Peak oil is a topic I have read about in the past on and off. Ironically, I was diverted into the subject today while looking for books on a subject—transhumanism—that is far more optimistic than those typically written on this one. According to noted Princeton geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes (i.e., no crackpot):
World oil production will start to fall sometime during this decade, never to rise again. In 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970's. Although Hubbert was widely criticized by some oil experts and economists, in 1971 Hubbert's prediction came true. The 100 year period when most of the world's oil is being discovered became known as "Hubbert's Peak". The peak stands in contrast to the hundreds of millions of years the oil deposits took to form. Hubbert's methods predict a peak in world oil production less than five years away.
Many books on this subject paint doom and gloom scenarios for which there is no solution, except to figure out how to survive in a world where cheap abundant energy of any kind is a thing of the past—in other words, a lifestyle more akin to 19th century agrarian societies than modern information economies. Perhaps the best known of such books is The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler. As the review from Publisher's Weekly states:
The indictment of suburbia and the car culture that the author presented in The Geography of Nowhere turns apocalyptic in this vigorous, if overwrought, jeremiad. Kunstler notes signs that global oil production has peaked and will soon dwindle, and argues in an eye-opening, although not entirely convincing, analysis that alternative energy sources cannot fill the gap, especially in transportation. The result will be a Dark Age in which "the center does not hold" and "all bets are off about civilization's future." Absent cheap oil, auto-dependent suburbs and big cities will collapse, along with industry and mechanized agriculture; serfdom and horse-drawn carts will stage a comeback; hunger will cause massive "die-back"; otherwise "impotent" governments will engineer "designer viruses" to cull the surplus population; and Asian pirates will plunder California. Kunstler takes a grim satisfaction in this prospect, which promises to settle his many grudges against modernity. A "dazed and crippled America," he hopes, will regroup around walkable, human-scale towns; organic local economies of small farmers and tradesmen will replace an alienating corporate globalism; strong bonds of social solidarity will be reforged; and our heedless, childish culture of consumerism will be forced to grow up. Kunstler's critique of contemporary society is caustic and scintillating as usual, but his prognostications strain credibility.
While Deffeyes is hardly a rosy optimist, he devotes much of his recent book to exploring realistic alternative energy options. Environmentalists will not necessarily be heartened by his presentation, though. Again, from Publisher's Weekly:
In this sobering, instructive and somewhat apocalyptic book, Deffeyes (Hubbert's Peak) paints a bleak picture of the future of fossil fuels and of what will happen to the world without them. Deffeyes bases his book on the work of M. King Hubbert, who mathematically determined that the world's oil supply would peak in 2000 and then drop steadily thereafter. Deffeyes tackles the mathematics of Hubbert's method and offers his own prediction (that the peak will occur at the end of 2005), but there is plenty here for those who aren't enamored with numbers, including a crash course in the slow evolution of oil. Oil and its related petroleum byproducts, Deffeyes points out, have changed the world economically, technologically and socially, and its absence could have a similarly massive, though negative, effect. Deffeyes predicts that famine, war and death will result from the shortages, but he does more than just sound the alarm: a large portion of the book is devoted to surveying the pros and cons of alternative resources like coal and hydrogen. Though Deffeyes offers only a few practical suggestions for the reader, most of which are obvious (i.e., get on a waitlist for a hybrid car), this is an earnestly written cautionary tale and a great resource for anyone looking to become energy literate.
Implicit in Deffeyes' thesis is that peak oil presents more of an immediate threat to the world than global warming and/or the risks inherent in using nuclear power. (Check out his blog for ongoing thoughts on this subject.) No doubt, some luddite environmentalists will be drawn to Kunstler's doomsday scenario, with the resultant return to a pre-technological, small-scale village lifestyle. I would caution anyone who has never worked hard manual labor to not over-romanticize this possibility. To paraphrase Hobbes, life for most people for most of history was nasty, brutish, and short. The picture Deffeyes paints and the possible solutions he offers present us with hard choices and the need for some serious reflection. Savannah is perhaps better poised to deal with the ramifications than many other cities are due to our warm climate, walkability, and year-round growing season. The question is whether the predictions of impending calamity are valid. If they are, then the time is now to start planning for how to deal with it.
For those concerned enough to research what to do next, there are a couple of more practical books out there:
- Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash
- Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World
Keywords: alternative energy, doomsday, peak oil