End of the Binge - The exhaustion of our energy supply may end affluence as we know it
Articles
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....
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.... 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....
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....
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 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...
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....
Read the complete article.
