The Empty Tank: Witty, grim, unflinching, hopeful --- essential reading when peak oil meets global warming

The Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air, and the Coming Global Financial Catastrophe
Jeremy Leggett
Random House, 2005

[W]hat makes the depth of the current global addiction especially bewildering is that, for the entire time we have been sliding into the trap, we have known that oil is in fact in limited supply. At current rates of use, the global tank is going to run too low to fuel the growing demand sooner rather than later in this century. This is not a controversial statement. It is just a question of when....

In a society that put a man on the Moon more than three decades ago, surely there can be no doubt that we could replace oil use if we seriously wanted to. I ask again, why have we not been fast-tracking the solutions to the problem long since? (p. 6)

I've read several books on peak oil, and this one is among my favorites. Geologist Leggett provides a compelling look at the coming topping point in oil production, the global catastrophe of global warming, and possible hope for the future, and he does so in a style that reads like well-crafted fiction. Interspersed throughout the narrative are Leggett's journal entries which reveal an intimate perspective on how all this theory and Big Picture stuff plays out in daily life.

First off, an admission. Based on the author photo on the book's dust jacket, I kept envisioning Leggett as the fired forklift driver in the British TV show The Office who challenges the wisdom of keeping Anton the midget on as a forklift driver. So that guy's voice was the one with which my mental vocalizer read the book. That, along with his absurdist, understated British wit (a la Monty Python and Douglas Adams), made the book a quite often funny read, in spite of the rather grim subject matter.

This wit is clearly on display in the Prologue, which tells the story of geological and human history from the Big Bang to the "The Two Oversights" of the 20th century. This account is told as if being related to alien anthropologists who have no vested interest in seeing history through the particular lens of their ideology or belief system. So along the way from creation to the present we encounter Apocalypse One, the catastrophic end of the Carboniferous Period which left behind a lot of coal; the "Two Great Underground Cookups," during which all oil and natural gas were created; and Apocalypse Two, otherwise known as the K2 Event or the end of the age of dinosaurs, 65 mya. Humans arrive on the scene in the last few milliseconds of the year that has been geological history, and develop agriculture and religion and urban civilization and almost continuous hostility toward one another:

Conflict avoidance was not, and never has been, our strong suit. At first we organized into tribes, and periodically killed the members of other tribes. Later we organized ourselves into city-states and built amazing cathedrals. But despite our inventing athletics as a potential substitute for war, we still couldn't think our way out of regular armed conflict, and our means of waging war grew steadily worse. (p. x)

In the last three centuries we learned to support all these endeavors by exploiting the fossil fuels from the Great Underground Cookups:

Just as [coal's dirtiness] was becoming very irritating, we found we could drill below the surface of the planet, pump oil, and burn that. We didn't even have to send children down to get oil. (p. xi)

(See what I mean about the wit?) The discovery of and reliance on oil lead to two big "oversights." Big Oversight One is that all the burning of this oil, coal, and gas has created global warming which has been ignored by the Number One Nation-State. This nation, not otherwise named (to protect the innocent, of course), happens also to be Number One Petroleum Addict, and in this capacity serves deeply entrenched vested interests:

[M]ore than 100 years of unconstrained burning of oil, and 200 years of coal, have created quite a set of vested interests....These vested interests have created a web of power that transcends the throw-weight of the nation states. This web has become, in effect, a kind of Empire. The Empire of Oil is loosely bound, and even capable of civil war, but is without the most powerful interest group on the planet.

These vested interests have prevented research into alternative and meaningful political action. Big Oversight Two is that, because all the oil we have was created during the Two Big Cookups, and so therefore is limited in quantity by definition, discovery and production of oil is peaking. What this means is simple, if unpleasant to contemplate:

Humans will no longer be able to run their lives and their industries on growing amounts of cheap oil. All we can expect thereafter is shrinking supplies of expensive oil....We will look for the alternatives to come to the rescue, but the alternatives won't be able to, or at least not in enough volume to make a big difference, because the Empire of Oil and its Culture of Suppression has held them back all the years of the Great Addiction. (p. xiv)

One or the other "oversight" alone would be bad enough to face, but the possible threat posed by the synergy of both is chilling. Luckily, Leggett recognizes the role that each of us play in shaping our collective destiny, and so does not completely relinquish hope:

As the impact of the oil topping point joins with the first wave of assaults by a climate going awry, is there any hope that we can avoid an unpleasant outcome? I fear not. The chapters to come will show why. But what we can do, collectively, is to stop the rot and have a second crack at getting things right beyond the unpleasantness....Because changes of course need hands on the tiller, involvement matters. This book is a call to arms. Let us take our stupidities with oil, which will be put under such a necessary microscope when the topping point hits, and turn them into a new beginning before it is too late. (pp. xiv-xv)

With this book, Leggett seeks to address three related questions: (1) how close is the peak? (2) why haven't we done something earlier? and (3) what can we do about it?

So how close is the peak in oil production? Leggett distinguishes between "late toppers" and "early toppers," i.e., those who think we've got 2 trillion more barrels of oil to exploited (oil companies, financial analysts, etc.) and those who think we've got around 1 trillion more barrels (in other words, the downside of the production curve). The difference between the two is, in Leggett's word, seismic. If the late toppers are right, then we have a few decades in which to work out plans for a smooth transition from oil and gas to alternative; if the early toppers are right, though, the peak may actually be upon us now.

Leggett discusses some key witnesses in support of the "early topper" school of thought including veteran petroleum geologist Colin Campbell, Chris Skrebowski (editor of the trade journal Petroleum Review), and Houston oil investor Matthew Simmons. If these folks are correct in their reading of the available data, then the situation we face may be summed up in this sentence from a report within the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves:

"A serious supply-demand discontinuity could lead to worldwide economic chaos" (p., 50)

Worldwide economic chaos. And even if the early toppers are wrong in their estimates regarding the peak in oil production, the discontinuity between rising demand and falling supply will still be a reality due to a lack of investment in exploration and infrastructure:

Stated simply, it seems that even if an early topping point doesn't hit us, the results of two decades of negligence in investment in infrastructure and exploration will. p. (59)

After thoroughly scaring the beejezus out of the reader by marshalling all this evidence that the age of easy, cheap oil is rapidly coming to a close, with potentially catastrophic results, he introduces a variable that no other peak oil author I've read has mentioned: global warming.

A pair of diagrams on pages 75 and 76 says it all. The first is a graph showing a jagged line fluctuating between two extremes of atmospheric CO₂, a minimum of around 175 ppm and a maximum of around 300 ppm, showing that these quantities have changed within a relatively standard range over the last 500,000 years. The last fraction of a millimeter of the graph, representing the last century, shows the concentration at the beginning of the 20th century (near 300 ppm) rocketing skyward, out of the normal range and in fact off of the graph altogether. The predicted CO₂ concentration for 2100, based on current emission rates, is over 700 ppm, effectively off the charts and into "seriously fucking things up" territory. The second graph plots temperature fluctuations over the last millennium and reveals that they too fly off the charts during the 21st century, leading to an average increase of over 5 degrees globally. Which is disastrous. This stuff ain't controversial folks, and it ain't a liberal plot. The temperature of the Earth is rapidly climbing, most likely due to our increase of atmospheric CO₂, and all we know about the consequences is that they won't be pretty.

So how did we allow ourselves to get into this mess? Leggett provides an answer by way of an historical overview of the age of oil, divided into two chapters. The first, "Before the Knowledge," describes how we dug the initial hole, while the second, "The Complicity Years," discusses the last few decades, during which we have known better but let all our nation's policies be dictated by a consortium of vested interests. Our inability to change our approach to energy and fossil fuels is pretty clearly revealed in our national response to the first oil shock, which hit in the form of the OPEC embargo against the US, in retaliation for its uncritical support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

In the first three months of the [OPEC] embargo, U.S. gasoline consumption had decreased by more than 7 percent. But, after the embargo ended, consumption shot right back up again. Apathy instantly reasserted itself in Congress. Almost 800 potential bills concerning energy had been circulating on Capitol Hill during the oil crisis, many of them intent on promoting the prospects for renewable energy, renewable fuels, and energy efficiency. But by July 1974 only eight of them had become law, and two of those involved the suspension of anti-pollution laws and the opening of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. (p. 101)

Once cheap oil went back online, all alternatives were back off the table. By 1975 Exxon was the world's biggest corporation, with GM and Ford also occupying seats in the top 10. We didn't learn and so the Second Oil Shock followed the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War. Although President Carter urged us to treat the fuel crisis as "the moral equivalent of war," Americans still didn't listen and willingly voted in Reagan and the last three decades of denial.

Of course, one could say that if these earlier oil shocks were survivable, even after a mistake like electing Reagan, then perhaps we shouldn't be too concerned about future oil shocks. Anticipating this, Leggett duly notes that the circumstances surrounding these first two oil shocks do not pertain to the coming megacrisis:

[T]he Saudis cannot pump faster as they did in 1980, there is no spare capacity anywhere, little oil is stockpiled, and there is little liklihood of new discoveries on the scale able to meet fast-growing global demand. Bad as it was then, it will be much worse when the next crunch hits. (p. 104)

According to ExxonMobil's Lee Raymond:

"I think the notion in the United States of energy independence, which was first proposed in the Nixon administration, was a poor concept thirty years ago and it is a poor concept today."There it is, just as he told OPEC. It couldn't be clearer. We choose dependency, and therefore overseas adventures by our military in support of our dependency. (p. 135)

There you have it. That's how we allowed ourselves to get into this predicament. The Empire of Oil made us into a nation of junkies who elect those promising to keep the fixes coming.

So what can we do about it? In his chapter astutely entitled, "What Can We Do About It?" Leggett outlines five basic arguments:

1. We can replace fossil fuels with renewable energies and do so rather swiftly.

Renewable energies comprise a big family of options including biodiesel, a hydrogen economy (energy storage with home solar-driven electrolysis), fuel cells, solar (electric) and solar (heat), wind power, etc. There are alternative, renewable sources for plastics too, which is important since more petroleum goes to those industrial uses than into fuel production. We can improve efficiency too. And of course, we can re-envision the situation to come up with some novel solutions:

Currently, some 200 million of the world's 700 million hydrogen cars and trucks travel and park around America. If they were all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles they would have many times the grid's total generating capacity. What need then for nuclear, and coal- and gas-fired power plants? (p. 155)

2. We've waited too long, and so even with these technologies ramping up swiftly, we won't be able to cover the shortfall between now and then with any combination of fuel sources.

Economies will shrink, which is never a good thing for little people like me with jobs and families. Some are pushing for nuclear power to fill the gap (going so far as to discuss it in the pages of Mother Earth News), but Leggett thinks nuclear won't come to the rescue because (1) it will take even longer to get nuclear up and running to fill the gap than it would other sources of power, (2) investors don't want to back nuclear, particularly new unproven designs, (3) the threat of terrorism + nuke plants = bad idea, (4) disposal of waste is still an unsolved problem, and (5) nuke power's track record for accidents, cover-ups, etc. make it understandably unattractive. In short, nuclear is simply too risky in all ways to take seriously. (Although, sadly, that won't prevent our government from funding it, alas.)

Just think what renewable energy and energy-efficient markets could be doing by 2020, given even a fraction of the governmental and institutional support nuclear has been given for the last half-century. Come to think of it, just imagine what they could be doing tomorrow. (p. 159)

3. Renewable energy and fuel and energy efficiency will grow explosively.

Come whatever in other societal and economic sectors, people working in renewable energy, energy storage, and energy efficiency will be in the front row of those who can help once widespread acceptance of the oil topping point and its implications had descended on the world. (p. 165)

Leggett makes the important point that looking at solar energy costs means comparing them to retail prices rather than generator costs, because PV solar power generation gathers the power right where it is needed rather than producing and shipping it over extensive power grids. The decentralized quality of solar means that it is incredibly competitive in terms of price when generating costs are factored in, something that nuclear and coal advocates never do.

4. Many will try to turn to coal to support the status quo --- this will basically be a life-or-death decision for the future of the planet --- renewables or polluting coal.

The coal industry is strangely hard-line. Here is a technology that is so clearly mortgaging the future--at best, torpedoing it at worst--and yet it continues to grow largely unapologetically around the world. Besides the future death toll from unmitigated global warming and dire air quality, there is also the actual death toll to date from getting the stuff out of the ground....In the face of all this, even if they genuinely reject scientists' arguments about global warming, you would think there would be a little humility, a little reluctance about the product, a little willingness to search hard for alternatives. No, not that I have seen. In all my years as an environmental campaigner, I have observed a clear distinction between the oil industry and the coal industry....The oilmen and women were capable of politeness, reasoned debate, and even changing their position. The coal men and women weren't; not that I ever saw, once. (p. 168)

So instead of looking at renewables, we get nonsense about "clean coal," coal gasification, carbon sequestration, etc. And for the effects of coal on the world, all you need to do is Google "Beijing" and "air quality." And yet coal looks easy and cheap when the energy panic hits, and it has lots of technoscience supporting the rush to "clean coal," usually from the same folks who want to put parasols between the Earth and the Sun to cut down on solar radiation. Very little systems thinking and a technoscientific culture that valorizes individual achievement (just think about genetic engineering and the lack of consideration of ecology) mean that the coal hoax may be perpetrated on an unsuspecting Earth at precisely the worst possible time.

[G]iven the research programs underway aiming to bolster the acceptability of coal in a warming world, the depth of denial in the coal and coal-related theocracies, and the scope for iconoclastic scientists to fan the flames of confusion--belief in the feasibility of burning a thousand billion metric tons of coal or more and getting away with it might be much greater too. (p. 173)

5. We can influence the outcome of the struggle over coal vs. renewables

Don't look to leadership from governments or corporations. According to Leggett it must come from individuals. (I must note that these options are not mutually exclusive, and that following merely the role of individual effort may be playing into the corporate trap of devaluing collective efforts.) One should follow Stephen Leeb's lead by encouraging enlightened self-interest when investing money--invest in a green future and lead the marketplace where you want it to be. We must act locally and in every way possible to reach the tipping point from which a new future is visible.

Legget concludes with another presentation for aliens, this time looking at the present and at a possible hopeful futures. Consumer Empire gets hit by warriors in commandeered civilian jetliners and retaliates, pitting its own Christian Fundamentalists against the Middle Eastern Muslim Fundamentalists in a Cycle of Hate.

In both the Consumer Empire and the Middle Eastern nation-states, Fundamentalism has thrived amid all this mayhem. In the Consumer Empire, many humans hold a belief that their version of God would let them trash the Earth and still join Him in His heaven. Indeed, the more quickly we trash it, the more quickly they would get to enjoy what they think of as the Rapture. Rapturist humans tend to care nothing about the fuel efficiency of their horseless carriages, tend not to give a damn about the alternatives to oil, and tend to be very keen on burning coal. They also figure that all-out war might be another way to join their version of God more quickly than letting things run their normal course, so they tend not to be averse to that either....

For humans who believe in Cosmopolitan Tolerance--simply stated, having a stab at learning from the lessons of history--things are beginning to look really very bleak as they stand today. (p. 189)

Oversights One and Two show up, the economy collapses as oil production peaks and there are no replacements, there's all sort of political repression taking place in Consumer Number One in the wake of the attacks, and then global warming kicks in and really fucks with everything. This is Leggett's prediction of what will happen. Not a lot of wiggle room in there, and as he has noted, it is definitely unpleasant. He doesn't end there, though. Rather he provides an optimistic vision of the sort of world we can bring about out of this wreckage, a new Renaissance in which the tipping point is reached and humanity chooses a future of alternative energy and power, which in turn leads to a general renewed interest in the local, in community, in place, and eventually leads to a stabilization of human population through the education and empowerment of women. Not a bad future at all, but one that will definitely take a lot of dedication and hardwork with no hope to see the results. Like building a cathedral or journeying toward the Promised Land.

Out of Gas: Good intro to peak oil science, but look elsewhere for solutions

Out of Gas
David Goodstein
W.W. Norton & Company, 2004

We can hope, if we are wise, to alter the laws of peoples. But we cannot change the laws of nature. The intent of this small book is to explain the relevant laws of nature. The idea is to sketch out, for those who are not specialists, both the opportunities and the limitations that nature has provided for us. Only if we understand both can we hope to proceed with wisdom. (p. 19)

To this end Dr. David Goodstein, professor of physics at Caltech, has written a very readable introduction to the imminent peak in oil production and subsequent "end of the age of oil." Alas the book's greatest strength, its relatively narrow focus on the science surrounding fuel and energy, is also its biggest weakness when it comes to proposing solutions. After all, the problem of peak oil has as much to do with "the laws of peoples," or at least their habits and expectations, as it does with the laws of nature and raw technoscientific know-how.

He begins by describing something which is now a standard phrase in our household, "peak oil." M. King Hubbert was a petroleum geologist who predicted that the rate of oil extraction for the lower-48 states would hit a maximum value in the early 1970s (i.e., it would peak) and that it would rapidly decline afterward. Although his ideas were roundly dismissed in the shiny-happy 1950s, he found a more receptive audience during the fuel-challenged '70s. His prediction was based on three basic methods: (1) noting that increasing rates of resource use equal increasing rates of resource depletion, (2) assuming that rates of oil production will follow a bell-shaped curve, and (3) recognizing that the curve in production paralleled the curve in discovery, which has already peaked.

Goodstein notes that not all geologists heed Hubbert's warning, discussing oil in terms of the ratio of reserves to production (the R/P ratio) and concluding that we have oil aplenty for at least 40 to 100 years. As well, there is little agreement about the total amount of oil reserves left in the earth, and so all calculations based upon this uncertain amount must also necessarily be uncertain. His response is to note that Hubbert's warning is not about running out of oil per se, but about reaching a critical point at which the demand for oil will outstrip production:

Given that worldwide demand will continue to increase, as it has for well over a century, Hubbert's followers expect the crisis to occur when the peak is reached, rather than when the last drop is pumped. In other words, we will be in trouble when we've used up half the oil that existed, not all of it.

He then gives a cursory overview of the other energy sources available to us at this point in time. There are the much-discussed heavy oils, tar sands, shale oils, etc. whose exploitation will be expensive, slow, energy-intensive, and even more environmentally disastrous than conventional oil has been, and those cons are relevant only if we grant that these substances will ever be feasible to produce in quantity to begin with. Natural gas is a possible substitute for the oil on which we depend, but that would require an enormous overhaul of our entire energy infrastructure for a substance whose production will peak in a few decades, based on current demand levels. In other words natural gas is not a long-term solution. Although we have centuries worth of coal in the ground, it is highly polluting, dangerous to mine, and contains only half the energy of an equivalent amount of oil; additionally, to extract the same amount of energy from coal that we currently get from oil, we'd need to mine ten times as much coal as we do today. (To those who think this is reasonable, all I can say is here's your lamp and your pick, start digging.) Barring some crazy advances in technology (oil-based technology, I should add) nuclear fusion is a nonstarter, and nuclear fission, with good reason, is politically unpopular. So what options are available to us? What are the limitations reality imposes on how we can respond to this looming crisis?

Before Goodstein answers these essential questions (and because he is, after all, a life-long teacher) he provides crash courses in several areas, beginning with basic terms used in the discussion around energy. Global warming and the greenhouse effect aren't all bad, he says, because if it weren't for those gases and their warming effects, the Earth would be a pretty cold ball of rock floating in space. On the other hand global warming understood as "human-induced catastrophic climate change" is a very bad thing. Nuclear energy isn't all bad either, especially since all the energy we use ultimately comes from nuclear reactions in the sun. He also notes that while around 100,000 men and boys died in English coal mines in the latter half of the 19th century, the total number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl is around 2,500. (It isn't the most compelling argument for nuclear power, but it certainly makes visible the normally unseen human cost of fossil fuels.) We cannot conserve energy, which conserves itself as a fundamental law of nature; rather, we can learn to conserve our fuel. As Goodstein himself notes on p. 48, to say that there can never be an energy crisis "doesn't mean we don't have a problem; it just means we haven't been describing the problem in the correct terms." Because many of the books critical of peak oil use terminological sleight of hand to mislead readers into thinking everything is A-OK, this information helps provide intellectual self-defense against these status quo apologists.

The bulk of the book is dedicated to chapters on the history of energy, which describes the various forms of energy (e.g., kinetic, potential, thermal, etc.), the history and characteristics of electricity (a form of energy that is central to contemporary life), and the absolute importance of the idea of entropy, in which a fraction of energy used to do any kind of work will instead become disorganized heat energy. He describes a very vivid demonstration that he uses in his introductory physics lecture courses to underscore the implications of entropy: suspended from a long cord directly in front of his face is a 16-lb. bowling ball. After he releases it, he explains to his class that his confidence in the laws of thermodynamics, and particularly in the inevitability of entropy, allows him to stand in place as the returning bowling ball hurtles toward him. Of course, as should be obvious to anyone whose watched a pendulum, each swing is a little shorter than the last as the energy of the swing is dissipated due to the resistance of the air (i.e., friction, i.e., heat, i.e., entropy). This material was all absolutely fascinating, particularly when explained by such an obviously gifted science teacher, but I still find myself scratching my head about how it all connects to the theme of the book, which is the end of the age of oil.

Finally, Goodstein looks at some of our options for fueling the future in his chapter called "Technological Fixes." We could place a giant umbrella in space between ourselves and the sun, which he describes as a foolish idea. Limiting the damage done by our consumption of fossil fuels and the resultant production of greenhouse gas through carbon sequestration is feasible, although it has a variety of serious drawbacks, including the sad fact that there is little economic incentive to do so. (Sad how maintaining human life on Earth does not count as an economic incentive.) Goodstein feels that we might need to reconsider nuclear fission as a primary fuel source, in spite of all the dangers and difficulties with which it is fraught. Yet, even if the world were forced to use nuclear fission in this fashion, it is estimated that there is only enough uranium fuel (U-235) to last five to twenty-five years. And even if we could find more nuclear fuel, the world would have to build one Gigawatt nuclear plant every day for 30 years to supply the amount of energy we currently consume in fossil fuels. The only other option, he argues, is solar power--whether as photoelectricity, solar heat power, or indirectly as wind-generated electricity--and in order to harvest the most solar power, we'd need to do so with solar collectors in geosynchronous orbit, another sizable task. His conclusion, though, does not seem to follow from these premises, which would seem to suggest that we don't have a replacement for the fossil fuels to which we are addicted. Instead he falls back on faith in the "future technological fix" to keep from succumbing to the hopelessness of our present situation:

As this brief survey suggest, there is no single magic bullet that will solve all our energy problems.There is no existing technology capable of replacing the oil we will soon be without, nor is there any on the horizon that we can depend on to replace the remaining fossil fuels when they are exhausted. And if we permit them to become exhausted before replacing them, we may place the climate of our planet in grave danger. The best hopes for our civilization lies in technologies that have not yet arisen--possibly based on scientific discoveries that have not yet been made. Most likely, progress will lie in incremental advances on many simultaneous fronts, based on principles we already understand: controlled nuclear fusion, safe breeder reactors, better materials for manipulating electricity, more efficient fuel cells, better means of generating hydrogen, and so on.

While I don't disagree with his assertion that we need to fund research into these various research programs, I'm hesitant to suggest that we can avert disaster through mere supply-side solutions. In other words, we are going to have to learn to be a lot less individualistic and more communal in orientation, exchange single driver vehicles for mass transit, eat less meat, have fewer children, and in general learn to replace our consumer culture with one that values relationships instead of retail.

Earlier in the book, Goodstein provides a best and worst case scenario based on Hubbert's prediction, and I feel this is an appropriate place to end my review of his book. In his best case scenario, we collectively wake up to the dilemma, develop a methane-based economy to bridge the gap to future fuels, and then use a combination of nuclear and solar power while we build an alternative energy infrastructure. In his worse case scenario, which really is worse case, we don't heed the warning, run out of oil, and end up burning lots of coal for energy, increasing the green house gases in the atmosphere, crossing a tipping point, and basically making the Earth unlivable.

No matter what else happens, this is the century in which we must learn to live without fossil fuels. Either we will be wise enough to do so before we have to, or we will be forced to do so when the stuff starts to run out. One way to accomplish that would be to return to life as it was lived in the eighteenth century, before we started to use much fossil fuel. That would require, among many other things, eliminating roughly 95 percent of the world's population. The other possibility is to devise a way of running a complex civilization approximating the one we have no which does not use fossil fuel. (pp. 37-8)

Thus Goodstein sets the stage for our near future. I don't agree with him that these two are the only possibilities, although they do seem to be good endpoints for a continuum of options. According to Jim Kunstler's The Long Emergency, our dreams of running a civilization that approximates our own, particularly our love of automobiles and the infrastructure that supports an automobile culture, are pipe dreams, and nothing more. On the other end of the continuum, while it might not be possible or even desirable to return to an 18th century existence, we can all certainly work on the demand side of the energy equation and learn to live much more simply and in a way that minimizes our energy consumption---using public transportation, eating less meat, walking through the park instead of the mall, etc.

In short, this is a great book for explaining the scientific basis for peak oil and the coming fuel/food/transportation crisis. With a lot of voices being well paid to write off "peakists" as whackos, this sort of book is invaluable for providing a solid, reasonable, scientific response. Unfortunately, the technoscientific fixes he provides aren't that compelling, as even he seems to suspect. All in all a good place to start, but not to finish, your peak oil reading.

Investment guide/nonpartisan introduction to the coming energy crisis

The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel
Stephen Leeb
Business Plus, 2007


For those who aren't familiar with the issues surrounding the peak in oil production, this easy-to-read book provides a short introduction to the hard times ahead. It also serves as a resource for those investor-types who want to try to surf that chaos and make a tidy profit. The authors, both experienced financial writers, set the stage for discussing the imminent oil shortage and its consequences by recounting the late-90s tech bubble and the fact that few investors noticed the unsustainability of this bubble. "The oil delusion is a mirror of the technology delusion. While almost everyone in 1999 believed that the bull market in technology would endure, almost everyone today believes that the bull market in oil is temporary" (12). Needless to say, the authors don't share this assessment of the oil market and go to great pains to explain their contrarian conclusions. The coming peak in oil production (whether this year or in 20 years), the increasing insecurity of American oil supplies, and the growing need for energy resources in China and India are creating "a clash between supply and demand that will send oil prices soaring to unprecedented levels" (19). According to the authors, the only thing that will postpone this hyper-bull market in oil is a worldwide depression, a situation that none would consider beneficial.

The near-future scenario outlined by the authors is similar to that predicted in other works on peak oil; in short, it entails at best a massive depression and reduction in societal complexity, and at worst the complete collapse of the economy and of civilization as we know it. "[A] crisis of epic proportions is brewing" (89). They assert that this crisis can be prevented or at least mitigated against and they repeatedly affirm their hope that it will be. However, they also recognize the profound failure in American leadership and the profoundly deluded perceptions of our economists, media, and citizenry about this looming crisis. In the 10th chapter, they outline a few possible visions of what the world of the near-future might look like---decline, stasis, or Armageddon---none of which options is particularly appetizing to someone raised in a world of boundless growth and opportunity.

The primary author, Stephen Leeb, holds a PhD in psychology, and he uses this expertise to articulate the blind spots of conformity and groupthink that are contributing both to this crisis and to the fortunes that will be lost with the economic downturn. Wise investors like Warren Buffett and George Soros have succeeded because they've not followed conventional wisdom. Likewise, the reader is challenged to abandon groupthink and to grapple with the reality of this looming crisis, both for reasons of personal financial success and for reasons germane to the whole of human civilization.

It is in the final two chapters that the authors outline their preferred investment classes and strategies for growing wealth in the hard times ahead, so if you just want them to show you the money, so to speak, you can skip the rest and read those concluding chapters. For those who want an introduction to the coming energy crisis, the rest of the book is an excellent, nonpartisan place to start.

(This review was originally written on March 6, 2007.)

Heinberg is a definitely a Cassandra, but remember what happened to those who ignored her

The Party's Over: Oil, War And The Fate Of Industrial Societies
Richard Heinberg
New Society Publishers, 2005


Richard Heinberg set out to answer the questions, "How much petroleum is left? How much coal, natural gas, and uranium? Will we ever run out? When? What will happen when we do? How can we best prepare? Will renewable substitutes--such as wind and solar power--enable industrialism to continue in a recognizable form indefinitely?" (p. 3) He sorted the various responses to these questions into four broad voices--those of free-market economists, environmental activists, petroleum geologists, and politicians--and of these four, he found the third, the petroleum geologists, to be the most useful, if only because "theirs is a long-range view based on physical reality" (p.5). (Throughout the book, Heinberg notes that the free-market economists are almost constitutionally opposed to talk of Peak Oil, because, as economist Robert Solow said, "the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources." Resources, in other words, are merely commodities created by the market to satisfy demands, and when the demand arises, the market will find a supply. Needless to say, Heinberg finds this laissez faire approach to Peak Oil--"perilous optimism"--quite dangerous because it ignores hard ecological realities.)

"The message here is that we are about to enter a new era in which each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how to adjust to this new regime" (p.5). In short, an ecological perspective on humanity's consumption of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources reveals that the astronomical population growth and economic expansion of the last century are the biological bloom and population overshoot enabled by an energy subsidy from cheap, abundant oil, coal, and natural gas. As with other population overshoots in human (and evolutionary) history, the end probably won't be pretty, with massive die-offs and "structural readjustments" (to use free-market lingo) bringing the human population back into line with the Earth's carrying capacity. Heinberg's book challenges us to face this coming change NOW and to do what we can to mitigate against its worst effects through exploring and developing economical and social alternatives to the status quo.

The discovery of new oil resources peaked several decades ago, according to the majority of petroleum geologists, and as it seems that discovery and production follow similar curves, it will be but a matter of years until the production of oil peaks. (For the record, this doesn't mean that we will literally run out of oil, but only that it will seem like we've run out, because it will cost more--financially and energetically--to extract and refine the oil than it is worth.) The peak in oil production won't merely have a direct impact on the automobile industry, but will also undermine the production of plastics and pharmaceuticals, of which oil is the feed stock, and will yank the rug out from under petro-intensive, corporate, "Green Revolution" agriculture. Combine these consequences with growing population and energy consumption of developing nations like China and India, and you have a recipe for seriously ugly changes. Like James Howard Kunstler in The Long Emergency, Heinberg examines various other energy sources and technologies, from natural gas to zero-point energy, and finds them all wanting in one way or another. (Unlike Kunstler, Heinberg maintains a solid faith in our flexibility as a species and in our ability to adapt.) According to this perspective, oil (and other nonrenewables) were a one-time windfall in ecological terms, and once we've passed the peak in extracting them, we will have to recognize our ecological limitations as one species amongst many struggling for limited resources.

I recently read PowerDown, the follow-up to this book, and found it an excellently written, powerful and thought-provoking read. Perhaps it's because I read The Party's Over in conjunction with the contrarian book The Bottomless Well (Huber and Mills) or perhaps it's because I'm a bit burned out reading books on Peak Oil, but whatever the reason I did not find this book as compelling as its sequel. That said, it is still a better introduction to the subject of Peak Oil and to its ecological basis and implications than most others I have yet read.

(This review was originally written on February 10, 2007.)

Essential and unsettling reading about our options for making it in the Post-oil Age

PowerDown: Options And Actions For A Post-Carbon World
Richard Heinberg
New Society Publishers, 2004

Author Richard Heinberg approaches his topic, the consequences of peak oil and the final stop of the cheap oil gravy train, with ecological sensibility and moral clarity. These two characteristics, coupled with a straightforward prose style, make for compelling reading, as well as for serious reflection on the hard choices that we most likely face in the near future.

Heinberg's introductory chapter recaps his earlier book, The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies. In it, he describes a century's uncritical addiction to cheap oil and outlines the impending crises it has wrought, crises for which we must prepare and to which we will soon respond, voluntarily or otherwise.

After this brief introduction (which basically assumes the truth of the peak oil dilemma, a definite problem for those who are still unconvinced), Heinberg lays out four paths that we may take, both individually and collectively, in response to the threats of dwindling power supplies, climbing global temperatures, etc.

1. Last One Standing - In this scenario, which Heinberg glumly admits is the default scenario given our inability (or worse, unwillingness) to consider the reality of our natural constraints and our predilection for settling things militarily, the powers of the world scramble in their rush to control the world's remaining energy resources. The US misadventure in Iraq, and the current threats to Iran, are part and parcel of this "option," which, as most sane people will admit, doesn't sound like much of an option at all but is, instead, the path of least resistance. As Heinberg notes, this is "a breathtakingly alarming prospect" that may lead to "the general destruction of human civilization and most of the ecological life-support system of the planet" (p. 55). (And for those who would dismiss this speculation as merely the work of a green handwringer, he cites a Pentagon report featured in Fortune magazine that sketches the basic outlines of this kind of "option." If the top brass are seriously thinking about it, then so should we citizens.)
2. Powerdown - This scenario is all about radically reforming the human heart, so as to replace a global culture of greed and self-interest with one of collective interest, sharing, and community. Important components of this powerdown strategy include limiting the size of the human population, increasing the efficiency of our energy consumption, replacing planned obsolescence with enduring quality, and returning global agriculture from its contemporary dependence on fossil fuels to its sustainable, organic roots. Of course, these changes necessitate a change in our underlying economic principles, so that eternal growth is seen as a suicidal imperative and an ecological impossibility, which will in turn necessitate changes in our social and political organization. Because these radical changes will have to be implemented quickly, Heinberg realizes that something like Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat will have to be formed, presumably of like-minded folks of ecological sensibility and moral clarity. Alas, this option seems to me to be a combination of wishful thinking and highly questionable forms and uses of power; as anyone with a sense of history knows, such vanguards tend not to dissolve of their own accord and folks who aim at radically transforming the human heart end up getting crucified. Nevertheless, the scenario is one we may face out of necessity rather than choice, and so it is essential to come to grips with it.
3. Waiting for the Magic Elixir - This describes the option, if it can be called that, of waiting for the technoscience and free market cavalries to deliver the solution to our problems. Because we've muddled through before, goes the argument, we will surely do so again. This option includes all the hullabaloo about the new hydrogen economy, or abiotic oil, or tar sands, or zero-point energy, etc. None of these options take factors like ERoEI into account, for example, but more problematic, they seek to tackle the problem solely from the supply-side. If we don't work on the demand-side, argues Heinberg, we will merely forestall the crises of overpopulation and overconsumption that come from living beyond our ecological means. Needless to say, Heinberg has little patience for this option, seeing in it a self-centeredness that is morally reprehensible.
4. Building Lifeboats - In this final option, Heinberg echoes Morris Berman's Twilight of American Civilization in calling for a counterculture of "new monks" who will preserve those aspects of human science and arts that are worth preserving. In short, we will need to have small communities in which traditional and primitive technologies and skills are mated to contemporary knowledge of science, politics, literature, etc. Again, this is a tall order for such a short amount of time, but at least this challenge sounds possible and interesting.
   

In conclusion, Heinberg argues that the world's elites will probably play up option three while tacitly working on option one. Most of the outspoken opposition, the so-called "Other Superpower" of the anti-globalization, etc. activists, will choose a variant of option two, but they are limited because of their resistance to admittedly problematic ideas, specifically those involving population control. The rest of us folks here on the ground, living our modest middle class lives in our modest single-family homes, will suffer the impact of option one (e.g., sending our children to die in oil wars, watching as formerly unmentionables like torture become acceptable again, etc.) while also being able to reduce our own consumption, to reach out and form new small-scale communities, and to increase our practices of cultural preservation. None of these options looks pretty to those of us reared in the age of opportunity, but if what Heinberg and others argue about peak oil is true, these options may be all we have.

(This review was originally written on January 3, 2007.)

"The world ends tomorrow. Let's see how that will effect today's stock market."

The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World
Paul Roberts
Houghton Mifflin, 2004


Roberts, while attempting to be comprehensive in his treatment of the coming end of the oil age, omits several crucial points in his attempts at "balanced" reporting.

The author discusses the centrality of the politically volatile (and at times uncooperative) OPEC nations to the oil economy, and notes that the lion's share of geopolitical strategy and military adventurism is over energy supplies. The impending peak in oil production is as much a danger to our energy economy as are geopolitical machinations, but he downplays the consequences of peak oil after a cursory review of the literature, concluding rather tepidly that, "the picture for long-term oil is not encouraging." Given that the developing nations, specifically China and India, are expanding their energy consumption, this picture is definitely not encouraging.

Roberts also discusses the technological options that we may use to extend the oil economy as well as to transition into the next energy economy. He presents the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed hydrogen economy, of increased energy efficiency, and of combinations of different energy sources, yet he does not also note that many alternative sources of energy presuppose an underlying petroleum economy. This latter idea, connected to the concept of ERoEI (energy returned/energy invested), would seem to be essential to understanding our energy options, and its omission from Robert's analysis and reporting was conspicuous.

The author is also far too optimistic in his assessment of solutions delivered by the deus ex machina of free market technoscience; the sense of "can-do" that permeates this book is reminiscent of an ostrich with its head in the sand. I agree with Robert Anton Wilson that resources are less about what exists "out there" and more about our creative use of what exists, but I simply cannot imagine approaching this impending crisis creatively solely in the context of the "free market." As Roberts himself notes repeatedly, the free market has little incentive for investing in alternative ideas or marginal technologies when the existing economy is so lucrative. Instead of driving innovation, it seems that petrocapitalism stifles through its preference for the profitable, if catastrophically unsustainable, status quo. Roberts seems to recognize the need for intervention into the free market (like including "externalities" in the prices of the oil economy), yet his reliance on market solutions fills the book.

Thankfully, on the penultimate page, Roberts' facade cracks and he admits, "frankly, though, the thought of any kind of delay, no matter how rationally justified, terrifies me." This recognition of the seriousness of the problem, belated though it was, restored a bit of my confidence in the reporting that had preceded it.

(This review was originally written on January 1, 2007.)

A worst-case scenario for the end of the Age of Cheap Energy

The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century
James Howard Kunstler
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005


James Howard Kunstler (the man whose single use of profanity gave the film The End of Suburbia its R-rating) compellingly outlines his vision of the worst-case scenario that faces humanity as peak oil realities kick in and the Age of Cheap Energy comes to a close. Pessimistic about humanity's ability to maintain the level of civilization that we've come to see as "normal" for the last 60 years or so, Kunstler's book describes the catastrophic changes that will converge in the next 5 to 50 years. Climate change (for the sake of brevity, he avoids the issue of whether this climate change is human-induced), the global peak of oil production and the increased violence over those petroleum supplies that remain, new and more virulent diseases, and economic collapse are just a few of the treats that await us and our children in a near-future world devoid of cheap, easy petroleum energy subsidies.

Perhaps the most powerful conceptual tool that Kunstler introduces is "ERoEI" (something like "Energy Return over Energy Invested"). In other words, it takes a certain amount of energy to extract the energy in a given quantity of oil, natural gas, coal, etc., and so even if supplies of a given substance aren't literally exhausted, they can be more expensive (in energetic as well as monetary terms) than they are worth. This ratio has been diminishing as fossil fuel energy sources have become harder to utilize, whether because of their remote location or because of the technical challenges faced in extraction and production. Not only does this ratio indicate the approach of peak oil, argues Kunstler, but it also helps explain why new alternative energy sources like solar, hydrogen, biomass, etc. cannot be viable solutions. This is so, he argues, because they ultimately depend on their underlying bases in the existing fossil fuel energy system (e.g., for the manufacture of wind turbines and solar cells, the hydrolysis of water to produce hydrogen, etc.) And we shouldn't expect the technoscience cavalry to save our butts in the nick of time either because this paradigm of "miracle solutions through science" is itself an artifact of our century-long oil orgy, according to Kunstler. In short, the future as envisioned by Kunstler is a "clusterf*ck" in which a variety of catastrophes converge and reduce our civilization to something reminiscent of earlier and less forgiving times.

Several things about this book contributed to its relatively low rating, given how much I "enjoyed" reading it. (1) The author occasionally drags in unfortunate stereotypes in order to make his point, such as equating all the world's one billion Muslims with brainwashed jihadis or dismissing critiques of structural racism as the work of the political correctness "gestapo." (2) No matter how much he denies it in his introduction, Kunstler approaches the worst-case scenario he outlines with a subtle sense of Schadenfreude. (Although in the interest of full-disclosure, I must admit that I too occasionally harbor similar "I told you so" sentiments when considering our apparently dismal future as a species.) Given that he is talking about the end of civilization as we know it, this slight sense of giddiness is distressing. (3) The book is characterized by a dearth of citations; though most of the points the author makes are quite powerful, he doesn't direct the reader to his sources, and so corroboration is tough. (4) By far my most salient criticism takes issue with this book's pervasive sense of fatalism. While the picture Kunstler paints is certainly disheartening, its underlying message is that there is nothing we can do to reverse our collective fortunes. Maybe this is true, but, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, hope is only gone when we give up hope. The sense of hopelessness that permeates this book is its greatest weakness.


(This review was originally written on December 14, 2006.)