Peak Oil - A "Class Zero" Catastrophe ?  

Attention conservation notice: Any remaining hard core doomer readers, avert your eyes for this one, you'll only get annoyed.

I think I linked to Bruce Sterling's "State Of The World 2008" a few weeks ago, but I only just finished reading it and thought I'd include a snippet from part of the discussion about peak oil (Bruce's responses are marked with a *, the original reader question is broken up into segments marked with >>).

inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #45 of 116: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sat 5 Jan 08 06:03

>> The real question is how adaptable or fragile civilian institutions are to a rapid rise in the price of oil/rapid decline in supply

*I agree, but my problem with Peakists is that they're desperately eager to prove that civilian institutions are fragile, mostly because they're weird cranks who've never found one they like.

*If you want to understand how frail civilian institutions are, you need to study them under conditions of great stress. Epidemics, storms, fires, mass evacuations, and, yeah, total war. That's how you know how much humanity can bear.

>>not what a society engaged in total war would experience. Will the financial system go into cardiac arrest?

*It might, but the financial system isn't the heart of a civilization. Communism went into cardiac arrest. The GDP of Russia dropped something like 30 percent, the whole shebang was privatized to mobsters... The Asian financial system went into cardiac arrest a couple of years ago.

>> On a mundane level, would people be able to get to work?

* No, but when it really hits the fan people find themselves doing other work. Guys in the siege of Sarajevo didn't "go to work," but they had plenty to do.

>> Would we be able to raise sufficient quantities of food and get them to market?

* Cuba had a peak oil experience when the Soviets stopped shipping it. The average Cuban lost thirty pounds, or so I'm told. It was a calamity of sorts, they called it the "special period." Cuba is still there.

>> Clearly, $100/barrel petroleum doesn't seem to be resulting in societal collapse.

* Except in Iraq, maybe.

>> Presumably there is a rate of change in price/supply that society can accommodate fairly gracefully, and no doubt a point at which the rate of change becomes uncomfortable, and another point at which it becomes catastrophic.

* There's also a rate of change of zero when oil is no longer consumed, and that would be the victory condition. So, anxiously wondering whether a loss of oil is merely bad or catastrophic is a little short-sighted. Oil has to go away like whale-oil went away.

>> Which scenarios are most likely? Is there anything we can do to influence the likelihood of a better outcome -- and if so, how much influence can we have?

* Stop using oil. Coal is worse, mind you.

>> What about rapidly developing economies like India and China?

* I love those guys, actually. I'm old enough to remember when India and China were described in terms of "lifeboat ethics."

>> What about the possibility of exporting economies like Mexico simply consuming all the oil they produce as they grow?

* Texas does that already.

>> Examining the end stages of the Third Reich doesn't provide us with much guidance.

* I don't wanna come across all Mike Godwin here, but if you wanna talk catastrophe, it's important to have a coherent understanding of genuine historical catastrophes, not make-believe pipe-dream catastrophes that serve to feed somebody's cornball apocaphilia.

* Or, if you wanna explore the mental space of ALL POSSIBLE catastrophes, you can try this ( http://openthefuture.com/2006/12/an_eschatological_taxonomy.html ) in which peak oil would barely register as a "class zero."

Jon Lebkowsky has a follow up comment to that one, which underlines part of the difference in viewpoints - if you live in a relatively sustainable location, and spend most of your time looking at the solutions side of the problem, then things don't look so bad. If you live in outer suburbia, with huge, energy inefficient houses filled with people who spend 3 hours a day driving large SUVs too and from remote workplaces, and spend all your time admiring the problem, then things look far, far worse. By and large I recommend the first alternative.

In 2001 I wrote an article on global warming (Being Green in 2001) for the Bruce S.-edited issue of Whole Earth Magazine. One source of info for that article was an interview with James White, who was director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Here's an exchange from that interview that I've quoted and referred to often since:

> Jon Lebkowsky: One point that John Firor makes is that with six billion people on earth, if everyone had the same standard of living that we [Americans] have, there's no way that we could sustain.

> James White: Yes, that's very clear. I teach a course on energy. That's just one of the resources that you'd need, and if you do the calculations, we use thirty times the energy the average African does. We use ten to fifteen times the average energy that people do in general developing countries overall. We're 250 million, they're 6 billion people. You bring them all up to our standard of living, and the multiplication factor for energy, for aluminum, tin, lead, all the other resources we need is just enormous. It's probably on the order of a hundred, or something like that - I've never done the calculation.

But there's no way that I could see that we could support six billion consumers of the American type, or even six billion consumers of the Western European type, and they use half the resources we do.

(http://www.weblogsky.com/works/Jim_White.html)

Jamais and I discussed this a few years later, probably 2005, but in that discussion I referred to "our high standard of living." He argued that it was perfectly reasonable to assume all 6 billion could have a high standard of living, because a *high* standard of living *doesn't have to be* as resource intensive as in the U.S. The question then is how we define a "good life" that consumes fewer resources, with innovations like eco-balanced architecture and alternative transportation systems. And how do we get buy-in... how do you convince citizens of ascendant developing nations that they don't want SUVs, suburban lifestyles, swimming pools in every back yard, etc.

There's also the question of accumulation and hoarding of resources by the very rich: what if you assume that general widespread scaling up means that they have to scale down, let go of some resources? Will they fight to hold on? (It's been interesting to watch the Bush administration strategy: on the one hand, draining government coffers into wealthy corporations like Halliburton; on the other hand, nudging the U.S. toward greater financial and resource dependence on other countries, especially China, which seems to be buying more and more of the U.S. - all the while arguing a case for "keeping America safe/strong." Not meaning to get into partisan wrangling here - I'm not saying this to be critical of one party over another, it's just what I think I'm seeing; somebody correct me if I'm wrong.)

Mark - I'm less concerned about peak oil because I've been hanging out with clean energy business people who are dead serious about energy alternatives. Austin's already thought through how it'll support pluggable hybrids, and our utility, Austin Energy, is deep into thinking about alternative sources. We have guys all over town - all over Texas, really - who are rethinking energy. For them, global peak oil is opportunity. Bruce has seen this, too - we were both at a clean tech conference in Austin that was busting the seams of the local Hyatt.