Richard Heinberg: Peak Everything

Richard Heinberg: Peak Everyting: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007, New Society)

Actually, a collection of essays (titles in bold below), not all of particular interest.

Introduction. This starts with a number of charts tracking various issues over time:

• Oil & gas production profiles
• Worldwide possible coal production
• Uranium requirements according to IEA scenario and possible supply from known sources
• World total carbon dioxide emissions
• Global mean surface temperature
• Global temperature anomaly
• World water use: consumption
• World water use: withdrawals
• Water availability
• World grain production
• World population
• World diadromous fish catch
• Total fossil fuel production projection
• Arable land
• Metric tons oil equivalent per capita per year (primary energy)
• US gross domestic product and genuine progress indicators compared, 1950 to 2002

On feedback loops (pp. 7-8):

Self-reinforcing feedback loops sometimes occur in nature (population blooms are always evidence of some sort of reinforcing feedback loop), but they rarely continue for long. They usually lead to population crashes and die-offs. The simple fact is that growth in population and consumption cannot continue unabated on a finite planet.

If the increased availability of cheap energy has historically enabled unprecedented growth in the extraction rates of other resources, then the coincidence of Peak Oil with the peaking and decline of many other resources is entirely predictable.

Moreover, as the availability of energy resources peaks, this will also affect various parameters of social welfare:

• Per-capita consumption levels
• Economic growth
• Easy, cheap, quick mobility
• Technological change and invention
• Political stability

All of these are clearly related to the availability of energy and other critical resources. Once we accept that energy, fresh water, and food will become less freely available over the next few decades, it is hard to escape the conclusion that while the 20th century saw the greatest and most rapid expansion of the scale, scope, and complexity of human societies in history, the 21st will see contraction and simplification. The only real question is whether societies will contract and simplify intelligently or in an uncontrolled, chaotic fashion.

The energy transition (p. 19):

As we have seen, just a few core trends have driven many others in producing the global problems we see today, and those core trends (including population growth and increasing consumption rates) themselves constellate around our ever-burgeoning use of fossil fuels. Thus, a conclusion of starting plainness presents itself: our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels -- and to do this as peacefully, equitably, and intelligently as possible.

Tools with a Life of Their Own (p. 39):

The industrial revolution represented one of history's pivotal infrastructural shifts; everything about human society changed as a result. This revolution did not come about primarily because of religious or political developments, but because a few prior inventions (steel, gears, and a primitive steam engine -- i.e., Class B and C and simple Class D tools) came together in the presence of an abundant new energy source: fossil fuels -- first coal, then oil and natural gas. Ideas (such as Cartesian dualism, capitalism, Calvinism, and Marxism), rather than driving the transformation, achieved prominence because they served useful functions within a flow of events emanating from infrastructural necessity.

(p. 46):

In the best instance, the next generation will find themselves in a low-energy regime in which moral lessons from the fossil-fuel era and its demise have been seared into cultural memory. Like the Native Americans, who learned from the Pleistocene extinctions that over-hunting results in famine, they will have discovered that growth is not always good, that modest material goals are usually better for everyone in the long run than extravagant ones, and that every technology has a hidden cost. There is no free lunch. One hopes that, like the Iroquois, who long ago concluded that fighting over scarce land and resources only means the endless perpetuation of violence, they will also have learned the methods and culture of peacemaking.

Fifty Million Farmers (p. 48):

Modern industrial agriculture has been described as a method of using soil to turn petroleum and gas into food. We use natural gas to make fertilizer. We use oil to fuel farm machinery and power irrigation pumps, as a feedstock for pesticides and herbicides, in the maintenance of animal operations, in crop storage and drying, and for transportation of farm inputs and outputs. Agriculture accounts for about 17 percent of the US annual energy budget; it is the single largest consumer of petroleum products as compared to other industries. By comparison, the US military, in all of its operations, uses les than half that amount. About 350 gallons (1,500 liters) of oil equivalents are required to feed each American each year, and every calorie of food produced requires, on average, ten calories of fossil-fuel inputs. This is a food system profoundly vulnerable, at every level, to fuel shortages and skyrocketing prices. And both are inevitable.

(Post-) Hydrocarbon Aesthetics

Five Axioms of Sustainability: just list them (pp. 88-93):

1. Tainter's Axiom: Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.
   Exception: A society can avoid collapse by finding replacement resources. Limit to the exception:
   In a finite world, the number of possible replacements is also finite.

2. Bartlett's Axiom: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

3. To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment.

4. To be sustainable, the use of non-renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion.

5. Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.

   In cases where pollution from the extraction and consumption of non-renewable resources that have proceeded at expanding rates for some time threatens the viability of ecosystems, reduction in the rates of extraction and consumption of those resources may need to occur at a rate greater than the rate of depletion.

Parrots and Peoples

Population, Resources, and Human Idealism (p. 116):

Malthus believed that a general famine would occur in the near future unless his policies were implemented; in this he was clearly wrong. There have indeed been localized famines in the decades since his death (e.g., in Ireland, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Ethiopia), but these have provided only a minor brake on global population, which has surged by over 500 percent in the interim. This failure of prediction is the main cudgel wielded by generations of Malthus-bashers, who attribute the growth of world food production over the past century-and-a-half primarily to human ingenuity. As knowledge expands, so does out ability to sustain more people.

But increased knowledge and cleverness can account for only a portion of the added global human carrying capacity. The main factor has been the use of fossil fuels for clearing land, pumping irrigation water, fueling tractors and other farm equipment, fertilizing soils, killing pests, and transporting produce ever further distances to support people in remote urban centers who would be otherwise unable to sustain themselves. Malthus could hardly have foreseen the contributions of fossil fuels to economic expansion and population growths during the past two centuries. And so, taking into account the inevitable, now-commencing winding down of that brief, incomparably opulent fossil-fuel fiesta, it may be better to say that Malthus wasn't wrong, he was just ahead of his time.

(pp. 122-123):

An ethic of human rights, of sharing, and of equity without a practically expressed awareness of ecological limits is a setup for disaster. But demographic competition by way of fascism, as a response to population-resource crises, is an admission of failure; and it is less an expression of human nature than of the ugly habits formed through the past few thousand civilized years of extreme inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism.

The Psychology of Peak Oil and Climate Change

Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Activism (pp. 146-148):

Peak Oil activists adhere to more pessimistic resource estimates and production forecasts, and it is tempting to think that this is partly because doing so makes their case appear stronger. However, the track record of prediction by the optimists is not good:

• During the 1960s, the US Geological Survey issued successive reports forecasting a peak in US oil production around the year 2000; this followed M. King Hubbert's controversial forecast of a peak around the year 1970. Confounding the official view, US oil production did reach its maximum in 1970 and has been generally declining ever sine, despite the subsequent discovery of the largest conventional oilfield ever found in North America, on the North Slope of Alaska in the 1970s.
• In their Internatioal Energy Outlook (IEO) 2001 report, the EIA stated that "the United Kingdom is expected to produce about 3.1 mb/d by the middle of this decade, followed by a decline to 2.7 mb/d by 2020," implying a peak around 2005. Britain's oil production from the North Sea actually peaked in 1999, two years before this forecast was issued, at 2.684 mb/d, declining to less than 1.7 mb/d by 2005.
• In their IEO 2003 report, the EIA predicted that the country of Oman was "expected to increase output gradually over the first half of this decade" with "only a gradual production decline after 2005." In fact, Oman's production had already peaked in 2000, three years before the forecast was published.

This pattern of unrealistic optimism on the part of the official forecasting agencies has continued with regard to other countries, and thus probably, by extrapolation, to their forecasts for the world as a whole. So it might be unrealistic for the climate activists to give credence to such forecasts, or even to assume that the truth lies equidistant between the extreme resource estimates of the so-called optimists and pessimists.

(pp. 150-151):

Some depletionists see the world's enormous coal reserves as a partial supply-side answer to Peak Oil. Using a time-proven process, it is possible to gasify coal and then use the resulting gases to synthesize a high-quality diesel fuel. The South African company Sasol, which has updated the process, is currently under contract to provide several new coal-to-liquids (CTL) plants to China and has announced a plant in Montana.

CTL is not attractive to emissions analysts, however. While some carbon could be captured during the gasification stage (at a modest energy cost), burning the final liquid fuel would release as much carbon into the atmosphere as would burning conventional petroleum diesel.

A few depletion analysts tend to take a skeptical view of future coal supplies. According to most widely-quoted estimates, the world has one to two hundred years' worth of coal -- at current rates of usage. However, factoring in dramatic increases in usage (to substitute for declining oil and gas supplies), while also taking account of the Hubbert peak phenomenon -- extraction rates will inevitably begin to decline long before the coal actually runs out -- and the fact that coal resources are of varying quality and accessibility leads to the surprising conclusion that a global peak in coal production could arrive as soon as a decade from now.

(p. 151):

Other low-grade fossil fuels, such as tar sands, oil shale, and heavy oil are also problematic from both the depletion and emissions perspectives. Some depletion analysts recommend full-speed development of these resources. However, the energetic extraction costs for them are usually quite high compared to the energy payoff from the resource extracted. Their already-low energy profit ratio (also known as the energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI) would be compromised still further by efforts to capture and sequester carbon, sine, as with coal, these low-grade fuels have a high carbon content as compared to natural gas or conventional oil. Currently, natural gas is used in the processing of tar sands and heavy oil; from both an energy and an emissions point of view, this is rather like turning gold into lead. Many depletionists point out that, while the total resource base for these substances is enormous, the rate of extraction for each is likely to remain limited by physical factors (such as the availability of natural gas and fersh water needed for processing), so that synthetic liquid fuels from such substances may not help much in dealing with the problem of oil depletion in any case.

(p. 153):

Depletion analysts look to about a two percent per year decline in oil extraction folowing the peak of global oil production, with the rate increasing somewhat as time goes on. Coal extraction, following the production peak, will probably decline more slowly, at least for the first decades. Regional natural gas decline rates will be much steeper. The dates for global production peaks for these fuels are of course still a matter for speculation; however, it is reasonable to estimate that we might see a 25 to 45 percent decline in energy available to the world's growing population over the next quarter-century as a result of depletion.

Boomers' Last Chance? (pp. 161-162):

However, the freedom and affluence of modern Americans are due not just to courage and endurance but also sheer luck. Let us not forget that the people who inhabited the United States in the early 20th century happened to be sitting on one fabulous pile of natural resources -- everything from forests, fresh water, fertile soils, and fish to minerals (gold, nickel, iron, aluminum, copper) to energy resources (oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium). Moreover, the US has enjoyed geographic isolation from Eurasian intrigues, which enabled it to thrive during occasions when Europeans and Asians were tearing each other to bits.

Thus the payoff that came at the end of World War II carried an historic inevitability: with its resource base, factories, and highly motivated work force, the US had helped win the war without damage to its internal infrastructure, but only after seeing their cities, railroads, and factories bombed. While the rest of the industrial world lay in ruins, America stood unscathed.

Because of the American economy's stability, the US dollar was adopted as a reserve currency by other nations. American oil wells supplied over half the total amount of petroleum being extracted globally. Sixty percent of all export goods delivered throughout the world carried a "Made in USA" tag. General Motors was the world's biggest corporation and Hollywood films were on screens everywhere.

US factories made so many manufactured goods that Americans had to be cajoled into a permanent buying frenzy by the greatest propaganda system the world has ever seen -- the American advertising industry -- which made brilliant use of history's greatest propaganda medium -- television. In fact, the consumerist project had gotten under way in the 1920s as fuel-fed American capitalism searched for solutions to the problem of over-production (a problem that was in fact one of the Depression's causes). But World War II's insatiable need for materiel and the post-war expansion of advertising and credit made the Depression vanish like a bad dream and sent the economy into warp drive. Indeed, in the 1950s human beings habitually came to be referred to not as "people" or "citizens" but "consumers."

(p. 164):

Again: people are to some extent the product of the circumstances and events of their historical era. The younger generation, growing up in affluence, was free to take survival -- even abundance -- for granted. And we are discussing a level of abundance significantly greater, in some respects, even than exists today: at that time, the US was still solvent, still a net exporter of credit. In the 1960s an entire family could live on a single average income. Rents were cheap, land was cheap, and college was cheap.

Therefore rebellion was cheap, too. The young people knew they were different from their parents, and they could afford to question their parents' seeming obsession with discipline and hard work, their conformity and unflinching patriotism.

(pp. 166-167):

Of course oil was ana is central to the automobile and airline industries, which have been major drivers of the US economy. Less obvious is oil's role in modern industrial agriculture. However, if one looks more deeply, the very fabric of 20th century America is petroleum-soaked. In 1900 the world's wealthiest and oiliest man was John D. Rockefeller, whose company, Standard Oil, had cornered the national market. Rockefeller himself was an abstemious churchgoer who believed that wealth was a sign of God's favor; what does such a person do with so much money? All sorts of things. Why not go into banking in order to make even more money? The Rockefeller family did so with a vengeance and was instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve System -- the banking system that quietly controls the US currency and economy. If one is exceptionally wealthy it is also handy to have some influence over public opinion -- and so Rockefeller wealth found its way into controlling positions in media organizations. Even scientific research can have its uses: when I was tracing the history of genetic engineering for my 1999 book Cloning the Buddha, I discovered that the inception of molecular biology (the basis for all subsequent developments in genetic science) came in the 1920s as a result of strategic grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in its quest for a means of eugenic "social control." Politics, geopolitics, war, weapons manufacturing, education -- all were deeply impacted by the Rockefeller oil fortune. Oil wasn't just a subsidy to american wealth; it formed the very substance and character of American wealth.

Therefore the fact that by 1971 US oil production had peaked and was in terminal decline was momentous (if unheralded) news. America could no longer be a source of wealth in the same way it had been; if it were to maintain its privileged position globally it would have to become the world's moneychanger, banker, landlord, stockbroker . . . and enforcer. American military force would have to be used increasingly to safeguard and protect US access to the resource wealth of other countries, while international trade agreements would have to be written and enforced to the advantage of American corporations. And those corporations would be ever less involved directly in manufacturing, but more in trading, branding, and licensing.

A Letter From the Future

Talking Ourselves to Extinction (pp. 193-194):

In the last couple of centuries, the magical thinking associated with religion, under assault from science, has found a new home in political and economic ideologies. Economics, which masquerades as a science, began as a branch of moral philosophy -- which it still is in fact. For free-market ideologues, the market is God and profit is the ultimate good. We have used language to talk ourselves into the myth of progress -- the belief that growth is always beneficial and that there are no practical limits to the size of the human population or to the extent of renewable or even non-renewable natural resources we can use. This particular myth was an easy sell: It is an inherently welcome message (a version of "you can eat your cake and have it too") and it seemed to be confirmed by experience during a multi-generational period of unprecedented expansion based on the one-time-only consumption of Earth's hydrocarbon stores.

posted 2008-06-22