The Party's Over Part 12

Ecologist Raymond B. Cowles once suggested using economic motivations to reduce fertility. He proposed simply paying young women not to have babies. The expense of such a system would be offset by the savings to society from costs not incurred for education and health care for the children who would otherwise have been born.18 Economist Kenneth Boulding proposed a somewhat similar laissez-faire solution: Instead of money, women should be granted, at birth, a certain number of "baby rights," which could be sold or traded. Lovers of children could buy such rights whereas lovers of money would be encouraged to devote their efforts to activities other than parenthood.19 Neither Cowles's nor Boulding's idea has garnered much support so far, but both ill.u.s.trate the kind of creative thinking that must occur if we are to tackle the problem of overpopulation.

Immigration is an issue closely related to that of overpopulation, and it is likewise politically p.r.i.c.kly. In the US, roughly 90 percent of the projected population growth for the next 50 years will come from immigration, with the national population projected to double during that time. Such population growth threatens to dramatically increase resource depletion and pollution. From an ecological perspective, immigration is almost never a good idea. Ma.s.s immigration simply globalizes the problem of overpopulation. Moreover, it is typically only when people have become indigenous to a particular place after many generations that they develop an appreciation of resource limits.20 Opposition to uncontrolled immigration is often confused with anti-immigrant xenophobia. Also, some leftists cogently argue that to cut off immigration to the US from Mexico and other Latin American countries would be unfair: immigrants are only following their resources and wealth northward to the imperial hub that is systematically extracting them. Thus key elements in immigration reduction must be a halt to the US practice of draining wealth and resources from nations to the south, as well as democratization and land reform in the less-consuming countries.

In the decades ahead, all nations must find practical, humane solutions to the problem of population growth and immigration - solutions that will necessarily include legal caps on yearly immigration quotas and some means for reducing both disparities of wealth between nations and the exploitation of one nation by another so that immigration becomes a less attractive option.

As Virginia Abernethy of the Carrying Capacity Network has put it, [o]ften, allowing ourselves to be ruled by good-hearted but wrongheaded humanitarian impulses, we encourage ecologically disastrous responses among ourselves and our less fortunate neighbors. Impulses, which seem in the short run to do good, but which lead ultimately to worldwide disaster - and most quickly to disaster in the countries we wish to help - are not in fact humanitarian.21 US Foreign policy. America's military and espionage budgets represent a gargantuan investment in an eventual Armageddon. The US portrays itself as the global cop keeping order in an otherwise chaotic and dangerous world, but in reality America uses its military might primarily to maintain dominance over the world's resources.

This policy is unjust, futile, and dangerous. It is unjust because people in many nations are denied the benefits of their own natural a.s.sets. It is futile because the resources in question are limited in extent and their exploitation cannot continue indefinitely and because, by becoming ever more dependent on them, Americans are ensuring their own eventual economic demise. And it is dangerous because it sets an example of violent compet.i.tion for diminishing resources - an example that other nations are likely to follow, thus leading the whole world into a maelstrom of escalating violence as populations grow and resources become more scarce.

The US policy of maintaining resource dominance is not new. Shortly after World War II, a brutally frank State Department Policy Planning Study auth.o.r.ed by George F. Kennan, the American Amba.s.sador to Moscow, noted: We have 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality ... we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.22 The history of the past five decades would suggest that Kennan's advice was heeded. Today the average US citizen uses five times as much energy as the world average. Even citizens of nations that export oil - such as Venezuela and Iran - use only a small fraction of the energy US citizens use per capita.

The Carter Doctrine, declared in 1980, made it plain that US military might would be applied to the project of dominating the world's oil wealth: henceforth, any hostile effort to impede the flow of Persian Gulf oil would be regarded as an "a.s.sault on the vital interests of the United States" and would be "repelled by any means necessary, including military force."23 In the past 60 years, the US military and intelligence services have grown to become bureaucracies of unrivaled scope, power, and durability. While the US has not declared war on any nation since 1945, it has nevertheless bombed or invaded a total of 19 countries and stationed troops, or engaged in direct or indirect military action, in dozens of others.24 During the Cold War, the US military apparatus grew exponentially, ostensibly in response to the threat posed by an archrival: the Soviet Union. But after the end of the Cold War the American military and intelligence establishments did not shrink in scale to any appreciable degree. Rather, their implicit agenda - the protection of global resource interests - emerged as the semi-explicit justification for their continued existence.

With resource hegemony came challenges from nations or sub-national groups opposing that hegemony. But the immensity of US military might ensured that such challenges would be overwhelmingly asymmetrical. US strategists labeled such challenges "terrorism" - a term with a definition malleable enough to be applicable to any threat from any potential enemy, foreign or domestic, while never referring to any violent action on the part of the US, its agents, or its allies.

This policy puts the US on a collision course with the rest of the world. If all-out compet.i.tion is pursued with the available weapons of awesome power, the result could be the destruction not just of industrial civilization, but of humanity and most of the biosphere.

The alternative is to foster some means of international resource cooperation, but this would require a fundamental change of course for US foreign policy. Daunting though the task may be, it is time to recast US foreign policy from the inside out and from the ground up so that it is based not on resource dominance but on global security through fair and democratic governance structures.

Such a policy shift would necessarily imply both a voluntary relinquishment of US claims on resources and a dramatic scaling back of the US military apparatus. The latter could be accomplished through a fairly swift process of budget cuts, whereby funds formerly devoted to the military would be earmarked instead partly for the dismantling of weapons systems and partly for the redesign of the national energy and transportation infrastructure.

This would have domestic repercussions. Lacking a basis in militarily enforced resource dominance, the US economy would shrink. But this must be seen in perspective: it is an inevitable outcome in any case. The US, as the center of the global industrial empire, does not have the choice of whether to decline; it can, however, choose how to decline - whether gracefully and peacefully, setting a helpful example for the rest of the world, or petulantly and violently, drawing other nations with it into an accelerating whirlwind of destruction.

Such a unilateral US relinquishment of global dominance would, it could be argued, open the way for another nation - perhaps China - to take center stage. Might Americans wake up one day to find themselves subjects of some alien empire? It may help to remember that the inexorable physics of the energy transition preclude such an occurrence. In the decades ahead, no nation will be able to afford to subdue and rule a large, geographically isolated country like the US. Only small, weak, resource-rich nations will be likely targets for conquest.

Transportation. Because of their extreme dependence on car and truck transportation, the US and Canada are, relative to many other industrial societies, at a disadvantage. In the US, the Interstate Highway system represents a vast subsidy to the automobile and trucking industries. Since that system's inception in the 1950s, train transport has languished, with Congress continually reducing the already-small subsidies available for rail transport. In the half-century from 1921 to 1971 (the year of Amtrak's creation), Federal subsidies for highways totaled $71 billion; for railroads, $65 million. Rail transport has received a total of $30 billion over the past 30 years, whereas federal subsidies for highways in 2002 alone amounted to $32 billion, and for aviation and airports, $14 billion. In the same year, a mere $521 million were set aside for Amtrak. According to a study by the International Railway Journal, at $1.64, the US ranks between Bolivia and Turkey in mainline railroad spending per capita. Switzerland spends the most ($228.29) and the Philippines the least ($.29). Urban light-rail systems in the US have fared little better.25 America's decades-long shift from rails to highways has been justified by the argument that railroads work better in areas of high population density while highways are more practical where cities and towns are far-flung. Most of the US has a much lower population density than Western Europe and j.a.pan, where rail services move people cheaply and efficiently. In the US, where the distances traveled are typically greater, airlines are more attractive for interurban travel. This argument makes some sense - but only as long as fuel is cheap.

Even with the development of higher-efficiency and alternative-fuel cars and trucks, the energy transition will not permit the continued operation of a national auto/truck fleet of the current size. Moreover, commercial air travel may soon be a thing of the past as jet fuel becomes more scarce and costly. Trains - while still running on fossil fuels - have, when well utilized, lower energy costs per pa.s.senger-mile than either cars or planes. Thus, for the US, one sensible course of action would be to immediately cease subsidizing highways and airlines and to begin investing in rails.

At the same time, auto companies would be well advised to put in high gear their research into smaller, lighter, more energy-efficient electric, hybrid, and even human-powered vehicles.

Ultimately, for people in industrial societies, the future holds less travel in store, regardless of the means of transport chosen. Economic survival will thus require reducing the need for transportation by moving producers, workers, and consumers closer together.

Activism. In order to feel that the sacrifices they are making during the energy downturn are fair, the people of any nation must be empowered to partic.i.p.ate in the process of making decisions about how those sacrifices are allocated. However, the fundamental changes to national economies and infrastructures described above are not likely to be implemented through conventional political means - by citizens voting for candidates - because it is in the interests of most politicians to lie rather than to convey bad news. More people will tend to vote for the candidate who promises the rosier future, even if those promises are patently unrealistic. Therefore the radical shifts needed can probably only happen as a result of the dramatically increased involvement of an informed citizenry at every level of a revitalized political process.

Unfortunately, the citizenry is currently neither informed nor involved, and the system resists fundamental change at all levels. Immense sums are invested annually to distract the public from substantive issues and to turn their attention instead toward consumption and complacency.

The small minority who are aware of the difficult choices facing society need to take heart and redouble their efforts to educate others, including government officials.

Activists could play a crucial role in the upcoming energy transition, as they have played in most of the important social advances of the past few decades. Activist-led social movements have helped end colonialism and the worst manifestations of racism, gained rights for women, and helped protect numerous species and sites of biodiversity. Today many activists are advocating a rapid transition to renewable energy sources, conservation, and the equitable distribution of resources. Moreover, they are leading the way in modeling nonviolent social change.

An example of the latter is Marshall Rosenberg, whose Center for Nonviolent Communication works internationally with such groups as educators, managers, military officers, prisoners, police and prison officials, clergy, government officials, and individual families. Nonviolent Communication trainings evolved from Rosenberg's quest, during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to find a way of rapidly disseminating much-needed peacemaking skills. Today he is active in war-torn areas (Israel, Palestine, Bosnia, Columbia, Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria, Serbia, and Croatia), promoting reconciliation and a peaceful resolution of differences. As social and economic pressures from the energy transition mount, such mediation efforts could - both globally and locally - mean the difference between peaceful cooperation and savage compet.i.tion.

Social activists tend to be the leading-edge thinkers and change agents for society as a whole. We need more of them.

The World Many people are wary of world government, believing that it would lead inevitably to global tyranny. This fear is both founded and unfounded. It is well-founded in the sense that people's individual ability to contribute to the decisions that affect their lives varies inversely with the scale of social organization: it is easier to make one's voice heard in a town meeting than in a national election. This being the case, it seems highly likely that a world government, were one ever to be established, would tend to be remote and unresponsive to the needs of individuals and local communities. But the fear is unfounded in the sense that, without fossil fuels, it is doubtful that a sufficient energy basis could ever be a.s.sembled to build and maintain a government with a global scale of organization, communication, and enforcement.

Hence the reasonableness of a principle succinctly stated by ecologist Garrett Hardin: Never globalize a problem if it can possibly be dealt with locally.26 Are there any problems that must be dealt with globally? In ordinary times, there probably are not. However, during the extraordinary period of the peaking and decline of fuel-based industrialism in which we are now living, there are three kinds of problems that do indeed demand some kind of global regulatory mechanism: resource conservation, large-scale pollution control, and the resolution of conflicts between nations. All three must be administered more or less locally: Resources exist in geographically circ.u.mscribed areas that are ultimately the responsibility of regional decision-making bodies; pollution often issues from point sources that are best monitored by local agencies; and conflicts must ultimately be resolved by the parties involved. But the depletion of internationally traded essential resources, industrial production processes, and industrialized warfare are capable of having overwhelming global effects. Catastrophic global warming and nuclear war provide compelling examples: either would result from decisions made, and actions taken, by specific people in particular places; but the consequences of those decisions and actions would profoundly impact people and other organisms everywhere. The consequences are so far out of proportion to the decisions and actions taken locally that some form of global control mechanism seems called for, consisting of enforceable minimum conservation standards and enforceable means of containing or resolving international conflicts.

Some agencies already exist for addressing global problems. They are generally of three kinds: first, corporations, trade bodies, and lending inst.i.tutions; second, the quasi-governmental apparatus of the UN, with its related aid agencies; and third, the small but vocal cadre of transnational human rights and environmental NGOs.

The corporations, international banks, and trade bodies together const.i.tute a force for globalization-from-above. They are doing almost nothing to help, and much to hinder, an orderly global energy transition. This should be no surprise: they are part and parcel of the growth economy that flows from the fossil-fuel pipeline.

The forces of globalization-from-below (the NGOs) do not have a full picture of the degree to which world events revolve around energy resources and their depletion; nor do they have an adequate strategy for dealing with the issues they are confronting. But their push toward decentralization, democratization, and cooperation is nevertheless generally the right way to help humanity wean itself as painlessly as possible from fuel-fed industrialism. Thus what is needed globally is a weakening of the forces of globalization-from-above and a strengthening of those of globalization-from-below.

The UN - which is caught somewhere between those two sets of forces - is one of the few inst.i.tutions that is in any position to provide enforceable minimum global environmental standards and to serve as an arena for conflict resolution.

If all parties concerned understood the severity of the crisis facing them, there is much they could do. They could negotiate more global agreements modeled on the Kyoto accords, ensuring international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and subsidize renewables. The International Energy Agency could be expanded and empowered to survey, conserve, and allocate energy resources in such a way that all nations would have a.s.sured (though diminishing) access to them, and that profits from resource exploitation would go toward helping societies with the transition, rather than merely further enriching corporate executives. Meanwhile, UN-based conflict-resolution and weapons-destruction programs could substantially reduce the likelihood of violent conflicts erupting over resource disputes. Rich industrialized nations could wean themselves as quickly as possible from fossil fuels while less-industrialized nations, abandoning the futile effort to industrialize, could embark on the path of truly sustainable development. Industrialized nations could a.s.sist the latter in doing so by ceasing the practice of siphoning off less-consuming nations' resources.

What is especially needed is a new global protocol by which oil-importing nations would agree to diminish their imports at the rate of world depletion - approximately two percent per year. That way, price swings would be moderated as the peak of global oil production pa.s.ses, enabling poorer nations to be able to continue importing the bare minimum of resources needed to maintain their economies. A Model for such an agreement has been proposed by the a.s.sociation for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) The majority of the world's nations and peoples would probably be willing to partic.i.p.ate in all of these difficult and even painful efforts if they were informed clearly of the alternatives. The greatest impediment would likely be the nonpartic.i.p.ation of a few "rogue states" that tend to disregard international laws and treaties at will. The foremost of these are the US and, to a lesser extent, China.

With only five percent of the world's population, the US has the lion's share of the world's weaponry and exercises direct or indirect control over a steeply disproportionate share of global resources. The US cleans up some pollution at home while undermining international environmental agreements. It refuses international inspection of its weapons of ma.s.s destruction and attacks other nations virtually at will. It also undermines efforts to stabilize or reduce the global population at every turn. Just within the past four years, the US has abrogated the anti-ballistic missile treaty and undermined the small arms treaty, the UN convention against torture, the international criminal court, and the biological weapons convention.

Will the US join the international community, or insist on maintaining its privileged status even as its empire crumbles? This is the first great geopolitical question we face as the industrial interval wanes.

The second one concerns China. Will China continue to seek to industrialize? Because of its huge population, efforts in that direction will put great stress on any global efforts at conservation and pollution abatement.

The world does not revolve around these two countries. But if they could be persuaded - by either their own citizenry or the international community - to exercise constructive leadership, the global energy transition could occur far more smoothly than would otherwise be the case.

Taken together, these recommendations imply a nearly complete redesign of the human project. They describe a fundamental change of direction - from the larger, faster, and more centralized to the smaller, slower, and more locally based; from compet.i.tion to cooperation; and from boundless growth to self-limitation.

If such recommendations were taken seriously, they could lead to a world a century from now with fewer people using less energy per capita, all of it from renewable sources, while enjoying a quality of life that the typical industrial urbanite of today would perhaps envy. Human inventiveness could be put to the task of discovering ways not to use more resources, but to expand artistic satisfaction, find just and convivial social arrangements, and deepen the spiritual experience of being human. Living in smaller communities, people would enjoy having more control over their lives. Traveling less, they would have more of a sense of place and of rootedness, and more of a feeling of being at home in the natural world. Renewable energy sources would provide some conveniences, but not nearly on the scale of fossil-fueled industrialism.

This will not, however, be an automatic outcome of the energy decline. Such a happy result can only come about through considerable conscious effort. It is easy to imagine less desirable scenarios.

There are, at the local level, many hopeful signs that a shift toward sustainability is beginning. But there are also many discouraging signs that large political and economic inst.i.tutions will resist change in that direction. Seeing the latter signs and the immensity of the challenge before us, we can easily drift into discouragement and inaction. Is it too late? Are recommendations for a peaceful energy transition hopelessly unrealistic?

In some respects, it is too late. As noted above, the transition could have been made much more easily if we had started 30 years ago, and with a World War II-level of effort. Every few years since the oil crisis of 1973, another book has been published that says, in essence, "We have little time left; we must start now to change direction before it is too late." At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, several eminent speakers agreed that the global community had the decade of the '90s in which to turn from growth and consumption toward sustainability. The turn was not made in that decade. Indeed, the treadmill of consumption only accelerated. At what point does the clock run out? Is there a time when we'll have to say, "We had our chance and blew it"?

If by "Is it too late?" we mean "Is it too late to make the transition painlessly?", then the answer may well be yes. By now, we almost certainly face a "discontinuity," as renewable-energy expert Ron Swenson euphemistically put it in a recent phone conversation with me.

Am I being fatalistic? Or simply realistic? Our cultural obsession with good news, promises, and hope is humanly understandable, but there comes a time when the best thing to do is to accept that a bad situation has developed and to find intelligent ways to manage it.

If by "Is it too late?" we mean "Can we do anything now to make the future better than it would otherwise be?", then the answer, of course, is that it is never too late. There is much to be done, and hard work now may yield great benefits for the generations to follow. We may have up to 10 years before the gross level of energy available from all hydrocarbon resources falls significantly below current figures (though the net level of available energy may decline much sooner). Much can be done during that time. However, we need to acknowledge that waiting has consequences. The more we do, and the sooner we start, the better off we will be.

Are these recommendations for national and global change unrealistic? Past experience would suggest that national leaders will be unlikely to act on the basis of warnings like those contained in this book. I have already explored to some extent the reasons for their reluctance: a political system based on moneyed influence and a monetary system based on debt and interest, and hence endless growth. Thus, in order for many of the above recommendations to be implemented, much more may be involved than the technical problem of replacing the energy infrastructure of industrial societies (which is, of course, no small feat in itself). In order for that latter task to begin in earnest, we will also probably have to make fundamental changes to both our political systems and our economic systems. A successful transformation of even one of these three aspects of any single industrial society - its energy infrastructure, its political system, or its economic system - represents a daunting task probably requiring decades of work by many thousands of people. The likelihood of achieving fundamental change in all three arenas, and in most industrial nations, before the repercussions of the energy decline are felt is surely remote.

Nevertheless, the proposals need to be on the table. The public needs to know that there are alternatives to continued growth, resource compet.i.tion, and chaotic collapse. The mere fact that nearly every one of the above proposals is being put forward by many individuals and groups in many places suggests that there is already a growing awareness that we cannot keep going much further in the direction in which we are now headed. If the leaders cannot lead, they must get out of the way and let the people make the needed changes.

Moreover, while proposals for basic infrastructural, economic, and political change may seem hopelessly unrealistic within the current context, we must remember that the context is shifting. Times of crisis offer both danger and opportunity, and we are approaching a time of cascading crises - and hence, perhaps, large and unexpected opportunities.

A Final Word I would like to close with some personal observations. My experience of writing this book has been somewhat distressing at times, for reasons that should be fairly obvious. The subject I have chosen is not particularly cheery, a fact I have underscored in the book's t.i.tle and subt.i.tle. Surely the reader's engagement with this material has also brought an occasional moment of mental unease.

However, writing this book has also been rewarding in several respects, and so it seems important that I point out these rewards, if only to rea.s.sure readers that their task may also have been worthwhile.

First, I believe I have gained from this study a better understanding of many of the most important problems now facing humanity, and of those likely to do so in the foreseeable future. We all see daily evidence that the world is an increasingly unsettling, dangerous place: every morning's newspaper is likely to inform us of some new battle, terrorist act, or economic disaster. What are we to make of it all? Is it the work of Satan? Are foreign despots or greedy corporate executives to blame? Are we victims of the wrongheaded schemes of liberals and socialists? Is a vast conspiracy afoot?

An investigation of the history of humanity's evolving relationship with energy resources suggests a prosaic explanation. The growing turmoil we see around us is primarily the inevitable result of a way of life our immediate ancestors adopted for reasons that seemed to them self-evidently compelling, a way of life that we have accepted as inevitable and ordinary. Human beings have always had problems: compet.i.tion for scarce resources, natural disasters, diseases, accidents, and so on. It is the scale of the problems that beset us now that is unique. The steep expansion in scale of the human population size and the consumption of resources that has characterized modern societies is almost entirely due to industrialism and the use of fossil fuels. And many of the large-scale problems that we are likely to encounter in this century will be due to the depletion of those fuels.

When we operate on the basis of false explanations, we live in a state of confusion, and our attempts to solve problems are unlikely to be effective. With a more accurate understanding of problems, we have a much better chance of addressing them successfully. We also are more likely to place blame where it belongs, if indeed blame is called for.

Explanations for social problems usually carry moral implications, and the explanation offered in this book is no exception. We like to think that our human intelligence and our moral codes set us apart from other organisms. When other creatures gain an energy subsidy, they instinctively react by proliferating: their population goes through the well-studied stages of bloom, overshoot, and die-off. If we humans are more than mere animals, we should be expected to behave differently. Yet so far we have reacted to the energy subsidy of fossil fuels exactly the way rats, fruit flies, or bacteria respond to an abundant new food source. A hard look at the evidence tends to make one skeptical of human claims of specialness, causing one, almost inevitably, to view more sympathetically the choice our species has made to become socially dependent on nonrenewable fuels.

Of course, throughout the period of industrialization, matters could have been handled better at every stage. This is putting it charitably. The decades of the Industrial Revolution were replete with outrages against humanity and nature (many of which have been doc.u.mented by Derek Jensen in his brilliant and harrowing book The Culture of Make Believe27). Unquestionably, a relatively few people and inst.i.tutions have been responsible for immense suffering. While this was also the case throughout the millennia before the Industrial Revolution, industrialism and fossil energy resources, by vastly expanding the power wielded by human beings, also vastly expanded the human ability to commit atrocities. That being the case, perhaps it makes good moral sense to keep the scale of our societies and their projects small in the future so that the crimes and outrages that human beings will inevitably continue to commit will also occur on a small scale.

In the final a.n.a.lysis, we are left with many of the same moral questions as always, but we see those questions in a new light. The end of industrialism may lead us to be both more critical and at the same time more understanding of human foibles - more critical because we see writ large the results of greed and unrestrained compet.i.tion; more understanding because it is clear that we humans are, at least to a very large degree, simply animals responding to biological urges and environmental circ.u.mstances. Our vaunted moral and intellectual capabilities may enable us to alter our behavior, but perhaps only within rather narrow limits. What those limits are remains to be seen. If ever we have had an opportunity to prove our specialness as a species, our ability to collectively exert moral and intellectual faculties to overcome genetic programming and environmental conditioning through intelligent self-limitation, it is now.

A second reward I have gleaned from writing this book has been a more realistic sense of the human goals that are achievable under the present circ.u.mstances. Unrealistic goals breed disappointment and disillusionment. If we expect for our children the kind of high-energy society that we ourselves have known, our hopes will be dashed. We thereby set ourselves up for continual disappointment. As I have said, I believe that it is realistic to hope for a future world of smaller, more egalitarian communities in which people have more time on their hands and live closer to nature. It is realistic to hope for humankind to move collectively from being a colonizing species to being a cooperative member of climax ecosystems. Other species do this frequently, and various human cultures have made such a transition in the past. With effort, we can achieve this goal with minimal human suffering and environmental destruction in the interim.

However, even after we have downsized our long-term vision for society, we may still be frustrated because we don't see quick progress toward that goal. We humans like quick results. But sometimes people live in times when things aren't getting easier and when their efforts toward building a better world seem to bear little fruit. What should one's att.i.tude be if one is living in such a time? How does one continue to invest effort toward making positive change in the world without succ.u.mbing to cynicism and burnout? Surely it is helpful, during such times, to have an overarching historical perspective so that one has the sense of contributing to an eventual desirable outcome which one may not be around personally to see.

Third and finally, I believe I have gained a heightened sense of my generation's responsibility. Those of us who are older adults (I'm now 54) have lived in the most exciting time in history. Even if we have suffered from the stresses of the fast pace, the pollution, and the economic compet.i.tion of modern life, we have benefited from the enormous energies at our disposal. Most of us - most, at least, who have grown up in industrialized countries - have lived free from hunger, with hot and cold running water, with machines at our fingertips to transport us quickly and almost effortlessly from place to place, and with still other machines to clean our clothes, to entertain and inform us, and on and on.

It has been a fabulous party. But from those to whom much has been given, much should be expected. Once we are aware of the choice, it is up to us to decide: Shall we vainly continue reveling until the bitter end, and take most of the rest of the world down with us? Or shall we acknowledge that the party is over, clean up after ourselves, and make way for those who will come after us?

Afterword to the Revised Edition In the two years since the publication of the original edition of The Party's Over, the discussion of the phenomenon of peak oil and the economic and geopolitical turmoil likely to arise from it has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Over half a dozen other books on the subject of the limits to the production of fossil fuels have appeared - including Julian Darley's High Noon for Natural Gas, Paul Roberts' The End of Oil, David Goodstein's Out of Gas, Sonia Shah's Crude, and Dale Allen Pfeiffer's The End of the Age of Oil. At least three organizations have been formed to research the problem of oil depletion and possible responses, including the a.s.sociation for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO); the Oil Depletion a.n.a.lysis Centre (ODAC); and the Post-Carbon Inst.i.tute (PCI). Additionally, a doc.u.mentary film, "The End of Suburbia" (), centering on the potential impacts of peak oil on the American way of life, has created a minor underground sensation.

Numerous relevant websites have also sprung up, including , ,

, and .

Soaring oil prices during 2004 prompted headlines in the New York Times ("The Oil Crunch," by Paul Krugman, and a May 19, 2004 editorial t.i.tled "Gasoline Hysteria"), Le Monde ("The Petro-Apocalypse," by Yves Cochet), CBS Market.w.a.tch ("The Looming Oil Crisis Will Dwarf 1973," by Paul Erdman), and elsewhere. Even National Geographic, in its June 2004 cover story, proclaimed "The End of Cheap Oil."

In the short term, high oil prices appeared to be due to increased demand, lack of refining capacity in the US, and instability in the Middle East (Iraq's production just can't seem to get off the ground, due to repeated efforts at sabotage on the part of the indigenous population, and reluctance on the part of the oil companies to invest there, given the unsafe working conditions). "So why wouldn't oil prices rocket?" asked Alan Kohler in the t.i.tle of his May 19, 2004 essay at . "The last 'super giant' oilfield (more than 10 billion barrels) was discovered 40 years ago; the last American refinery was built 25 years ago; each successive American 'driving season' guzzles more gas than the last."

Although major daily newspapers talked about the immediate causes of high gas prices, they only occasionally noted that these were riding on a deeper, tectonically shifting terrain.

The Saudi Enigma Global spare production capacity (the amount that exporting nations could produce if called upon, over and above what they are now producing), is now at its lowest point in recent decades - reportedly a mere 1 to 2 million barrels per day out of a total global output of about 83 million barrels per day. And most of the spare capacity exists in one nation - Saudi Arabia. But even this a.s.sessment, worrisome as it may be, rests on the a.s.sumption that official Saudi reserve estimates are correct.

As mentioned in Chapter 3, for the past three years oil investment banker Matthew Simmons has been publicly questioning whether Saudi oil wells really contain all of the oil that Saudi officials claim is there. In articles in the New York Times and in his new book, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, Simmons has been quoted as saying that his extensive review of 200 technical papers by scientists working in the Saudi fields has led him to doubt the published figures. For many years, the country's five major oil fields - including Ghawar, the largest oil field ever discovered - have provided the core of Saudi production, but oil field operators are injecting millions of barrels of sea water each day in order to maintain pressure within the underground systems. This practice maintains extraction levels; however, the aging Saudi fields - all discovered between 1940 and 1965 - are inevitably being depleted. When the inevitable decline in extraction rates begins, seawater injection could actually accelerate the process, resulting in a rapid drop-off in oil available for the export market.

Simmons's statements were evidently so worrisome to Saudi officials that the latter arranged a high-profile symposium at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC in late April 2004. Their own representatives, together with prominent US government officials, a.s.sured the world that Saudi Arabia's oil fields are robust and able to supply increasing global petroleum demands for decades to come. Saudi officials even took the extraordinary step of announcing that official reserve estimates of 261 billion barrels of recoverable oil are far too low. For this claim to be credible, however, independent a.n.a.lysts will have to see credible evidence of spectacular new discoveries - of which no word has yet leaked out. Unless such evidence emerges, it would probably be safe to characterize the Saudi statements as an act of desperation intended to sh.o.r.e up US support for the increasingly embattled monarchy.

In October 2004, Channel 4 News in Britain conducted an interview with Sadad Al Husseini, the recently retired vice-president for exploration of the Saudi oil company Aramco. In the interview, Husseini noted that official US forecasts for future oil supplies (which a.s.sume that Saudi Arabia can expand its oil production by over 100 percent over the next two decades), are a "dangerous over-estimate." Asked if people should be worried by the actual state of affairs, he replied in the affirmative.

Given the context of recent events, Mr. Husseini's comments carry considerable significance. They represent a radical break from previous Saudi official statements and signal that the nation with the world's largest stated petroleum reserves cannot, in fact, continue to open the oil spigot arbitrarily in order to keep prices low.1 Sh.e.l.l Game Meanwhile, in the spring of 2004, Royal Dutch/Sh.e.l.l created shock waves by reducing its reported reserves on three separate occasions within a nine-week period. This 20 percent total reserve reduction was startling enough, but an examination of the reasons for the embarra.s.sing corporate admission (which resulted in the firing or resignation of several high-level executives and the hammering of Sh.e.l.l stock prices), leads to even deeper questions about standard industry reporting practices, and about technologies that are being relied upon to extend current oil production levels in many countries.

Many of Sh.e.l.l's difficulties issued from the oil-exporting nation of Oman, where production levels have been declining for the past four years. Sh.e.l.l executives in that country apparently expected that horizontal drilling techniques would be able to maintain and even increase extraction rates. These expectations led them to overestimate their company's reserves within that nation by as much as 40 percent. A similar situation in Nigeria also led to downward reserve revisions.

This was bad enough for Sh.e.l.l, but the really grim news is what is implied for the rest of the industry. Other companies active in Nigeria - including Italy's ENI, France's Total, and US-based ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil - appear to have followed Sh.e.l.l's practice of exaggerating reserves. While new technologies - which many oil optimists are relying on to fulfill rosy projections for increased global production - appear to be effective at extracting oil from known reserves more quickly and efficiently, the overall result seems to be simply the quicker exhaustion of those reserves.

Oil's Depressing Outlook Even as questions are being raised about global oil supply, demand is inexorably growing. China is currently increasing its oil imports by 30 percent per year, and in 2003 that nation surpa.s.sed j.a.pan to become the world's second foremost petroleum importer. In the same year, Shanghai banned bicycles from most of its main streets in favor of automobiles.

As Chris Skrebowski of Petroleum Review notes in his November 2004 report "Oil Field Megaprojects," several substantial deepwater oil fields are scheduled to come on-stream in 2006, so there is some possibility of a stabilization of prices. Moreover, if current high prices lead to a renewed global recession, this could result in a drop in demand, which could in turn lead to lower fuel prices. But that effect would only be temporary. From the long-term perspective, burgeoning demand is on a collision course with emerging supply constraints, and $60, $80, and even $100 per barrel oil is possible in the near term.

When will the actual global peak of oil production occur? In the original edition of The Party's Over, I surveyed several authoritative forecasts and, on that basis, cited a decade-long window of 2006 to 2016 as the most likely period during which the global all-time peak in oil production will take place. The latest data - from Petroleum Review and Matthew Simmons, among other sources - suggest that the peak may more likely occur during the earlier years of that window. Between now and then, we will continue to experience a b.u.mpy ride as we leave the "petroleum plateau" that we have been on for the past 30 years. Once we are off the plateau and on the downward skid, times may get very interesting indeed.

Significant New Reports During the first months of 2005, several reports relevant to the issue of peak oil were issued; each had important implications that can only be summarized briefly here.

The Hirsch Report. Commissioned by the US Department of Energy from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and released in February, the study t.i.tled "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management," led by Robert L. Hirsch, examines the likely consequences of the impending global peak. The Executive Summary begins with the following paragraph: The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.

The report offers three scenarios: one in which mitigation efforts are not undertaken until global oil production peaks; a second in which efforts commence only ten years in advance of peak; and a third in which efforts begin twenty years prior to the peak. Each scenario a.s.sumes a "crash program rate of implementation." In the first case, the study suggests that peak will leave the world with a "significant liquid fuels deficit for more than two decades" that "will almost certainly cause major economic upheaval;" even with a ten-year lead time for mitigation efforts government intervention will be required and the world will experience a ten-year fuel shortfall. A crash program initiated twenty years ahead of the event will offer "the possibility" of avoiding a fuel shortfall. The report emphasizes repeatedly that both supply- and demand-side mitigation options will take many years to implement; it also notes that "The world has never faced a problem like this."

The International Energy Agency has released, in draft form, Saving Oil in a Hurry: Measures for Rapid Demand Restraint in Transport. This small book advises countries to prepare contingency plans to be implemented in the case of petroleum supply shortfalls. While not specifically predicting such shortfalls, the book a.n.a.lyzes the supply disruptions of the 1970s to see which demand-restriction measures were most helpful. The report advises developing policies such as: * Driving bans on alternate days (if your license plate ends with an odd number, you would be allowed to drive on Mondays; Wednesdays, and Fridays; if it ends with an even number, you could drive on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sat.u.r.days).

* Reduced speed limits * Encouragement of telecommuting * A 50% reduction in public transport fares * Building more carpool lanes, and making existing ones active on a 24-hour basis The Bank of Montreal Report: "Big Footprints on the Sands of Time, and Little Footprints of Fear." In the course of this report, released March 30, 2005 by Harris Investment Management, Inc. (a member of the Bank of Montreal Investment Group), author Donald G. M. c.o.xe notes that even newly developed oil fields in Saudi Arabia are being pressurized with desalinated water from the Arabian Gulf. "Isn't waterflooding petroleum v.i.a.g.r.a for aging wells?," asks c.o.xe. He goes on to speculate that the combination of the news that there's no new Saudi Light coming on stream for the next seven years plus the 27% projected decline from existing fields means Hubbert's Peak has arrived in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom's decline rate will be among the world's fastest as this decade wanes. Most importantly, Hubbert's Peak must have arrived for Ghawar, the world's biggest oilfield, and Wall Street's most-cited reason for a.s.suring us month after month that oil prices would plunge because there were so many billions of barrels of readily-available crude overhanging the market.

The report goes on to say that news from Mexico's Canterell, the world's second-largest field, and from the North Sea as well, is just as bad, and concludes that "oil shortages are here to stay."

The Goldman Sachs Report. This report, issued March 30, does not discuss Peak Oil per se; instead, it warns of an oil price "super spike" period - "a multi-year trading band of oil prices high enough to meaningfully reduce energy consumption" - resulting from surging demand in China and the US. The report suggests that oil prices could hit $105 per barrel by 2007. It also notes that "our new range [$50 105 per barrel] could prove conservative, especially if there is a supply disruption in a major oil exporting country.

The Iraq Quagmire By far the most discussed development since April 2003 (when The Party's Over hit the bookstores), has been the US-British invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq. As I discussed in my subsequent book Powerdown (New Society, 2004), I do not believe that this invasion was undertaken simply to commandeer Iraq's oil supply: the situation is more complex, and hinges on the Washington neoconservatives' published fantasies of world domination. However, when the Iraq adventure is seen in light of America's long-term foreign policy in the Middle East, it can certainly be regarded as an oil war. The US would have little interest in that part of the world were it not for the fact that 60 percent of proven global oil reserves are concentrated there. No doubt the strategy behind the war included the building of several large and permanent military bases in Iraq for the defense of US access to oil supplies in the region, especially in neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Accusations that the invasion was motivated by a thirst for oil gained credibility when American troops, as they entered Baghdad, faithfully guarded the Iraqi oil ministry but allowed other government buildings - including museums - to be looted. However, despite keen attention on the part of US civilian contractors, Iraq's oil production has languished, partly due to ongoing sabotage by Iraqi resistance fighters.

By now it is clear that the invasion and subsequent occupation were fraught with almost unfathomable incompetence and poor planning, all issuing from arrogant Washington neoconservative ideologues.

Revelations about the torture of Iraqis in American-run prisons have dramatically intensified the widespread perception that the entire exercise was criminal in nature. Even in the US itself, sentiment is growing that the country has allowed itself to be taken over by a ring of gangsters who have undermined the nation's international standing and strategic interests. America now faces a no-win situation regardless of whether it tries to continue the occupation or picks up and leaves. In either case it has lost face, made enemies, and squandered opportunities. The entire Middle East has been destabilized, and the flames of Islamic fundamentalism have been fanned to white heat.

For the world as a whole, the consequences of the Iraq fiasco are likely to be severe and long lasting. The invasion has created a widening rift between the US and many other nations. It has also hastened the inevitable energy crisis (by at least temporarily undermining Iraq's production capacity) and has likely made that crisis much harder to solve. This is because the destabilization of the Middle East will lead to greater geopolitical compet.i.tion for control of resources. The region cannot simply be left to sort out its problems on its own: all of the world's oil-importing nations have a survival stake in the contest. And that contest is likely to become more chaotic in years ahead, as the Saudis attempt to deal with simmering internal conflicts - an increasing population of younger people, declining per-capita incomes, increasing Islamic fundamentalist sentiment and violence, and ambiguity regarding a successor to the ailing King Fahd.

The old order in the Middle East is nearly finished, and a new one must be negotiated, with the US, Israel, China, Russia, j.a.pan, India, Europe, and the Middle Eastern exporting countries themselves as the primary interested parties. But "negotiated" may be too tidy a term for what lies ahead in the region.

Russia, China, Europe, and Brazil are seeking a "multipolar" world order to replace the American-led regime of corporate globalization that has characterized the period since the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile former US subordinates such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina have rebelled against the "Washington consensus." The end is in sight for US-led corporate globalization, despite the continuing growth in global trade and the accelerating outsourcing of jobs from the US to India and China.

Largely as a result of the neoconservatives' unbounded hubris, the US economy and geopolitical status are unraveling more quickly than could have been imagined only a few years ago. While in 2004 the US appeared to be in the early stages of an economic recovery, that recovery is being undermined by high oil prices, staggering levels of government debt, and a ballooning trade deficit fed largely by the need for ever greater fuel imports.

The only chance for a peaceful solution to the global energy crisis will be to foster cooperation between nations, the conservation of remaining resources, and the sharing of what oil is left. This is a politically challenging scenario at best, and it has been made far more so by the Bush administration's crimes and blunders.

The Curse of Free Energy I have received hundreds of messages in response to The Party's Over, scores of them suggesting that I have overlooked or underestimated various alternative energy sources. This was certainly the case in at least some instances, and information I have received from readers is reflected in the updated a.s.sessments of non-petroleum energy sources contained in Chapter 5. However, the subtext of many of these messages was that alternative energy sources will be capable of sustaining industrial civilization in more or less its present configuration far into the future. With this I disagree.

As I have pointed out in Powerdown, it is a mistake to view oil depletion as a technical problem that can be solved by subst.i.tuting other energy sources for petroleum. This statement may seem counter-intuitive, since to most people it must appear obvious that if we are about to run out of cheap energy, the solution is to find other sources of cheap energy.

The search for supply-side solutions to the problem of resource depletion is time-honored: we humans have become masters at every imaginable strategy for increasing our rates of extraction of important raw materials. The supply-expansion gambit has sometimes succeeded for us spectacularly - as doc.u.mented in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book. As I also sought to point out there, the effort has not always paid off so well - witness the legacies of civilizations that collapsed because of the depletion of topsoil, forests, grazing lands, or other essential resources. As Joseph Tainter has shown, returns from investments in complexity (which are also, in effect, investments in supply-side strategies) have a tendency to diminish over time.

Nevertheless, the motive for growth is so strong that it leads to a kind of mystique, which takes its ultimate form in what could be termed the cult of the inventor-savior. The cultic myth goes something like this: Once upon a time, the world teetered on the brink of chaos. Society had become mired in inefficient ways of producing or delivering its essential goods. All would have been lost but for the intervention of the Hero - who, through the tireless exercise of his superior intellect, produced an Invention that not only averted calamity but led to the dawn of a new and better era. Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were among the early inventor-heroes; Nikola Tesla, whose career is discussed in Chapter 2, seems to be the patron saint of the modern "free-energy" branch of the cult.

No one doubts that good ideas are helpful. Better designs and new inventions can indeed, in some instances at least, enable us to do the things we need to do in a more efficient and less wasteful manner. But will technology by itself, or a supply of new resources, or a way of more cleverly extracting or using current resources do anything more than buy us a little time?

Not all cult devotees are so bold as to suggest it, but surely the ultimate dream of those who advocate a technological fix must be some form of free energy. Suppose an inventor-savior were to come up with a simple device that, when operating, actually produced more energy than it consumed. What would be the implications? If the cultic myth is to be believed, it might mean the liberation of humanity from its age-old material burdens; we might therefore experience a collective spiritual awakening. Wars for control of scarce resources might cease. It might mean an end not just to drudgery, but to all forms of poverty and human exploitation - truly, Paradise at last regained!

As enchanting as this mythic vision may be, I contend that it has little to do with reality. In fact, we have had an energy source that was virtually free for the past century. I am speaking not of an exotic perpetual-motion machine based on the ingenious arrangement of permanent magnets, but of ordinary old petroleum. The energy in a single gallon of gasoline is roughly equivalent to the energy expended by a human being working hard (producing a quarter of a horsepower) for a month, and an American working at a minimum-wage job can purchase a gallon of gasoline for about 20 minutes of labor. This is a ratio of 600 to 1. The only monetary investment that I can think of that has a similar rate of return is a winning lottery ticket. Thus, even for a low-wage employee, energy has been and is still so extraordinarily cheap as to be virtually free. Hence our ability to run a society in which the average person has hundreds of "energy slaves." This is probably about as close to truly free energy as human beings will ever get.

And what have we done with this effortless and inexpensive abundance? We have expanded our numbers and our per-capita consumption rates of virtually all resources. We have created widening waste streams, and we have imperiled the existence of nearly every ecosystem on the planet. Why would more "free" energy lead to anything other than more of the same? Even if we hypothesize a completely nonpolluting energy source, we would still need to eat, and we would still need raw materials of various kinds in order to maintain our still-growing numbers in the way of life to which we have become - or would like to become - accustomed. The rate of species extinctions would continue to escalate, and at some point in the not-too-distant future we would encounter an ecological crisis that threatened the continued existence of the species that matters most to us.

But what, then, is the answer? An a.n.a.logy may be helpful. Suppose a man wins the lottery and suddenly finds himself in the possession of 10 million dollars. He uses the money to buy a penthouse apartment in Manhattan and a fleet of Italian sports cars; he gambles in Las Vegas; he develops expensive tastes in food, art, and clothing. Then one day he notices that he has only a few hundred dollars left in his bank account. Meanwhile his four children are nearing college age and are pestering him about enrolling in expensive schools. What is he to do? Let's say he imagines that the solution is simply to win the lottery again, and so he begins buying more lottery tickets. In that case, the story is unlikely to have a happy ending. In reality, his best option is to sell the penthouse and cars, buy a modest home, and get a job.

I would suggest that the effort to find more sources of cheap energy is somewhat a.n.a.logous to buying more lottery tickets. Even if we "win," we will simply be miring ourselves deeper in a fundamentally unsustainable mode of existence. Thus there may be no solution to the problem of oil depletion, if by "solution" we mean a strategy that will enable us to continue living as we are. "Free" energy has enabled us to create a lifestyle that has no future, simply because it is predicated on unending growth, and continuous growth within a finite system is an impossibility.

This information may be hard to take, but take it we must. There are problems in life that can be solved and those that can't. If the problem is that the register in our checkbook hasn't been kept in order, that is a problem we can solve - though possibly only with considerable effort. If the problem is that we are getting older and cannot do all of the things we could when we were young, we are fighting a losing battle. There are better and worse strategies in that case: we could improve our diet and get more exercise, in which case we would prolong our youthfulness as long as possible. Or we could spend our days smoking cigarettes, eating junk food, and watching hours of television, in which case we would squander and shorten whatever time we had left.