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| Jul 29, 2010 - 06:41 PM |
Queen City News - Helena's FREE Weekly Newspaper |
Helena, Montana |
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On August 26, Governor Brian Schweitzer delivered a rousing speech to a roaring crowd. The speech was exalted by pundits, bloggers and, of course, just about everyone here in Montana. My alarm clock is set to Montana Public Radio because it's somewhat less jarring and offensive than a blaring alarm buzzer, so I got an earful about the speech the next morning. But not once did I hear anyone provide any critical analysis of it, the closest being Montana GOP Chairman Erik Iverson calling Schweitzer a “partisan attack dog”. While I don't disagree with that, I would hardly call it analysis. So I will do it myself. Governor Schweitzer is utterly deluded about energy issues.
First of all, I want to let you in on something that should be – but is not – obvious to the vast majority of us (myself included): petroleum is a finite resource and, as such, the rate at which we extract it from the ground will one day peak, after which it will begin an inevitable decline. This is true for any area, from an individual field, to a region, nation, continent or the entire world. Oil production in the United States peaked in the early 1970s, when we were already a net oil importer. Opening up Prudhoe Bay in Alaska and offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico provided some rebound, but we never again reached the 1971 peak and are now again in decline, producing about 5 million barrels of oil a day, half our peak rate. This raises the question, when will global oil production peak? The data and analyses are converging
more and more on the possibility that we are, give or take a few years, at the global oil production peak. Production has been essentially flat since 2005, with a slight uptick in recent months. It looks very much like a plateau, one that we should have left behind many months ago if “market forces” have any power at all. Higher prices are supposed to stimulate more production, and apparently they have, but not anywhere near the rate needed to keep up with demand. Rather, higher prices have finally destroyed enough demand to lower prices somewhat. The implication of this is that there is essentially no spare production capacity left.
I make the following statement with much consideration and in all seriousness: any candidate, office holder, pundit or journalist who discusses energy and does not include “peak oil” in that discussion is either uninformed or untruthful and should not be trusted while that behavior persists. I can understand how Schweitzer's speech can seem, for people having no knowledge about energy depletion, to be Just What We Need. That doesn't make Obama's plan and Schweitzer's enthusiasm for it any less deluded, and I include myself as a former member of that deluded group.
In May 2005, I went to a live broadcast of Al Franken's radio show in Seattle. One of his guests was Congressman Jay Inslee, who talked about the legislation he and others were about to introduce in Congress. It was called the “New Apollo Energy Act”, leveraging the notion that we need a “let's go to the moon” attitude to get out of our energy predicament. Sound familiar? This was at a time when our “predicament” was gasoline at just over $2 per gallon, having breached the $2 barrier the year before. Ah, the good old days. Anyway, Inslee's presentation was welcome relief. It validated everything I thought I knew about energy (and apparently for the rest of the audience as well), including the notion that the problem could be solved without any significant effort or sacrifice on my part. I'm an American, damn it, and I like my way of life. All I had to do was cast the right ballot or write my congresscritters.
Not two months later, buried in the four-digit channels of my satellite TV system, I encountered an interview on Free Speech TV with some guy named James Kunstler talking about something called “peak oil”. It was the first time I understood that it isn't how much oil you have that matters, but how much is available each day. A $500 daily ATM limit puts a damper on $1 million in the bank, for example. Think about that the next time someone touts reserves without mentioning production rates.
Schweitzer used the phrase “energy independence” no less than seven times, as did Senator Jon Tester on these pages two months ago. Energy independence is a contradiction, and its repetition is another indication that someone is uninformed, lying to you, or just manipulative. Life is fundamentally dependent on energy, and there is only one way to become energy independent: die. Becoming independent of foreign oil is something different and certainly in the realm of possibility. In fact, it is inevitable, but probably not the way you think. One of the subtle aspects (again, this should be obvious but is not until someone points it out) of resource depletion is what Jeffrey Brown has dubbed the “Export Land Model”. Simply put, due to increasing consumption within oil exporting nations, their export rates will decrease faster than that of their production. This should be a significant concern for oil importers like us, as we can see it happening before our eyes (if we look) with Mexico (who happens to be our third largest oil supplier), which is on the fast track to zero oil exports within a few years. Their production peaked in 2004.
Governor Schweitzer makes the common and egregious claim that we import 70 percent of our oil “from overseas” with the money ending up in the hands of those “openly hostile to American values and our way of life”. Let's go down the list. Our largest supplier of oil is Canada, selling us 12 percent of the oil we use. Second is Saudi Arabia, at around 8 percent. They're our friends, right? I mean, George W. Bush meets with them a lot, holds hands with the prince, asks them to increase production, etc. Number three is Mexico, just under 7 percent. Immigration tensions aside, I'd say friendly and, not to mention, next door. Next in line is Venezuela. Hugo Chavez certainly takes exception to American imperial activities, for which he gets a bad rap in U.S. media. But is he hostile to our values and way of life or, more importantly, us as people? A while back he called Bush “the devil” at the U.N.; that ought to please most Democrats. A few years ago, he began selling discounted heating oil to poor families and communities in the United States. That's some hostility. Number five: Nigeria. Anyone remotely aware of the situation there knows that the Nigerian government and the dreaded “Big Oil” companies who produce oil there are far less hostile to our way of life than to that of the Nigerians trying to maintain their traditional lifestyle in the Niger Delta. And so on. The point is that, in total, we receive around 12 percent of the oil we consume from the Persian Gulf. That's where the hostiles are, right? The “petro-dictator”, as Schweitzer calls them. Why not just call them “Islamofascists” and be done with it? Oh, wait, wrong party.
By now you might be thinking, “Yeah, so? We're going to get off the oil, that's the whole point!” The problem is, it's too little, too late. If we had listened to Jimmy Carter a few decades ago we may – and I stress “may” – have been able to ween ourselves off petroleum with no more discomfort than putting on a sweater. But we didn't, and now we don't have the time. Everything about Schweitzer's speech and Obama's plan are about MORE. Buy a windmill. Buy solar panels. Buy a new car, whether it's just a more fuel-efficient one or a fancy plug-in hybrid. That's just greenwashed Business As Usual. At no point does Schweitzer tell us that we must or should even try to make do with less.
The closest he comes is stating that “the most important barrel of oil is the one that you don’t use”, without really telling us how we're going to not use that barrel. I Assume it has something to do with the tax credits for fuel-efficient cars. There are two problems with this. First, increased efficiency leads to an overall increase in consumption, not a reduction. This is called Jevons Paradox. Second, what about the people who don't drive? They don't get a tax credit, but the Prius drivers do? I drive a fairly low mileage car, averaging a little more than 20 mpg in town. I also drive relatively few miles, an order of magnitude less than when I lived in a big city.
I am not convinced that buying a new car for myself would do any good for anyone or anything, except maybe the dealer. Oh, but I would have heated seats and the latest in cup holder technology. How many more miles would I have to drive in order for the difference in the gasoline consumption between the two vehicles to make up for the many barrels of oil it would take to build the new car: oil to mine the iron ore for the frame, oil to make the plastic composites for the body and interior, oil to mine the lithium for hundreds of pounds of batteries, and so on? I don't deserve a tax break for buying a new car and neither do you.
Schweitzer touted the Bakken formation as “one of the most promising oil fields in America”, which may be true, as far as it goes. Did I mention that I've won the “Most Promising Ben Sutter” award every year since 1972? Did I also mention that the United States is firmly in its oil production decline phase? In case I didn't make that point clear enough earlier, allow me to do it now. The United States will never again reach its peak production rate. Even if we did, right now, jump back up to 10 million barrels a day, we would still need to import about half of the oil we consume.
Yes, we will continue to find oil. New wells will be drilled and will pump oil profitably for a long time. But they won't make up for declines elsewhere. And that is the problem with a global production peak. There is nowhere else to go; we are already drilling for scraps, squeezing oil out of coal and replacing food production with fuel crops. The desperation is so obvious it has become transparent to us.
It's not fair of me to single out Schweitzer and Obama. Schweitzer is right about McCain's plan. The drill-drill-drill mantra is asinine indeed, and he has confirmed that this is his plan by choosing ANWR drilling advocate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. I am, however, somewhat reluctantly inclined to acquiesce to the “drillaniacs”, if only to end that insipid debate and demonstrate (albeit in a few years time) that drilling will not save us.
By now, you're probably saying, out loud, “That's why John McCain's single-answer is a ‘dry well’, but Obama will CHANGE things!” Sorry, it's not going to happen. The problem with all of these individual solutions – biofuels, nuclear, hydropower, solar, wind, tidal, hydrogen, geothermal, “clean” coal, coal gasification, coal to liquids, drill here, drill now, just drill drill drill – aside from their own individual horrific downsides (biofuels lead to high prices and food riots, windmills kill birds, dams destroy fish habitat and spawning grounds, hydrogen is a pipe dream, coal anything is a dirty pipe dream) is that they do not scale well. The issue of scale is a multiplicative one. Something is double, triple, 10 or 100 times larger than something else; e.g., what we want to produce compared to what we currently produce.
When we combine these individual sources they are cumulative, additive. If the individual items won't scale up to the desired levels, neither will adding them together. I challenge anyone to show me realistic numbers for all of these “solutions” – each competing for the same oil needed to scale up (e.g., solar panels, nuke plants, dams, windmills and plug-in hybrids are not made from gumption and hemp; they all require oil, metal, concrete and other resources) – and how they can be added together to provide more than a modest fraction of the 20 million barrels a day we currently use. And then show me where all of the oil is going to come from to maintain our current daily activities (way of life) while building 100 million plug-in hybrids, umpteen thousand windmills, acres of solar panels and so on.
Schweitzer says we need to “break America’s addiction to foreign oil”. Well, sort of. It's not foreign oil we're addicted to. It's not even oil itself. To quote Kunstler, “It's not that we're putting the wrong fuel in our cars or driving the wrong cars. It's the incessant motoring that's the problem.” That, and the endless stream of electronic gadgets that we must have. In this, there is no distinction between Schweitzer, Obama and McCain. We are all entitled to our lifestyles. Our role is simply to indicate whether we think puppet D or puppet R will be more successful at making sure we don't have to sacrifice anything substantial to maintain our “American way of life”.
Schweitzer points out, correctly, that “America consumes 25 percent of the oil, but has less than 3 percent of the reserves”. He follows with a snarky, “You don’t need a $2 calculator to figure that one out.” The implication is that we are entitled to that 25 percent; we just have to find another way to get it. What he fails to mention is that we consume that 25 percent having only 5 percent of the world's population. Some time ago, a commenter on theoildrum.com (I forget who) put it this way: “It's like going to a party where there are 19 other people and four pies and demanding an entire pie for yourself”. Remember that the next time someone blames high oil prices on increasing demand from India and China, the Chinese being the ones who use a significant amount of oil to make all of our crap, including $2 calculators.
We are entering an era fundamentally different from what most living Americans have known. It will be a time of contraction, localization, instability and unfamiliarity. Schweitzer said that his parents never graduated high school but sent all of their children to college. The future will be a time when that trend reverses and phrases like “last of my family to go to college” become familiar. While we are distracted by the media, as I am sure we will be, with an historic election – either the first black president or the first female vice-president will take office on January 20th – those competing for our votes will continue to pretend that if we only vote for them, all will stay (or return to) the way it should be. Prepare to be disappointed.
(Ben Sutter is a software developer who lives in Helena.)
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