8. USDA. 1996. Agricultural Statistics, 1995-96. US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Washington, DC.
9. F.H. King. 1911. Farmers of Forty Centuries: Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. Reprinted in 1973 by Rodale Press, Emmaus, PA. For a quantitative treatment of nutrient data in this book, see: M.H. Bender. 2000. Comparison of nutrient return and plant uptake in agricultural systems. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 15:89-105.
10. G. Stanhill. 1984. Agricultural labor: From energy source to sink. Pp. 113-130 in: G. Stanhill (ed.). Energy and Agriculture. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
11. FEA/USDA. 1976. Energy and U.S. Agriculture: 1974 Data Base. Vol. 1, Part A: U.S. Series of Energy Tables. Federal Energy Administration and US Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC.
12. D. Torgerson and H. Cooper. 1980. Energy and U.S. Agriculture: 1974 and 1978. USDA Statistical Bulletin No. 632. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Washington, DC.
13. J.R. Barse (ed.). 1990. Seven Farm Input Industries. USDA Agricultural Economic Report No. 635. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Washington, DC.
14. M. Anderson and R. Magleby (eds.). 1997. Agricultural Resources and Environmental Indicators, 1996-97. USDA Agricultural Handbook No. 712. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Washington, DC.
15. C.J. Cleveland. 1995. Resource degradation, technical change, and the productivity of energy use in US agriculture. Ecological Economics 13:185-201.
16. B.S. Panesar and R.C. Fluck. 1993. Energy productivity of a production system: Analysis and measurement. Agricultural Systems 43:415-437.
17. M. Demuynck, E.J. Nyns and W. Palz. 1984. Biogas Plants in Europe: A Practical Handbook. D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht.
18. W. Vergara and D. Pimentel. 1978. Fuels from biomass: Comparative study of the potential in five countries: The United States, Brazil, India, Sudan, and Sweden. Advances in Energy Systems and Technology 1:125-173.
19. Y.R. Chen. 1983. Biogas digester design. Pp. 23-59 in: D.L. Wise (ed.). Fuel Gas Systems. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.
20. EIA. 1987. Annual Energy Review 1986. US Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Washington, DC.
21. A.B. Lovins and L.H. Lovins. 1989. Drill rigs and battleships are the answer! (But what was the question?): Oil efficiency, economic rationality, and security. Pp. 83-138 in: R.G. Reed III and F. Fesharaki. The Oil Market in the 1990s: Challenges for the New Era. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
22. D. Spreng. 1988. Net-Energy Analysis and the Energy Requirements of Energy Systems. Praeger, New York. See page 222 for table of bioconversion efficiencies.
23. Smil, V. 1991. Population growth and nitrogen: An exploration of a critical existential link. Population and Development Review 17:569-601.
24. H. Shapouri, J.A. Duffield and M.S. Graboski. 1995. Estimating the net energy balance of corn ethanol. USDA Agricultural Economic Report No. 721. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. National Agricultural Statistics Service, Herndon, Virginia.
25. US DOE, 1998. Annual Energy Review 1997. US Department of Energy, Washington, DC. Available: http://www.eia.gov/pub/energy.overview [7 April 1999].
26. In the USDA review in note 24, the Midwest corn yield is 122 bushels per acre, which also happens to be the average national corn yield during the past decade according to: USDA. 1999. Agricultural Statistics, 1999. US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Washington, DC. Available: http://www.nass.usda.gov/pubs [21 Feb. 2000].
27. J.H. Cook, J. Beyea, K.H. Keeler. 1991. Potential impacts of biomass production in the United States on biological diversity. Annual Review of Energy and Environment 16: 401-431.
28. OTA. 1980. Energy from Biological Processes. US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Washington, DC.
29. J. Pelisek. 1975. Conifer plantations and soil deterioration. Ecologist 5:332-336.
30. A.B. Lovins, L.H. Lovins, F. Krause and W. Bach. 1981. Least-Cost Energy: Solving the CO2 Problem. Brick House Publishing Co., Andover, MA.
31. J. Goldemberg, T.B. Johansson, A.K.N. Reddy and R.H. Williams. 1987. Energy for a Sustainable World. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC.
32. J. Zucchetto and G. Bickle. 1984. Energy and nutrient analyses of a dairy farm in central Pennsylvania. Energy in Agriculture 3:29-47.
33. P. Craumer. 1979. Farm productivity and energy efficiency in Amish and modern dairying. Agriculture and Environment 4:281-299.
34. W.A. Johnson, V. Stoltzfus and P. Craumer. 1977. Energy conservation in Amish agriculture. Science 198:373-378.
35. M. Green. 1978. Eating Oil: Energy Use in Food Production. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
36. R.M. Gifford. 1976. An overview of fuel used for crops and national agricultural systems. Search 7:412-417.
37. C.A.S. Hall, C.J. Cleveland and R. Kaufmann. 1986. Energy and Resource Quality: The Ecology of the Economic Process. John Wiley, New York.
38. C.E. Goering and M.J. Daughtery. 1982. Energy accounting for eleven vegetable oil fuels. Transactions of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers 25:1209-1215.
39. R. Herendeen and S. Brown. 1987. A comparative analysis of net energy from woody biomass. Energy 12:75-84.
40. A.F. Turhollow and R.D. Perlack. 1991. Emissions of CO2 from energy crop production. Biomass and Bioenergy 1:129-135.
41. W. Vergara and D. Pimentel. 1978. Fuels from biomass: Comparative study of the potential in five countries: The United States, Brazil, India, Sudan, and Sweden. Advances in Energy Systems and Technology 1:125-173.
42. M. Demuynck, E.J. Nyns and W. Palz. 1984. Biogas Plants in Europe: A Practical Handbook. D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht.
43. R.A. Herendeen. 1988. Net energy considerations. Pp. 255-273 in: R.E. West and F. Kreith (eds.). Economic Analysis of Solar Thermal Energy Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
44. C.J. Cleveland and R. Herendeen. 1989. Solar parabolic collectors: Successive generations are better net energy and exergy producers. Energy Systems and Policy 13:63-77.
45. G. Tyner, Sr. and R.G. Fowler. 1992. Estimating the viability of alternative sources of energy. In: Investing in Natural Capital — A Prerequisite for Sustainability. Second Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics. Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, 3-6 August 1992.
46. B. Sørensen. 1995. History of, and recent progress in, wind-energy utilization. Annual Review of Energy and Environment 20:387-424.
47. M.W. Gilliland, J.M. Klopatek and S.G. Hildebrand. 1981. Net energy: Results for small-scale hydroelectric power and summary of existing analyses. Energy 6:1029-1040.
48. D.M. Gates. 1985. Energy and Ecology. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA.
49. R.H. Williams and E.D. Larson. 1993. Advanced gasification-based biomass power generation. Pp. 729-785 in: T.B. Johansson, H. Kelly, A.K.N. Reddy and R.H. Williams (eds.). Renewable Energy: Sources for Fuels and Electricity. Island Press, Washington, DC.
50. B. Hannon. 1981. The energy cost of energy. Pp. 81-107 in: H.E. Daly and A.F. Umaña (eds.). Energy, Economics, and the Environment: Conflicting Views of an Essential Interrelationship. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
Energy in Agriculture and Society: Insights from the Sunshine Farm
Marty Bender
Biodiesel tractor at the Sunshine Farm.
Released March 28, 2001
Accompanying Tables 1-3 found here are available in downloadable PDF format. Click here and the PDF will automatically begin downloading. To read a PDF file you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer—it's available for free from Adobe Systems. Links to the tables also appear in text and each open a pop-up window to view individually.
Farming, in industrial countries, has generally become an industry itself. As such, it has national energy demands comparable with other industries and thus competes for energy supplies, particularly petroleum. Annual global oil production has been rising for many years, but an important economic transition period for all industries will arrive when annual production peaks, then declines as discovery drops off and the remaining oil becomes harder to extract. That time is not far off, even by optimistic estimates. For example, a recent assessment by the US Geological Survey increased its previous global estimate of remaining oil, both discovered and undiscovered, by an unprecedented 37 percent.1 During the century ending in 1990, the world consumed an amount of oil equal to this increase, 625 billion barrels of oil. In stark contrast to the 100 years, using current annual production as a guide, 27 billion barrels, the increase will last little more than 25 years during the early part of the twenty-first century. Since oil production will be approximately symmetric on both sides of the peak, the increase will delay the peak of annual global oil production by half this period, or 12 years.2 Added onto current estimates of the peak year, the 12-year delay would place the peak only one human generation from now, or about three decades. The highly touted Caspian Sea oilfields in the former Soviet Union would postpone the peak only a year.
The importance of national food security dictates that we should reduce farming's dependence on fossil fuels. As part of The Land Institute's mission to use nature as measure for developing sustainable agriculture and culture, the Sunshine Farm Project has been exploring the possibilities of farming without fossil fuels, fertilizers or pesticides. We have been conducting energy accounting on the Sunshine Farm to assess the extent to which modern farms can run, essentially, on sunlight. As late as the 1950s, many farms ran mostly on sunlight, relying on draft horses and using crop rotations for soil fertility instead of commercial fertilizers. Nowadays however, agriculture uses far more energy nowadays in the form of farm inputs, while at the same time, there are current renewable energy technologies that were not available in traditional farming. Energy accounting reveals patterns of energy consumption that can be examined to determine which changes in farming practices would save energy. For example, the use of animal manure as a source of nitrogen requires less energy than that required to manufacture commercial fertilizer.
The accounting on the Sunshine Farm is done by determining the weight of everything going into and out of the farm and by entering this information into an accounting framework that we established for our computer database. The weights of inputs are converted into values of energy by computer calculations based on embodied energy factors (the energy used in industry to mine, process and fabricate raw materials and ores into farm inputs) from the professional literature. Likewise, the literature is used to provide caloric energy factors for converting our marketed farm outputs into calories, like in our daily diet.
Our energy accounting shows that the Sunshine Farm could supply about 40 percent of its embodied energy needs through animal feed, electricity, and biodiesel fuel for the tractor and vehicles. That is, a 4.5-kilowatt photovoltaic array on the Sunshine Farm has been converting sunlight into electricity required for the workshop tools, electric fencing, water pumping, and chick brooding. About one-fourth of the cropland on the Sunshine Farm has been devoted to soybeans and sunflowers for biodiesel fuel that could be commercially produced to meet all our field operations and off-farm transportation. Both the array and biodiesel are renewable energy; they produce more energy than they consume.3 Almost three-fourths of the animal feed consumed on the Sunshine Farm has been supplied by the oats, grain sorghum and alfalfa produced on the farm for the draft horses, beef cattle and poultry. The remaining 60 percent of the farm's embodied energy needs is imported onto the farm through purchased inputs including amortized capital, such as supplies, commercial feed and seed, buildings, fences, water lines, tractors, vehicles, equipment, and the photovoltaic array.
These results do not include the lifestyle energy support for a farm family, a large unknown ranging from the austere Amish to typically affluent Americans, although we do keep track of human labor on the Sunshine Farm. Nor do they include some prorated part of the food processing, marketing, distribution and preparation sectors that nationally consume more energy than farming.4 Our focus is to determine how much energy farms can supply for their inputs. Family support and commercial sectors are not unique to agriculture but are common to all industrial activity; hence, they are social considerations beyond the scope of our project.
The purpose of the renewable energy technologies in our project is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels but not our dependence on local energy systems. Virtually all farms are part of the local community in many ways, energy being no exception. For example, from our exploration of biodiesel production, we have learned that biodiesel fuel with quality satisfactory to engine manufacturers can be produced by farmers' co-operatives but not by individual farms producing various, unregulated home-brews of biodiesel fuel. Also, although our photovoltaic array has a bank of batteries and could stand alone, it is connected to the electric grid of the local power company to sell excess electricity.
Just as important as the monetary income from the sale is the fact that the excess electricity is now on the grid for use by the local community. In other words, in an all-solar future, given certain limits of energy production by solar technologies compared to current conventional technologies (see below), it will likely be considered uncivic to own a personal electrical technology located near a grid but not connected to it. This would prevent the use of the technology's potential excess electricity by other people, and in effect, would be squandering some of the hard-won, solar-based energy embodied in the manufacture of that technology. Since any solar technology exposed to the weather will slowly deteriorate whether or not it is used, there would be little to be gained from the selfish idea of operating a personal solar technology only when the owner needs its energy. The obligation to sell excess electricity would be quite contrary to the current popular notion of achieving energy self-sufficiency in order to disconnect oneself from the grid. This notion is made possible by the present industrial economy with its abundance of fossil fuels and mineral resources.
Some important consequences for farming result from some differences between fuel crops and solar technologies such as heat collectors, photovoltaics, wind turbines and hydroelectric. The annual energy efficiency of crop production by photosynthesis is less than 1 percent, far below the range of 10-25 percent for the conversion of sunlight into useful energy by solar technologies. Hence, to produce a given amount of useful energy, fuel crops require ten to 100 times more land area than solar technologies.5 Solar's smaller land requirement is why the Sunshine Farm uses a photovoltaic array as its primary source of electricity instead of a generator operated on a renewable fuel. Fuel crops' larger land requirement explains why the national production of ethanol from corn grain for use in gasohol raised a furious ethical debate over diverting substantial cropland from food to fuel production. Moreover, solar's smaller land requirement would make it more desirable than fuel crops for powering tractors on farms of about 100 acres or less in an all-solar future, but the technology will require further development.6
In the energy accounting of a farm, solar technologies are treated in the same manner as conventional energy technologies. As an imaginary example, if a farmer built a coal-fired electric plant on his/her farm, it would be ludicrous to count its marketed electricity as an output of farming. Instead, we note the amount of electricity consumed annually by the farm (absent the plant) and calculate the embodied energy of the coal required to provide that electricity through the farmer's plant. The coal's embodied energy is the farm input representing the electricity consumed by the farm. This is the same conventional procedure used for electrical consumption by any farm; i.e., the coal-fired plant is usually owned by a utility company and is located far away from the farm. Analogous to the imaginary example, we do not regard the output of a farmer-owned solar technology as a farm output. Instead, we note what percentage of the technology's output is consumed by the farm. We then take the energy embodied in the mining and manufacture of that technology and adjust it by the output percentage to obtain a reduced value that becomes the farm input representing the electrical consumption of the farm.
Agriculture's potential to provide energy as well as food for society can be ascertained by the energy balance of various farms and national agricultural systems. We determine the energy balance of a farm by comparing the caloric energy of its marketed outputs with the embodied energy of its purchased inputs. Not counting the photovoltaic array, the Sunshine Farm marketed 1.7 calories for every calorie purchased. The outputs and inputs are qualitatively different types of energy, but since their units are the same, this is an energy ratio of 1.7 to 1 for outputs to inputs, or simply 1.7. Inclusion of the photovoltaic array by the above accounting procedure had little effect on the Sunshine Farm's energy ratio, but this was because the energy ratios for the array and the farm were about the same to begin with.3
The Sunshine Farm's energy ratio is comparable to values at the upper end of the range for mixed crop and livestock farms (Table 1).7 A conventional Pennsylvania dairy farm had a ratio of 1.8. Amish farms from six communities had ratios of 0.7-1.6, greater than the ratios of 0.3-0.6 for nearby conventional farms, except for a group of mixed farms in the Illinois Corn-Belt region that averaged 2.0. This strong contrast between Amish and conventional farms is all the more remarkable considering that the former also energetically provide their own field traction while the latter do not. That is, Amish farmers raise draft horses fed by their crops, while conventional farms do not make their tractors and fuel, but purchase them.
The Pennsylvania dairy farm, Illinois Corn-Belt farms, and Sunshine Farm had the greatest farm energy ratios, partly because most of their marketed output (69-95 percent of caloric energy) was crops (Table 1). In contrast, crops on the other farms constituted only 14-29 percent of marketed output, and animal products accounted for the remaining share. On the other farms, feeding much of the crops to animals incurred large metabolic energy losses and thus lower farm energy ratios. Another reason for the large farm energy ratios of the Pennsylvania dairy farm, Sunshine Farm, and some communities of Amish farms was the low amount of purchased inputs per acre of cropland (Table 1). In other words, less energy-intensive production helps yield a higher farm energy ratio. The average per-acre marketed crop output of the Illinois Corn-Belt farms was so great that they had the largest farm energy ratio despite a large amount of purchased inputs per acre (Table 1). These results are corroborated by 15 hypothetical farm energy budgets computed by Gerald Leach in his 1976 book, Energy and Food Production: the greater farm energy ratios were clearly associated with fewer purchased inputs and with a larger proportion of outputs devoted to crops.
National energy ratios for farming in various countries display a range of values similar to mixed farms (Table 2). Industrial countries, such as the US and those in Europe, have energy ratios near 1.0 or less, like conventional mixed farms. This is not surprising because the agricultural structure of industrial countries is generally a mix of energy-intensive crop and livestock production. For example, about three-fourths of the crops in the US are fed to livestock.8 While much of it is fed in large feedlots and operations, this value is a common proportion on individual mixed farms, thus resulting in similar energy ratios at the national and individual levels of farming. As an example of the effect of adopting capitalism, China's agriculture has rapidly increased its use of commercial fertilizers and other inputs, resulting in a national energy ratio of 1.2 in 1978. This value is surely lower now and reflects an industrial economy instead of one that relied on peasant farming methods not that long ago, as described in Farmers of Forty Centuries.9
Although the energy ratio of 1.0 for US agriculture is based on data a quarter century old (Table 2), this data is nearly the latest available from which an energy ratio can be readily calculated. It was computed from summary data reported by Stanhill that, in turn, was based on the extensive 1974 USDA national survey of agricultural energy inputs.10,11 The USDA survey repeated in 1978 also gives the same energy ratio.12 Since then, less detailed estimates of some agricultural energy inputs have been made, but with no computation of the embodied energy in the inputs.13,14 Recent econometric studies have shown that energy productivity in US agriculture has increased since 1980 due to improvement in technology and farm management stimulated by the energy price shocks of the 1970s, the withdrawal of energy-requiring marginal cropland through the federal Conservation Reserve Program, and the economy of scale accrued from continuing increases in average farm size (although the latter is not desirable for rural communities).15,16 Hence the current energy ratio for US agriculture must be greater than 1.0, but it cannot be directly calculated from these econometric studies because the measures of energy productivity were based in part on financial data or indices.
National energy ratios for farming are higher in less-industrialized countries. For example, agriculture in Egypt, Pakistan and Australia have respective ratios of 1.8, 2.9, and 3.1, again because of fewer purchased inputs and fewer crops fed to animals (Table 2). Australia relies mostly on low-input crops (e.g., wheat), free-range animal rearing, and extensive use of leys (i.e., grazed legume cover crops) instead of commercial fertilizer for cropland nitrogen needs. Likewise in America, before the tremendous increase in commercial fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation after World War II, American farming in 1940 had a national energy ratio of 2.3 (Table 2).
To understand the challenge of obtaining energy from agriculture, the energy ratios for mixed crop and livestock agriculture can be compared with energy ratios that industrial society has obtained from nonrenewable and renewable energy sources. The highest energy returns have come from nonrenewable fossil fuels. Drilling for petroleum and natural gas currently yields an energy ratio of 10, well below the ratio of 100 or more in the 1940s when oil was literally gushing out of the wells (Table 3 ). The energy ratio for coal also declined during that time with a current value of 30 at the mine mouth or stripped coalfield. Including combustion of coal in electric power plants drops this value to a national average of 9. The ratio can go as low as 2.5 for western, strip-mined coal that is transported more than 1,000 miles to Midwestern power plants outfitted with pollution scrubbers. Nearly the same energy ratio applies to the current extraction and use of natural gas in electric power plants.
The mining and processing of uranium ore and its use in nuclear light-water reactors to produce electricity result in an energy ratio of only 4, which includes storage of spent fuel (Table 3 ). This value certainly will not justify the future exposure of society to the inherent risks of nuclear reactors and their fuel cycle from mining to burial. The risk is simply too great for large-scale civilian or military accidents, sabotage, or mismanagement with huge economic, environmental, and social costs. None of the energy ratios in Table 3 include decommissioning of a technology (i.e., moth-balling, dismantling, or disposal) at the end of its useful life, and this energy input, relative to the other inputs, will be far larger for nuclear reactors than for the other technologies.
The energy ratios for renewable liquid fuels are much lower than for extraction of petroleum. Conventional agricultural production of grain, starch, or sugar crops and some chemical processing yield ethanol fuel with small energy ratios in the neighborhood of 1-2, with methanol from tree production slightly higher (Table 3 ). The energy ratios for biodiesel fuel, which can be chemically processed from various vegetable oils, would not be much higher than ethanol and methanol. The ratios for ethanol and vegetable oil also include an energy credit for the by-product spent mash and meal cake, respectively.3
The energy ratios for renewable solid fuels, namely 6-13 for biomass production by intensive farming of crops and trees, are lower than for mining of coal, the analogous fossil fuel (Table 3 ). The energy ratios for biomass production are higher than renewable liquid fuels because the latter require chemical processing that introduces either substantial energy inputs or chemical losses for the liquid fuels and thus lowers their energy ratios. Moreover, the output of fuels derived from seed, like ethanol and biodiesel, is lower than biomass because seed is only a small portion of the above-ground plant that constitutes biomass.
Subsequent use of biomass further reduces the energy ratios resulting from biomass production. Gasification of biomass crops to produce a gaseous fuel results in values of 2-5, lower than the current ratio for extraction of natural gas, the analogous fossil fuel (Table 3 ). These values are also not much better than the above ratios for renewable liquid fuels. Direct combustion of biomass crops for heat might give slightly higher ratios, including an energy input for the embodied energy in the furnace or boiler. Heat can also be obtained by flat-plate solar collectors, including storage, with energy ratios of 2-5, the lower values including fuel-operated heating systems as back-up. Direct combustion of crop residues or biomass for electricity results in energy ratios between 3 and 4, although advanced cogeneration of electricity and heat, not yet commercialized for biomass, may yield values twice as high.
Another renewable fuel is biogas, mostly methane, produced from anaerobic digestion of agricultural materials such as manure, crop residues, or wastes. The range of energy ratios in a table of results from eight European countries was 1.7-5.6, the higher values in southern countries with warmer climates that reduce the energy input required to keep the digester warm enough for sufficient microbial digestion.17 However, if we use some other studies to add estimates for collection of agricultural materials and for amortized embodied energy in digesters, then the range becomes 1.5-3.1, less than the ratio for extraction of natural gas, but comparable to renewable liquid fuels (Table 3 ).18,19 The lower values, associated with northern countries, do not decrease much because the two additional inputs are small compared to the heating requirement for the digesters. Finally, if an agricultural material is going to be regularly dedicated to biogas production, or some other renewable fuel, then it should be regarded not as a secondary by-product with just collection costs but as a primary product with its prorated share of the production inputs for its source. Using prorated production inputs for crop residues as representative of agricultural materials in general, the range of energy ratios for the European countries would then become 1.4-2.0.
Analogous to the results for renewable fuels, most solar-related technologies for the production of electricity, including reliable back-ups, generally have energy ratios less than the national average for coal-fired electricity including coal mining. One exception is hydroelectric systems with dammed water as inherent energy storage, which commonly attain an energy ratio of about 10. Upper values of 8-10 have been reported in energy ratios for photovoltaic arrays that electrochemically convert sunlight directly into electricity and for parabolic-thermal reflectors that collect heat for driving steam or gas turbines to generate electricity (Table 3 ). In comparison, wind-electric turbines have achieved upper values twice as high. However, it remains to be seen if these upper values can be typically achieved so as to become averages. Unlike current centralized power plants, these smaller technologies will be distributed in location and thus will have less embodied energy in transmission lines. However, despite being connected to local electric grids, some technologies may require energy storage and/or back-up systems.
Energy conservation and efficiency reduce the consumption of energy with the result that energy savings effectively constitute an output available for other uses. The energy ratios for conservation are comparable to nonrenewable energy sources and are often an order of magnitude greater than renewable fuels and solar technologies. For example, double-pane windows and ceiling insulation prevent losses of heat in winter and coolness in summer that are equal to 136 and 61 times, respectively, the energy expended in producing and installing the windows and insulation (Table 3 ). Passive solar design reduces heating and cooling in new houses by an amount equal to 10-25 times the energy spent in manufacturing the passive components from raw materials and in constructing new houses with them. In other words, much more energy would generally be made available from a given amount of energy inputs invested in conservation and efficiency than in renewable energy sources. As documented by the US Department of Energy, during 1979-1986 the US obtained 7 times as much new energy from savings through conservation and efficiency than from all net increases in domestic energy supplies based on fossil fuels, nuclear power, and renewable sources.20,21 Hence conservation and efficiency should be fully developed, as well as renewable energy sources.
This brief review shows that industrial society has been powered by nonrenewable energy sources with energy ratios much greater than the values of 2.0 or less for mixed crop and livestock farms. With energy ratios this low, agriculture will not be a net source of renewable fuels or electricity. Simply, if outputs from mixed farms were converted into fuels or electricity, typically half of the energy in the outputs would be lost during the conversion processes.22 In conjunction with the energy ratios of 2.0 or less, this implies that for any mixed farm the potential output of marketed fuel or electricity would be less than the embodied energy required in the manufacture of the farm's purchased inputs. Hence, beyond the food and feed already marketed by mixed farms, there would be no net output available as energy for society. The same conclusion also applies to US agriculture for which the energy ratio is greater than 1 but probably less than 2, as elaborated above. The nation exports one-fourth of its grain production, and one might think that it could be converted into a lot of energy for society, but the resulting converted energy would provide less than one-half of the embodied energy in the farm inputs used by US agriculture.4,8
For mixed farms or US agriculture to have some net output available as energy for society, the energy ratios must be raised by reducing purchased inputs and increasing marketed outputs. Many farmers have been using less purchased fertilizers and pesticides, mainly to cut expenses. Farms could someday, like the Sunshine Farm, energetically supply their own fuels and electricity instead of purchasing them. Inputs can also be reduced by utilizing biological efficiencies in crops and animals, such as letting animals obtain their own feed through grazing and foraging which involve no embodied energy, in contrast to feeding them machine-harvested grain and hay.
As far as increasing the amount of marketed outputs from mixed farms, increased crop yields will not be an option under a regime of fewer commercial inputs in farming. It is envisioned that yields will be maintained not quite as high as current levels by diverse farming practices that will require more use of land, biological efficiencies, and human labor. Also, substitution of fuel crops in place of feed and food crops will have little effect since they have fairly similar yields under equivalent farming practices.
Large increases in marketed outputs could be achieved by diverting cropland from supplemental animal feed to crops for direct human consumption. The potential increase is large because slightly more than half of US crop production is fed to animals.8 Since the feed conversion efficiency of animals is only 10-20 percent on a weight or energy basis, each pound less of animal products derived from supplemental feed would permit an output of 5-10 pounds of directly consumed crops substituted for the displaced feed crops.8 There is plenty of slack for reducing the consumption of animal products in our diet because the average American currently consumes twice the average minimum daily protein recommended by the international Food and Agriculture Organization, and two-thirds of our daily protein intake is animal protein.8,23
By these strategies for inputs and outputs, mixed farms and US agriculture should be able to increase their energy ratios to 3, perhaps 4, the former figure already achieved by Australia (Table 2). An energy ratio of 4 implies 4 units of marketed farm outputs in the numerator of the ratio for every 1 unit of embodied energy in the manufacture of purchased farm inputs in the denominator. Provision of 1 unit of embodied energy would require conversion of 2 units of farm outputs into fuel and electricity because of the aforementioned conversion losses of about 50 percent. Subtraction of the 2 converted units from the 4 units of marketed outputs would leave 2 units of farm outputs, or effectively an energy ratio of 2 after agriculture has met the embodied energy requirements of its own farm inputs. Considering that this value is double the above energy ratio of 1.0 for US agriculture, in absolute amounts this ratio should provide sufficient food and maybe a small amount of energy for the nation's society. Hence, national agriculture must achieve at least an energy ratio of roughly 4 to be a net source of commercial energy beyond the food demands of society and the energy requirements of its own farm inputs. Otherwise, an energy ratio less than 4 means that manufacture of some agricultural inputs will require energy subsidy from society such as electricity from photovoltaic arrays or wind-electric turbines.
The above review also demonstrates that nonrenewable energy sources, namely fossil fuels and nuclear power, have energy ratios that are generally greater than the analogous renewable energy sources. Furthermore, they former sources yield a lot of power from the little land area required for mining, fuel processing, and power production. In other words, fossil fuels and nuclear power yield much greater power densities, or power per acre, than renewable energy sources because the latter are derived from sunlight that is dispersed across the landscape.5 Hence, fuel crops and solar technologies would require much more land to meet the current energy consumption of various US sectors.
An aggressive national program of energy conservation and efficiency will be required to sufficiently reduce energy consumption such that the US economy could be powered by renewable energy sources without using too much land. Absent such measures, for example, if the nation's current transportation sector were to be fueled solely by the gross yield of ethanol from corn grain, then half of the entire US must be planted to corn.24.25.26 This result assumes an average corn yield 90 percent of the current Midwest corn yield and that the energy inputs for corn production and ethanol processing in an all-solar future would be met by solar technologies. Since solar technologies have greater power densities than fuel crops, they require less land than fuel crops.5
We cannot look to America's forests for much woody biomass unless we increase the recycling of paper and wood products. The current annual net growth of America's forests is already entirely accounted for by the national consumption of wood and paper products.8 Extra biomass could be gained initially by improvement of forest productivity through conventional intensive practices such as fertilization and introduction of nonnative species, but this would result in a loss of biodiversity and a concomitant, long-term decrease in biological efficiencies that would offset the initial extra productivity.27,28,29
Nonetheless, some energy scholars believe that energy conservation and efficiency will make it quite possible to power our current standard of living with renewable energy sources.30,31 Solar technologies would be particularly important in meeting US energy needs since they have much greater energy ratios and power densities than renewable fuels derived from agriculture. An all-solar future with solar technologies would be radically different than one without them. The research and infrastructure needed for an all-solar future should be developed now while we have the luxury of high energy ratios from fossil fuels.
1. USGS. 2000. U.S. Geological Survey World Petroleum Assessment 2000 ? Description and Results. US Department of Interior, Washington, DC. Available, http://greenwood.cr.usgs. gov/energy/WorldEnergy/DDS-60 [8 Aug. 2000]. This is conventional oil that does not include tar sands and oil shales. The large increase is mainly from a new category, reserve growth, in which the USGS estimated how much the apparent sizes of known oil fields are likely to grow as drilling hits previously unrecognized pockets of oil within and just beyond the edges of fields already producing oil. By the mid-1990s, USGS analysts realized that reserve growth was substantial and thus included it in the recent assessment. In the previous USGS estimate of remaining global oil, discovered reserves and undiscovered resources (mean) were 1100 and 580 billion barrels of oil, respectively.
2. This rough estimate was confirmed by a more complex analysis in: A.A. Bartlett. 2000. An analysis of US and world oil production patterns using Hubbert-style curves. Mathematical Geology 32 (1).
3. Over its projected 20-year lifetime, we calculated that the photovoltaic array will produce 1.6 times more energy than was consumed in its manufacture and installation, including a bank of batteries and a prorated portion of the power company grid to which it is connected. The 25% of the farm's cropland devoted to oilseeds was determined on a net-energy basis in which the gross energy content of the biodiesel fuel is reduced by the energy inputs for raising the oilseed crops and chemically converting them into biodiesel, including amortized embodied energy in machinery and buildings. It is also increased by an energy credit for high-protein meal cake, a by-product from biodiesel production that would be fed to livestock.
4. A.B. Lovins, L.H. Lovins, and M.H. Bender. 1995. Agriculture and energy. Pp. 11-18 in: Encyclopedia of Energy Technology and Environment. Vol. 1. John Wiley and Sons, NY. The proportion of energy use in the US food system is (%): farming, 18; food processing, 30; distribution, 10; commercial food service, 17; and home food preparation, 25.
5. V. Smil. 1991. General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization. John Wiley and Sons, NY.
6. Electricity from solar technologies would power electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen fuel that could either be spark-ignited in internal combustion tractor engines or be converted by fuel cells into electricity to run electric tractor motors. Since tractors require a lot of power, more technological advancement must be achieved in hydrogen storage tanks in either case and also in hydrogen fuel cells in the latter case. An accessible reference is: J.J. MacKenzie. 1994. The Keys to the Car: Electric and Hydrogen Vehicles for the 21st Century. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC.
7. In contrast to the actual measurement of the weight of inputs and outputs on the Sunshine Farm that were converted by energy factors, the data in the other studies were obtained through extensive interviews with farmers and farm businesses, farm financial records, and state or national farm business surveys. Some of this data is based on actual measurement of weight, but much of it was expenses that authors translated from dollars to embodied energy values by means of energy conversion factors from research publications in energy analysis.
8. USDA. 1996. Agricultural Statistics, 1995-96. US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Washington, DC.
9. F.H. King. 1911. Farmers of Forty Centuries: Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. Reprinted in 1973 by Rodale Press, Emmaus, PA. For a quantitative treatment of nutrient data in this book, see: M.H. Bender. 2000. Comparison of nutrient return and plant uptake in agricultural systems. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 15:89-105.
10. G. Stanhill. 1984. Agricultural labor: From energy source to sink. Pp. 113-130 in: G. Stanhill (ed.). Energy and Agriculture. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
11. FEA/USDA. 1976. Energy and U.S. Agriculture: 1974 Data Base. Vol. 1, Part A: U.S. Series of Energy Tables. Federal Energy Administration and US Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC.
12. D. Torgerson and H. Cooper. 1980. Energy and U.S. Agriculture: 1974 and 1978. USDA Statistical Bulletin No. 632. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Washington, DC.
13. J.R. Barse (ed.). 1990. Seven Farm Input Industries. USDA Agricultural Economic Report No. 635. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Washington, DC.
14. M. Anderson and R. Magleby (eds.). 1997. Agricultural Resources and Environmental Indicators, 1996-97. USDA Agricultural Handbook No. 712. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Washington, DC.
15. C.J. Cleveland. 1995. Resource degradation, technical change, and the productivity of energy use in US agriculture. Ecological Economics 13:185-201.
16. B.S. Panesar and R.C. Fluck. 1993. Energy productivity of a production system: Analysis and measurement. Agricultural Systems 43:415-437.
17. M. Demuynck, E.J. Nyns and W. Palz. 1984. Biogas Plants in Europe: A Practical Handbook. D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht.
18. W. Vergara and D. Pimentel. 1978. Fuels from biomass: Comparative study of the potential in five countries: The United States, Brazil, India, Sudan, and Sweden. Advances in Energy Systems and Technology 1:125-173.
19. Y.R. Chen. 1983. Biogas digester design. Pp. 23-59 in: D.L. Wise (ed.). Fuel Gas Systems. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.
20. EIA. 1987. Annual Energy Review 1986. US Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Washington, DC.
21. A.B. Lovins and L.H. Lovins. 1989. Drill rigs and battleships are the answer! (But what was the question?): Oil efficiency, economic rationality, and security. Pp. 83-138 in: R.G. Reed III and F. Fesharaki. The Oil Market in the 1990s: Challenges for the New Era. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
22. D. Spreng. 1988. Net-Energy Analysis and the Energy Requirements of Energy Systems. Praeger, New York. See page 222 for table of bioconversion efficiencies.
23. Smil, V. 1991. Population growth and nitrogen: An exploration of a critical existential link. Population and Development Review 17:569-601.
24. H. Shapouri, J.A. Duffield and M.S. Graboski. 1995. Estimating the net energy balance of corn ethanol. USDA Agricultural Economic Report No. 721. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. National Agricultural Statistics Service, Herndon, Virginia.
25. US DOE, 1998. Annual Energy Review 1997. US Department of Energy, Washington, DC. Available: http://www.eia.gov/pub/energy.overview [7 April 1999].
26. In the USDA review in note 24, the Midwest corn yield is 122 bushels per acre, which also happens to be the average national corn yield during the past decade according to: USDA. 1999. Agricultural Statistics, 1999. US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Washington, DC. Available: http://www.nass.usda.gov/pubs [21 Feb. 2000].
27. J.H. Cook, J. Beyea, K.H. Keeler. 1991. Potential impacts of biomass production in the United States on biological diversity. Annual Review of Energy and Environment 16: 401-431.
28. OTA. 1980. Energy from Biological Processes. US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Washington, DC.
29. J. Pelisek. 1975. Conifer plantations and soil deterioration. Ecologist 5:332-336.
30. A.B. Lovins, L.H. Lovins, F. Krause and W. Bach. 1981. Least-Cost Energy: Solving the CO2 Problem. Brick House Publishing Co., Andover, MA.
31. J. Goldemberg, T.B. Johansson, A.K.N. Reddy and R.H. Williams. 1987. Energy for a Sustainable World. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC.
32. J. Zucchetto and G. Bickle. 1984. Energy and nutrient analyses of a dairy farm in central Pennsylvania. Energy in Agriculture 3:29-47.
33. P. Craumer. 1979. Farm productivity and energy efficiency in Amish and modern dairying. Agriculture and Environment 4:281-299.
34. W.A. Johnson, V. Stoltzfus and P. Craumer. 1977. Energy conservation in Amish agriculture. Science 198:373-378.
35. M. Green. 1978. Eating Oil: Energy Use in Food Production. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
36. R.M. Gifford. 1976. An overview of fuel used for crops and national agricultural systems. Search 7:412-417.
37. C.A.S. Hall, C.J. Cleveland and R. Kaufmann. 1986. Energy and Resource Quality: The Ecology of the Economic Process. John Wiley, New York.
38. C.E. Goering and M.J. Daughtery. 1982. Energy accounting for eleven vegetable oil fuels. Transactions of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers 25:1209-1215.
39. R. Herendeen and S. Brown. 1987. A comparative analysis of net energy from woody biomass. Energy 12:75-84.
40. A.F. Turhollow and R.D. Perlack. 1991. Emissions of CO2 from energy crop production. Biomass and Bioenergy 1:129-135.
41. W. Vergara and D. Pimentel. 1978. Fuels from biomass: Comparative study of the potential in five countries: The United States, Brazil, India, Sudan, and Sweden. Advances in Energy Systems and Technology 1:125-173.
42. M. Demuynck, E.J. Nyns and W. Palz. 1984. Biogas Plants in Europe: A Practical Handbook. D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht.
43. R.A. Herendeen. 1988. Net energy considerations. Pp. 255-273 in: R.E. West and F. Kreith (eds.). Economic Analysis of Solar Thermal Energy Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
44. C.J. Cleveland and R. Herendeen. 1989. Solar parabolic collectors: Successive generations are better net energy and exergy producers. Energy Systems and Policy 13:63-77.
45. G. Tyner, Sr. and R.G. Fowler. 1992. Estimating the viability of alternative sources of energy. In: Investing in Natural Capital — A Prerequisite for Sustainability. Second Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics. Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, 3-6 August 1992.
46. B. Sørensen. 1995. History of, and recent progress in, wind-energy utilization. Annual Review of Energy and Environment 20:387-424.
47. M.W. Gilliland, J.M. Klopatek and S.G. Hildebrand. 1981. Net energy: Results for small-scale hydroelectric power and summary of existing analyses. Energy 6:1029-1040.
48. D.M. Gates. 1985. Energy and Ecology. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA.
49. R.H. Williams and E.D. Larson. 1993. Advanced gasification-based biomass power generation. Pp. 729-785 in: T.B. Johansson, H. Kelly, A.K.N. Reddy and R.H. Williams (eds.). Renewable Energy: Sources for Fuels and Electricity. Island Press, Washington, DC.
50. B. Hannon. 1981. The energy cost of energy. Pp. 81-107 in: H.E. Daly and A.F. Umaña (eds.). Energy, Economics, and the Environment: Conflicting Views of an Essential Interrelationship. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display...12/01/3aa90b0d9
Fertility and the Age of Soils
Wes Jackson
Released December 1, 2000
Published as a fund raising letter, December 2000.
Professor Tim Crews of Prescott College in Arizona described his undergraduate experience with the famous intensive vegetable gardens established by Alan Chadwick at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Although Tim was much taken with what was under way in that beautiful setting, he found one disconcerting activity impossible to get off his mind — there were frequent pickup runs for manure for these lovely and productive gardens. "They may not use chemicals," he concluded, "but they certainly are not sustainable."
Tim experienced an intellectual epiphany of sorts. I, too, had one in California during a three-day field trip in Mendocino County. Hans Jenny, America's foremost soil scientist at the time, and his friend Arnold Schultz, a forestry professor at the University of California-Berkeley, led Canadian ecologist J. Stan Rowe and me up and down what is called the ecological staircase of Mendocino. Any penchant toward eco-fundamentalism was sure to suffer. Mine did.
To understand an ecological staircase, imagine you are on the beach looking inland with your back to the Pacific. If you were several hundred feet tall, if no vegetation were in the way, you would easily see five stair treads, geological uplifts 100,000 years apart. Before I started up the staircase, I believed any natural ecosystem improves over time, that roots would hold the essential soil minerals and add topsoil, increase in stability and maybe increase diversity. Or if the ecosystem should happen not to improve, at least it would stay constant indefinitely. By the time we headed back to Berkeley, the pillars of my ecological understanding had been shaken. In the younger first and second terraces away from the ocean, the redwood and Douglas fir forest loomed up around us. Terrace three was a transition zone that included Jeffrey pine, and terraces four and five (the older) were pygmy forest, severely stunted in appearance.
Over the next several weeks, letters were exchanged, and finally, about four months after the field trip, a letter came from Hans saying he was unaware of such a concept as steadily improving ecosystems. He said such a "sunshiney belief rests on a neglect to appreciate the soil as a dynamic — either improving or degrading — vital component of land ecosystems." There was little comfort in the fact that I had had it half right.
In that same letter he expressed concern whether he and Arnold had presented Stan and me with "sufficient physical evidence that the decline in soil and vegetation from the redwood-fir forest on the second terrace to the pygmy forest is a natural sequence." Plant ecologists had, in fact, designated the redwood-fir forest a climatic climax (so long as the climate was constant the vegetative structure would not change), and the pygmy forest an edaphic climax (relating to soil). In Hans's view, ecologists had designated two different worlds, two different ecosystems, "not realizing that the two ecosystems might be on the same time arrow, merely separated by a long time interval."
Fundamentalism sometimes dies hard. Staring into a soil pit dug into the fourth terrace, I could sympathize with the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Even there, with the evidence before me, I protested, saying that good farming can improve the soil. "Yes," Hans said, but "the extent depends on what kind of a soil, virgin or depleted, the farmer begins with." He thought it would be difficult to improve a good virgin Iowa prairie soil by management techniques, except perhaps by applying nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
This was the beginning of an important lesson for me. Since then I have burdened myself and my students with the question: Why should a look to nature, as we work out our relationship to the earth, provide us with easy absolutes? Nature may or may not share human interests. We choose to make nature our standard for agriculture instead of trying to understand agriculture on its own terms. We, not nature, have concepts and notions of good and bad. Most humans comparing the luxuriant redwood-fir forest to the pygmy forest would call the pygmy deteriorated or declining. Yet Hans insisted that "nature might call it a biological improvement, an adaptation of vegetation to a changing substrate." This then raises the most important question of all: Why are there not pygmy forests or pygmy prairies or pygmy whatevers all over the world? The answer is: because we have glaciers, volcanoes, mountain building due to uplift — disturbances that seem destructive yet are sources for the raw materials of soil formation. This requires very long time periods, so soil is as much of a nonrenewable resource as oil. What right have we to expect those nosing roots to absolutely hold all nutrients from any downward leaching?
Tim Crews told his story to our 14 Graduate Research Fellows when they assembled with us for a week in Matfield Green. Discussion continued among staff, visitors and graduate students. Our session reviewer was Dr. Ted Lefroy, a scientist from the University of Western Australia in Perth. During one coffee break Ted turned to me and said, "the United States has a ?manure pile' this high" (and he held his hand some five feet from the floor) "and Australia has a manure pile this high" (holding his hand less than a foot from the floor). "The last benefit we got from tectonic plate movements," Ted said, "was 65 million years ago; our nutrient pool, our manure pile, has mostly run down. You had an ice age in the last 2 million years plus major mountain formation in the Rockies in the last 15 million years. The Sierra Nevada and Coast Range are young. You live on a young continent."
When we look around the world at the places with a bountiful agricultural production, we are struck with the importance of recent geologic events necessary to sustain them.
The Greek historian Herodotus once said, "Egypt is the gift of the Nile." True enough, but that is only part of the story. The Blue Nile carries nutrients from Ethiopia's volcanic highlands, thanks to the predictable monsoon rains arriving from the Indian Ocean each year. The White Nile, with its jungle origin and swampy places, contributed its organic matter, which also had to be nutrient-sponsored, of course. Fertility from two parts of the world converged at the confluence. Prior to the dams on the Nile, these fresh nutrients and organic matter spilled over to deposit a layer one millimeter thick each year to be turned into crops by Egyptian farmers. Or, put otherwise, the volcanoes of Ethiopia and the swampy jungles of Africa built the pyramids using humans as agents.
The gardens at the University in Santa Cruz are beneficiaries of what we might call an acceptable theft, for otherwise the manure would likely go unused. Where those nutrients came from before becoming manure is important to know. The likelihood is they had their origin as horizontal fertility from across a broad landscape, perhaps from hay and grain grown in a California valley. Transformed into manure piles in the livestock barns, the grain became vertical fertility in the Santa Cruz garden.
As you can see, this is a story that lends itself neither to sound bites nor bumper stickers. It is not a story to discredit organic gardening, but it is a story that illustrates, for all practical purposes, that soil is as much of a non-renewable resource as oil. This is where our work at The Land comes in, for when we watch topsoil slip into the sea, we are watching the disappearance of the faces of unborn children. The Land Institute's paradigm, featuring a diversity of perennial roots modeled after nature's arrangements, we think represents the best bet to hold the soil that will support with dignity healthy children of the future. Perennial roots hold those nutrients whether made available by the likes of Pleistocene glaciers or mountain creation.
Agricultural time, 10,000 years, is not even a blink compared to geological time. Yet it is during that blink that we humans have been creating horizontal open mine shafts called plow furrows in the most wasteful mining operation in the history of the planet. We don't have another 10,000 years to correct the problem, and we need to get going while we still have the slack with which geology has blessed us.
Fertility and the Age of Soils
Wes Jackson
Released December 1, 2000
Published as a fund raising letter, December 2000.
Professor Tim Crews of Prescott College in Arizona described his undergraduate experience with the famous intensive vegetable gardens established by Alan Chadwick at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Although Tim was much taken with what was under way in that beautiful setting, he found one disconcerting activity impossible to get off his mind — there were frequent pickup runs for manure for these lovely and productive gardens. "They may not use chemicals," he concluded, "but they certainly are not sustainable."
Tim experienced an intellectual epiphany of sorts. I, too, had one in California during a three-day field trip in Mendocino County. Hans Jenny, America's foremost soil scientist at the time, and his friend Arnold Schultz, a forestry professor at the University of California-Berkeley, led Canadian ecologist J. Stan Rowe and me up and down what is called the ecological staircase of Mendocino. Any penchant toward eco-fundamentalism was sure to suffer. Mine did.
To understand an ecological staircase, imagine you are on the beach looking inland with your back to the Pacific. If you were several hundred feet tall, if no vegetation were in the way, you would easily see five stair treads, geological uplifts 100,000 years apart. Before I started up the staircase, I believed any natural ecosystem improves over time, that roots would hold the essential soil minerals and add topsoil, increase in stability and maybe increase diversity. Or if the ecosystem should happen not to improve, at least it would stay constant indefinitely. By the time we headed back to Berkeley, the pillars of my ecological understanding had been shaken. In the younger first and second terraces away from the ocean, the redwood and Douglas fir forest loomed up around us. Terrace three was a transition zone that included Jeffrey pine, and terraces four and five (the older) were pygmy forest, severely stunted in appearance.
Over the next several weeks, letters were exchanged, and finally, about four months after the field trip, a letter came from Hans saying he was unaware of such a concept as steadily improving ecosystems. He said such a "sunshiney belief rests on a neglect to appreciate the soil as a dynamic — either improving or degrading — vital component of land ecosystems." There was little comfort in the fact that I had had it half right.
In that same letter he expressed concern whether he and Arnold had presented Stan and me with "sufficient physical evidence that the decline in soil and vegetation from the redwood-fir forest on the second terrace to the pygmy forest is a natural sequence." Plant ecologists had, in fact, designated the redwood-fir forest a climatic climax (so long as the climate was constant the vegetative structure would not change), and the pygmy forest an edaphic climax (relating to soil). In Hans's view, ecologists had designated two different worlds, two different ecosystems, "not realizing that the two ecosystems might be on the same time arrow, merely separated by a long time interval."
Fundamentalism sometimes dies hard. Staring into a soil pit dug into the fourth terrace, I could sympathize with the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Even there, with the evidence before me, I protested, saying that good farming can improve the soil. "Yes," Hans said, but "the extent depends on what kind of a soil, virgin or depleted, the farmer begins with." He thought it would be difficult to improve a good virgin Iowa prairie soil by management techniques, except perhaps by applying nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
This was the beginning of an important lesson for me. Since then I have burdened myself and my students with the question: Why should a look to nature, as we work out our relationship to the earth, provide us with easy absolutes? Nature may or may not share human interests. We choose to make nature our standard for agriculture instead of trying to understand agriculture on its own terms. We, not nature, have concepts and notions of good and bad. Most humans comparing the luxuriant redwood-fir forest to the pygmy forest would call the pygmy deteriorated or declining. Yet Hans insisted that "nature might call it a biological improvement, an adaptation of vegetation to a changing substrate." This then raises the most important question of all: Why are there not pygmy forests or pygmy prairies or pygmy whatevers all over the world? The answer is: because we have glaciers, volcanoes, mountain building due to uplift — disturbances that seem destructive yet are sources for the raw materials of soil formation. This requires very long time periods, so soil is as much of a nonrenewable resource as oil. What right have we to expect those nosing roots to absolutely hold all nutrients from any downward leaching?
Tim Crews told his story to our 14 Graduate Research Fellows when they assembled with us for a week in Matfield Green. Discussion continued among staff, visitors and graduate students. Our session reviewer was Dr. Ted Lefroy, a scientist from the University of Western Australia in Perth. During one coffee break Ted turned to me and said, "the United States has a ?manure pile' this high" (and he held his hand some five feet from the floor) "and Australia has a manure pile this high" (holding his hand less than a foot from the floor). "The last benefit we got from tectonic plate movements," Ted said, "was 65 million years ago; our nutrient pool, our manure pile, has mostly run down. You had an ice age in the last 2 million years plus major mountain formation in the Rockies in the last 15 million years. The Sierra Nevada and Coast Range are young. You live on a young continent."
When we look around the world at the places with a bountiful agricultural production, we are struck with the importance of recent geologic events necessary to sustain them.
The Greek historian Herodotus once said, "Egypt is the gift of the Nile." True enough, but that is only part of the story. The Blue Nile carries nutrients from Ethiopia's volcanic highlands, thanks to the predictable monsoon rains arriving from the Indian Ocean each year. The White Nile, with its jungle origin and swampy places, contributed its organic matter, which also had to be nutrient-sponsored, of course. Fertility from two parts of the world converged at the confluence. Prior to the dams on the Nile, these fresh nutrients and organic matter spilled over to deposit a layer one millimeter thick each year to be turned into crops by Egyptian farmers. Or, put otherwise, the volcanoes of Ethiopia and the swampy jungles of Africa built the pyramids using humans as agents.
The gardens at the University in Santa Cruz are beneficiaries of what we might call an acceptable theft, for otherwise the manure would likely go unused. Where those nutrients came from before becoming manure is important to know. The likelihood is they had their origin as horizontal fertility from across a broad landscape, perhaps from hay and grain grown in a California valley. Transformed into manure piles in the livestock barns, the grain became vertical fertility in the Santa Cruz garden.
As you can see, this is a story that lends itself neither to sound bites nor bumper stickers. It is not a story to discredit organic gardening, but it is a story that illustrates, for all practical purposes, that soil is as much of a non-renewable resource as oil. This is where our work at The Land comes in, for when we watch topsoil slip into the sea, we are watching the disappearance of the faces of unborn children. The Land Institute's paradigm, featuring a diversity of perennial roots modeled after nature's arrangements, we think represents the best bet to hold the soil that will support with dignity healthy children of the future. Perennial roots hold those nutrients whether made available by the likes of Pleistocene glaciers or mountain creation.
Agricultural time, 10,000 years, is not even a blink compared to geological time. Yet it is during that blink that we humans have been creating horizontal open mine shafts called plow furrows in the most wasteful mining operation in the history of the planet. We don't have another 10,000 years to correct the problem, and we need to get going while we still have the slack with which geology has blessed us.
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