Dreaming in Petrocolour: The End of Oil Dependency?

Fig. 2: Theoretical projected US petroleum use if Amory Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute proposals were fully implemented. Global use is about 4-5x these amounts. Projected global use in 2020 is hence about 120 Mbbl/d or 44 Gbbl/a; compare that to the projected global production of 25 Gbbl/a that year, in Fig. 1. Even with 100% compliance with Lovins’ proposals, globally, use would be about 32 Gbbl/a, or about 130% of production.

If you don’t know who to believe about the End of Oil, you’re not alone. On the one hand, we have terrifying scenarios about civil unrest and civilizational collapse like that in James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. On the other hand, we have scenarios of quick and profitable transition to alternative fuels like that in Amory Lovins’ free e-book Winning the Oil Endgame.

This week, Salon’s Katharine Mieszkowski provides a scorecard of the players, while carefully avoiding taking sides. Just as well. Both sides have teams of geologists and economists arguing their position, and the differences are technical, speculative, and dramatic. The technophiles, like Lovins, tend to believe that the End of Oil is wishful thinking by those opposed to the existing power structure, the market economy, and civilization’s excesses in general — a neosurvivalist, secular version of the Rapture for socialists and environmentalists wanting to reboot human endeavor in a more responsible way. The alarmists, like Kunstler, tend to think the technophiles have adopted the ‘free’ market and technology innovation as their own, man-made theology to will save us from ourselves, and are denying the terrible realities of our economic and political systems, humanity’s resistance to and inability to change, and even the laws of thermodynamics.

I have enormous respect for both perspectives, and specifically for Kunstler and Lovins. I don’t claim to be an expert in any of the subjects that support either scenario, or might support a third alternative somewhere in the middle. I know a little bit about a lot of subjects, I read a lot, including the lessons of history, and I trust my instincts. As a result, my sense is that Kunstler’s scenario is much more likely than Lovins’, for these reasons:

• The Efficiency Myth: Winning the Oil Endgame’s scenario expects to get more than half of its projected reductions in oil demand through conservation — overwhelmingly from more efficient use and consumption of oil and natural gas rather than from voluntary absolute reductions in use. While I think it’s wise not to expect altruism from billions of people, I think it’s very unwise to assume that, just because large efficiency gains in hydrocarbon use are possible, that we will, starting tomorrow, work feverishly towards such efficiency gains, even if there’s a promise of profit in it. Achieving such gains assumes a willingness to take great risks in pursuit of possible fortunes. It is human nature, however, only to take such risks when the alternative is intolerable. By the time the alternative is intolerable, it will almost certainly be too late. Also, our economic system is risk-averse: Neither shareholders nor creditors will be anxious to make such investments, and will instead hope that someone else (the government, or entrepreneurs) will do so, and then let them run the system when the ROI is high and guaranteed. Nature is effective, not efficient. Efficiency brings with it enormous vulnerability, and is inherently unsustainable and prone to decay and breakdown. When you’re working at 100% efficiency, there’s nowhere to go but down.
• The Myth of Government Leadership: Lovins’ scenario also assumes an unprecedented willingness of governments to take a bold, courageous and highly interventionist role in transforming the mainstay of the entire economy. Unless FDR is resurrected, this seems to me highly unlikely, at least until we’re into the next Great Depression that will precede any of the more direct effects of the End of Oil. What I’ve read suggests that could easily be two decades off — again far too late even for a motivated, heroic government to turn the economy around before oil shortages overwhelm us. We live in an era where everyone hates government, remember: Conservatives because they think people should look after themselves (and, begrudgingly, each other), and liberals because they equate (with some recent justification) government with Big Brother. So even if the right political hero came along, he or she probably would never be elected.
• The Myth that Someone is In Control: It doesn’t matter where in the political spectrum you look, there always seems to be a view that ‘those in control’ can, if they are so inclined, change the world very quickly and extensively. It’s hard to know where this myth arose, or why it is so appealing. All I know is that it’s wrong. Look at what enormously powerful oligopolies have accomplished — all they can and will do is constrain the market until people and competitors find workarounds, and then the oligopolies collapse (to be replaced, often, with new oligopolies). The big automobile companies don’t have enough money to pay their retiree pensions, let along radical innovation. It’s taken them a decade to get a few, tepid hybrids onstream, and no major car company, even the Japanese, has yet embraced this modest new technology fully. Or look at the world’s one remaining superpower, mired in a trillion dollar and growing war that has accomplished less than nothing, impotent and incompetent at dealing with its own immediate security crisis, health care crisis, education crisis, financial crisis, and utterly unprepared for new crises as mundane as hurricanes and disease epidemics that everyone agrees are certain to recur. Sorry, Amory, no one is in control. Even if there is a will, there is no way.
• The Myth of Rapid Commercialization of New Technologies: Most technologies take decades, generations to reach levels of successful commercialization. This is partly because it takes companies a long time to ‘get them right’, partly because new technologies rely on support infrastructure (like millions of cellular communication towers) that is enormously expensive and time-consuming to finance and build, and partly because people naturally resist change (fax technology was introduced fifty years before it achieved its ten years of commercial success) and will not tolerate having it imposed on them, even if it is good for them. Lovins’ plan entails massive changes to US agriculture, to all the furnaces, automobiles and everything else that currently consumes oil, and to public attitudes, to enable the rapid introduction of biofuels, to be produced by a wholesale transition of millions of square miles of US land to monoculture switchgrass, willow and poplar ‘plantations’ and giant fermentation areas that would subject these ‘natural’ substances to genetically engineered bacteria. Know anyone who might take issue with any of that?
• The Myth of 100% Compliance: One of the things the ‘market’ tells us is that if people are told to do something they don’t want to do, they will find a way to get around it. Some struggling nations have wonderful, model social and environmental laws — but not enough people to enforce them, and a lot of people with an interest in non-compliance and the ingenuity to cheat, bribe, steal, smuggle or do whatever they need to do to get around the laws. The destruction of Brazil’s rainforest is illegal under Brazilian law, but it is happening very quickly anyway. If people want to use gasoline instead of methanol, because retrofitting is too expensive or for any of a million other reasons, they’ll find a way to get it. If people don’t like anti-pollution devices because they reduce performance, they’ll find a way to circumvent them. If the new oil-free economy requires a big jump in taxes, people will pay lawyers to help them cheat the system. People hate change, and won’t comply with it unless and until they’re ready to do so.

So, ideally, Lovins’ prescription is a good one. So are many other suggestions for reinventing the economic, social, political, legal and educational systems, to make them more efficient and to achieve the greater human good. But, for the above reasons, ain’t gonna happen. That’s not pessimism or defeatism, it’s understanding the lessons of history, the way human systems work, and human nature.

What really tilts the balance of credibility in favour of Kunstler, in my view, is Kunstler’s willingness to address the contrary arguments. Kunstler painstakingly deconstructs the arguments that energy salvation could come from natural gas, tar sands, hydrogen, coal, hydroelectricity, solar and wind power, biomass, nuclear, and six other forms of energy I hadn’t even heard of, raising some serious questions about the technical viability of some of the alternatives Lovins proposes. Lovins’ model would be more persuasive if he had addressed some of Kunstler’s arguments with comparable thoroughness.

If you want to prepare for the End of Oil, no matter which scenario prevails, as I’ve said before, you don’t need to buy farmland and hand tools (though your grandchildren might): Instead, get out of debt, spend less, learn to be more self-sufficient (including not depending on The Man for an income), buy local and renewable, eat and live healthier, be informed, acquire practical skills, build good networks and intentional communities, and have contingency plans that will work when infrastructure breaks down. And be good to yourself and those you love.

And take everything you read with a grain of salt.