Michael Ruppert's Most Important Speech
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THE PARADIGM IS THE ENEMY: The State of the Peak Oil Movement at the Cusp of Collapse
April 28, 2006 - As a matter of necessity, in the course of a turbulent and often very difficult life, I have developed a pretty warped sense of humor. As most police officers, nurses, ER doctors, paramedics, and military combat veterans know, the best time to find humor is when things are at their worst. Sometimes the humor that emerges from these situations is strange, to say the least. And yet sometimes it remains the most memorable humor of a lifetime—humor that can actually sustain you in tough times. Humor is energy.
Too often Peak Oil activism reminds me of a statement that I found a long time ago in a book of famous quotations. In the section containing the last recorded words of famous people I found a quote that has stayed with me ever since.
The quote was simply, “We’ve got them now.”
The person who wrote those last “recorded” words on a dispatch to his commanding officer, General George Crook, was George Armstrong Custer.
During the course of this conference I have heard precious little attention paid to events in the world around us indicating that Peak Oil is about to have its global “coming out party” and what that might mean. In almost every nook, cranny and corner of the planet, stress points are beginning to fracture. For the past five years I have argued, emphasized, and repeated endlessly that perhaps the biggest mistake of all time was made on September 11th 2001, when the only real global operational plan to deal with Peak Oil was put into effect. On September 11th we began a war, now infamously known as “the war which will not end in our lifetimes,” to decide who will control the last remaining oil and gas reserves on the planet.
In Crossing the Rubicon I wrote, “Events in the five-year period that began on September 11th, 2001 will determine the course of human history for several centuries to come.” We are just months away from the end of that five-year period. What has been accomplished?
The painful answer is: not enough.
Where are we in the real world and how do we judge our current activities in light of real-world events? To sum it up in the words of one of the most senior members of the Peak Oil movement I know, Jay Hanson, “I see my worst fears unfolding right in front of my face.” Jay wrote those words just about a week ago.
Jay started the first Peak Oil website in the 1980s, almost even before there was a web. We should listen to Jay, and I could not agree more with his assessment; my worst fears are unfolding right in front of my face.
Perhaps the greatest flaw in the Peak Oil movement’s current operating paradigm is that, a part of the movement at least, instead of building lifeboats in the face of an immediate disaster, is delusionally focused on trying to build alternative-powered luxury liners that operate just like the paradigm we as a species need to be abandoning. Not only is this a futile effort, it may well be responsible for killing or destroying the lives of people who at least partially understand Peak Oil and who are trying to find the best courses of immediate action for themselves and their families.
Some parts of this movement however—and tonight I intend to honor two men who are leading the way—have seen the writing on the wall and are independently taking appropriate courses of action that demonstrate both the kind of incisive thinking and leadership that will be needed in very short order.
Before I tell you about these men I think it’s a good idea to stop for a minute and take an inventory of the world in which we live today—right now.
THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S ENERGY
I have observed that almost every Peak Oil conference, whether this one, or the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, or ASPO-USA, makes only the most superficial attempt to evaluate geopolitical and economic conditions. These conditions, more than the rate at which supplies are depleted, will determine how Peak Oil and collapse manifest in our lives.
• The Times of London on April 8th ran a story that should have pre-empted every other major story that day. Headlined “World ‘cannot meet oil demand’”. The story’s first sentence read, “The world lacks the means to produce enough oil to meet rising projections for demand for fuel, according to Cristophe de Margerie, head of exploration for Total.” Later the story quoted Margerie as saying, “’Numbers like 120 million barrels per day will never be reached, never’ he said.”
• In the last year we have seen the collapse of Kuwait ’s super-giant field Burgan; accelerated decline in the world’s second-largest field, Mexico ’s Cantarell; and an overall global decline rate approaching 8%. We have seen Saudi Arabia fail to increase production while at the same time finding it more difficult to hide deteriorating reservoir conditions in all of its mature fields, including Ghawar. As of tonight, more than 30 of the world’s largest producing nations have entered steep decline.
• Discoveries continue to fall off a cliff. Over the last four years the world has been consuming 6 barrels of oil for every new one found. Publicity stunts, such as the recent attempt to reclassify Venezuelan tar as oil – even when applauded by dilettantes like Gregg Palast – are having no impact on markets, prices or public policy. I think we can safely say at this point that we will soon see an end to the influence of charlatans and schemers like Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy. (Now there’s at least one bright note.) At this point, the Peak Oil movement should avoid expending needless energy on any arguments about whether Peak Oil is real or not. That precious energy is needed elsewhere. We have won that debate.
• Soaring commodity prices for everything from copper, to uranium, to cement and steel are not only hampering needed infrastructure investment, they are also making it almost impossible to build new drilling rigs, especially deep water rigs. Commodity scarcities are the result of overpopulation, hoarding, over consumption and nothing else. Drilling rigs themselves are in extremely short supply around the world and I believe we should also stay away from any debates about whether new oil supply will even make a difference. It will not and we need only continue to breathe in and out to see this position vindicated also.
• The US government continues an unwinnable war in Iraq while building massive permanent bases and the largest embassy compound ever built. Not only does the US have no intention of leaving Iraq , it has committed—whether under Republican or Democratic leadership—to staying forever—whatever that means. The Empire’s position is clear, not as a result of what it says, but as a result of what it has done. America ’s primary plan to deal with Peak Oil is to fight or intimidate for energy supplies wherever it deems necessary. That, of course, has forced the rest of the world—with a few notable exceptions like Norway and Brazil —to dance to the same sheet music. As a result, I would estimate that of every ten units of energy (or money) expended preparing for Peak Oil today, nine are spent preparing for war while only one is spent building lifeboats and teaching people how to survive. This is sheer insanity.
• The US government is playing a bluff hand over an attack against Iran , which in spite of being both unlikely and risking a global nuclear holocaust, has resulted in massive increases in military spending all around the planet. A global arms race is now using up energy and commodities that should be used rebuilding railroads, enhancing mass transportation, and building renewable infrastructure to soften the coming blows.
• In the face of this, the entire world, and especially China , Russia , India , Germany and Japan are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into Iran . This is one of many sure signs that the American Empire’s weaknesses are becoming visible. There is blood in the water and blood in the water usually leads to a fight. The world, at least as far as its pocketbook is concerned, is betting on Iran .
• Russia is selling Iran lots of Tor M1 anti-aircraft missile systems and cruise missile and high-speed torpedo technologies. China also is flooding Iran with advanced military systems.
• The US has stepped up deliveries of weapons systems and military advisors to oil-producing regions around the world. This has been matched by similar deliveries to the same regions by Russia , China , Pakistan , Saudi Arabia , Venezuela , France , Britain , India and many other countries. A best-selling novel in China , The Battle in Protecting Key Oil Routes, has the Chinese navy destroying a US carrier battle group. The popular book documents a bloody contest over control of the Straits of Malacca, that narrow channel through which most of China ’s, Japan ’s, and Korea ’s energy passes.
• China ’s Hu Jintao, clearly one of the world’s only major leaders with both plans and choices, is making direct calls on Saudi Arabia and Nigeria as George W. Bush haplessly points to hydrogen fuel cell cars as a solution. Don’t worry about how many American people will buy into such Bush nonsense. Worry about how many world leaders are watching these same clips and asking, “Is that the best he can do? America is in deep shit.”
• In Nigeria—the US’s fifth largest oil supplier and the world’s eighth—groups of well-organized and supplied rebels are using high-tech email, bombs, bullets and kidnapping to terrorize major oil companies. Production is threatened on a daily basis. In a world where there is no place else to go to replace even 50,000 barrels a day—out of the 84 million needed—the totally corrupt regime of Olusegun Obasanjo is besieged by rebel and dissident groups on many fronts. I have no doubt that several of these groups are being financed, trained, led and supplied through covert arms of the US, Chinese, Russian, British, Saudi, Pakistani and/or Indian governments.
• In nearby Chad—which is the source-country for the Chad-Cameroon pipeline delivering 160,000 barrels a day into the global mouth—as he attempts to ward off an aggressively hungry World Bank, President Idriss Deby is literally holding oil hostage. Knowing full well that to shut down the pipeline would cause an estimated $10 jump in the price of oil, he is literally telling the west, “Come any closer and I’ll shoot the oil.”
• At the same time, Chad is beset by rebel insurgents from neighboring Sudan , which is China ’s fifth-largest oil supplier. Both the US and China are hip-deep in covert operations in Sudan.
• On April 18, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with one of Africa’s most brutal dictators, Teodoro Nguema of Equatorial Guinea —Africa’s third-largest oil exporter, calling him a good friend of the US . With institutional memories as short as they are, few remember that Sir Mark Thatcher, son of Britain ’s Margaret Thatcher, was nabbed last year in the middle of a coup intended to oust Nguema.
• All of Africa, especially West Africa—exactly as I predicted in 2003, in Crossing the Rubicon and in last year’s lecture series which became our newest DVD Denial Stops Here—is exploding with armed insurrections from the Western Sahara region to Angola . It is West Africa where I believe we will see proxy wars likely intensifying this year, which could trigger a global nuclear exchange in very short order.
• But murder, far more callous, is about to be perpetrated by the Democratic Party as it enters the 2006 midterm campaigns with what is surely—barring a miracle—going to be one of its major planks in 2008: “Don’t worry,” they will promise, “the Democrats will restore cheap gasoline for all and find a no-pain answer to all of our energy woes. High prices are the fault of greedy oil companies and price gougers, not a lack of supply.” I can promise you now, Hillary Clinton, that if the Democratic Party adopts this approach it will find in me an enemy that will make FTW’s editorial posture towards the Bush administration over the last five years look like abject friendship.
• American mainstream media has become absolutely and certifiably schizophrenic on the issue of Peak Oil. Within the space of an hour, one can watch segments acknowledging Peak Oil and Gas and the insoluble problems they bring, and segments assuring us that there is no problem at all if we just fix a few little things.
• On April 11th The Financial Times reported that Russian production is falling and expected to decrease—rather than increase—rapidly over the next four years.
• On April 21, Russia ’s giant, Gazprom—for the second time in less than a year—threatened to shut off Europe’s only major source of natural gas. Just a month previously, a desperate and hobbled Britain surrendered its energy sovereignty to the European Union in the hopes of getting better energy prices at the end of Russia ’s long natural gas supply line.
• On April 24th, just a few days ago, during his state visit to Saudi Arabia , Chinese President Hu Jintao signed a series of accords in which China , in exchange for a larger portion of Saudi oil exports, agreed to transfer high-tech weapons and other technologies to the Saudi monarchy in exchange.
• At the same moment that George W. Bush has announced that he will stop refilling the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an ill-conceived attempt to lower pump prices—a completely shortsighted and self-serving gesture—China is in negotiations with Saudi Arabia to begin filling a new one.
• Climate Change and hurricanes not only continue apace but have accelerated. Now that we are just weeks away from a new hurricane season, fully 23% of Gulf of Mexico production remains shut-in after last year’s hurricanes. Recently the Department of Energy acknowledged that most of that would never be rebuilt due to high investment costs at mature and post-mature reservoirs. Aside from the fact that it’s not cost effective, this is also because of rig shortages. This is what FTW warned you about almost a year ago. When and if we ever have a chance to look back we will historically mark Katrina and Rita as the singular moment in time when a true US economic and military resurgence became impossible; the moment when the Empire began it’s collapse. In other words, that was the moment when the Empire passed from decline to terminal status.
• On April 4th, Dow Jones’ MarketWatch reported that $6 to $7 gasoline might be coming this summer. Is there anyone in this room tonight who does not believe that $6-$7 gasoline would be an unmistakable sign of collapse?
• And let me add an observation here. I think a good part of this unseasonable spike in American oil prices is both caused by the switch out from MTBE to ethanol and a classic political strategy which is to create a bad problem and then appear to solve it so that people will accept an otherwise unacceptable solution. This is an election year. The elections are not for seven months. I for one do NOT think we will see $6 or $7 gasoline this summer. I think gas prices may reach $4 or even $5 for a short period, after which the Bush administration (say sometime between July and September) will again tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and his oil industry base will—they hope—be able to find a few million barrels to temporarily drive prices down, give Republicans a desperately-needed electoral boost, and feed another dose of valium to the increasingly worn out American consumer.
• But to assume that the current high prices are solely caused by the MTBE/Ethanol switchover is to miss the fact that Britain is now experiencing it’s highest-ever gasoline prices averaging more than $8 per gallon or that Japan—according to the news agency Chugoku—has now reached it’s highest-ever price for diesel fuel at almost $4.00 per gallon. These countries do not have MTBE rules to be concerned with. Peak Oil is here.
There is an enormous risk lurking in all this. I mean a potentially deadly risk.
As the effects of Peak Oil intensify there is less and less wiggle room on the planet for any miscalculation. Worse, there is less and less room to recover from or adjust to any “surprises” that might come along.
SURPRISES
What are some of these possible surprises?
• Just one more major hurricane
• A major earthquake in any oil producing region or pipeline corridor from Russia ’s far east, to Iran , to Alberta
• Any one of a dozen possible side effects from global warming, whether from melting tundra that might sink pipelines, to rising sea levels that might endanger offshore production
• Civil unrest in any oil-producing region that gets out of control and damages more infrastructure than can be quickly repaired
• A decision by Venezuela ’s Hugo Chavez to redirect just 10 or 15% of his US exports to other customers
• A successful attack on Saudi Arabia ’s Abqaiq terminal
• Political unrest in our second-largest oil supplier, Mexico
• Major unrest in the Caspian basin – another region where covert operations are now probably the second- or third-largest GDP component for several nations.
As I speak tonight, India is moving to supply MiG 29s to Tajikistan at the same time that Kyrgyzstan is threatening to revoke permission for US bases. This is a building vacuum that China , India , Russia and Pakistan (all nuclear powers) are eager to fill. Add Iran to the list of nations seeking increased influence in the Caspian Basin.
Another one of many reasons why the US cannot and will not attack Iran is that—unreported by the major media—the US military has undertaken quiet but significant military build ups in both West Africa and in the Caspian. US military personnel have been dispatched to Nigeria and NATO and the US Navy have begun moving into to the Gulf of Guinea. This is pulling ever tighter on the already over-stretched rubber band holding the US military together as it experiences a continuing, unmitigated and unprecedented defeat in Iraq .
There are many more possible precipitating events that could push the first dominoes in the chain of collapse. Any one of them could trigger a massive and sudden descent into chaos that would catch all of us by surprise. My position is that we cannot afford to be unprepared for surprises. And it’s probably an event we haven’t thought of that will ultimately do it. These are only a few possibilities.
THE STATE OF THE AMERICAN AND WORLD ECONOMIES
• General Motors, as it stands on the brink of bankruptcy, has announced that it lost $106 billion last year.
• Ford and Daimler Chrysler are teetering not far behind GM as Toyota is poised to become the largest auto maker in the world, bigger in terms of sales than America ’s Big Three combined.
• As US News told us last December 19th, 800,000 jobs were going to be cut last winter. The final numbers aren’t in yet, but it looks like that happened.
• According to an MS-NBC story dated April 24, “The Housing Bubble Has Popped” as inventories swell, sales decline, prices soften, lenders are raising rates and the first signs of panic start to appear. For those who have followed the housing bubble closely, you know that this is a global housing bubble and that these trends have become apparent from the UK, to Australia, to Japan. Along with falling house prices and a drying up of credit, over-stretched consumers now face very difficult choices as they are forced to decide between driving, eating, paying their bills, or having a place to live. This particular collapse is just beginning and the world economy must follow its lead.
• New stories are reporting that some Americans are pawning precious objects for gas money.
• Consumer debt continues to skyrocket as the US trade deficit continues to explode.
• Bankruptcies are at an all-time high.
• As Reuters told us on April 22, the Finance Ministers of the G7 nations have just announced after their recent meeting in Washington that the dollar is going into decline.
• On April 24th, Qatar announced that it will begin diversifying out of dollars and into Euros.
• On April 4th, according to Reuters, the Vice Chair of the Chinese parliament urged that China reduce its holdings of US debt.
• On February 22, the director of Norway ’s stock exchange recommended that Norway drop out of the London Petroleum Exchange (priced in dollars) and open an oil trading bourse priced in Euros.
• On January 12, Britain ’s Independent announced that Norway had begun preparations for a global environmental and economic collapse. The story reported that “ Norway has revealed a plan to build a ‘doomsday vault’ hewn out of an Arctic mountain to store two million crop seeds in the event of a global disaster. The store is designed to hold all the seeds representing the world's crops and is being built to safeguard future food supplies in the event of widespread environmental collapse.
• In a sign of pending inflation, the Federal Reserve last month stopped telling us what the M3 money supply was in a surefire indication that inflation is on the way. This came conveniently after further inflationary indicators were hidden by removing the cost of gasoline and food from the Consumer Price Index.
• On March 28, Al Jazeera warned that Asia must be prepared for an imminent dollar collapse.
• On March 26, India moved to relax all currency controls for the Rupee. This suggests that India knows a dollar crash is coming and hopes that the Rupee will enjoy the bounce.
• China has made another adjustment re-evaluating the Yuan, accelerating the dollar’s decline.
• The Asian Development Bank has announced plans to develop a regional currency index as a preliminary step in the creation of a Euro-like currency for Asia.
• The dollar has lost six cents against the Euro in the last six weeks.
• Gold, which I have and still devotedly endorse as a safe haven for either rich or poor, has broken through to highs not seen in 18 years. I had not expected gold to break $600 an ounce until at least this fall. It happened weeks ago. Notwithstanding the predictable price corrections that we will see, as a failed and broken system of gold price suppression loses control, I think the path is now fairly clear to $800 gold within two years or less. When Peak Oil becomes aggressive, within the next five years, I think $1,000 gold is a certainty. As always, I encourage FTW subscribers and anyone who will pay attention to continue to invest in gold. To be precise, I encourage them to invest in physical, tangible, gold bullion or bullion coins like the Maple Leaf or Krugerand that can be kept close to home and hearth. Small gold purchases can be made for as little as a few hundred dollars. All of the struggling FTW subscribers who have made even tiny purchases have benefited by seeing even their meager investments double in four years and increase by 50% in value in just the last 18 months.
• Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach – who last year warned of an economic Armageddon is now warning, “I continue to believe that the American consumer is the weak link in the global daisy chain. The combination of rising long-term interest rates and higher oil prices puts an unmistakable squeeze on discretionary income – the last thing overly indebted, savings-short US consumers need…”
So why then has the Dow recently reached six-year highs? It’s simple, and I know that my good friend and colleague, Catherine Austin Fitts will agree, that the DOW Jones Industrial Average has absolutely nothing to do with measuring the quality of American life. I am reminded of one of the most important quotes I have ever obtained for a story, that of Dutch economist Martin Van Mourik who told the Paris ASPO Conference in 2003, “It may not be profitable to slow decline.”
Indeed ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the point where every increase in the Dow will mean that life has actually gotten worse for Americans and riskier for the world as a whole. I described the endgame of this irony in one of my favorite essays of all time Globalcorp. As M. King Hubbert wrote, and as Catherine Austin Fitts teaches, and as I have said for so long, “Until you change the way money works, you change nothing.”
It is a shame that much of the Peak Oil movement that understands this problem is foolishly trying to change the way money works systemically, instead of trying to change it in the only way that time and circumstance now permit—individually, locally and regionally. The first and primary requirement for that to occur is for people to disengage from the global paradigm.
TWO LEADERS POINTING THE WAY
During my eight-month hiatus from public speaking, I have watched the Peak Oil movement morph from its general status as a “lunatic fringe” group to acceptance and even recognition and honor as an “influential special interest group.” (That’s what they call groups like us on Capitol Hill and in the mainstream press). Many members of congress, business leaders, and even the major media listen to us now. To the organizers of this conference and to all of us who have labored on the Peak Oil field for years—like Jay Hanson, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist, Ken Deffeyes and Colin Campbell, for decades—there is some relief in seeing growing public (and even governmental) acknowledgment of Peak Oil. Of course, most of us have known that all we had to do was keep breathing in and out for a while and we would be vindicated on the issue.
But now what?
Before I continue, let me stop and acknowledge that the backbone of this section of my speech tonight was derived from a series of original From The Wilderness articles published almost a year ago. Our then Science Editor, Dale Allen Pfeiffer, brought to my attention a brilliant Russian writer named Dmitry Orlov who—having experienced the collapse of the Soviet Empire—thought that there might be some lessons to learn if rational minds compared what looked to be the ever-more-certain coming collapse of the American Empire. After listening to Dale and corresponding with Dmitry—who presented here yesterday with my good friend, and a great Peak Oil leader, Matt Savinar—I instantly commissioned a three-part series for FTW titled Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century.
That series is probably the single most eloquent and cogent piece of writing FTW has published in its eight-plus years. And if you are familiar with FTW writers like Stan Goff, Jamey Hecht, Carolyn Baker, and Michael Kane you know that’s a heck of a compliment. You can still read Dmitry’s stories on our site and if you have not, I beg that you do.
So let me acknowledge right now, that our next important lesson tonight was first articulated by Dmitry—Dmitry, if you’re here, please stand up. I’m going to quote Dmitry quite a bit as I add my own observations and updates about the biggest challenges lying in front of us and how we might deal with them.
At the start of his series, Dmitry observed that when he started looking for stories connecting economic collapse to Peak Oil in October 2004 there were 16,300 such documents listed on search engines. Less than a year later, by April 2005 there were 4,220,000. He pointed out correctly that the reason why such stories had not been discussed in the media was attributable to only one cause: denial.
Denial.
Let’s take a look at just a few of the most important quotes from Dmitry’s essays. You really need to read the entire set. And even though these quotes are clipped from disparate sections, when strung together they speak for themselves admirably and paint a deeply-moving picture.
• “Instead, there is much discussion of policy: what ‘we’ should do. The ‘we’ in question is presumably some embodiment of the great American Can-Do Spirit: a brilliantly organized consortium of government agencies, leading universities, research centers, and major corporations, all working together toward the goal of providing plentiful, clean, environmentally safe energy, to fuel another century of economic expansion. Welcome to the sideshow at the end of the universe!”
• “The next circle of denial revolves around what must inevitably come to pass if the Goddess of Technology were to fail us: a series of wars over ever-more scarce resources. Paul Roberts, who is very well informed on the subject of peak oil, has this to say: ‘what desperate states have always done when resources turn scarce… [is] fight for them.’ Let us not argue that this has never happened, but did it ever amount to anything more than a futile gesture of desperation? Wars take resources, and, when resources are already scarce, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility. Those with more resources would be expected to win. I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur. I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat. I would also like to suggest that these conflicts would be self-limiting: modern warfare uses up prodigious amounts of energy, and if the conflicts are over oil and gas installations, then those installations will get blown up, as has happened repeatedly in Iraq . This will result in less energy being available and, consequently, less warfare.”
• “While the United States used to have far more goodwill around the world than the Soviet Union, the ‘evil empire’ gap has narrowed since the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene. Now, in many countries around the world, including Western countries like Sweden , the United States ranks as a bigger threat to peace than Iran or North Korea . In the hated-empire race, the United States is now beginning to look like the champion. Nobody likes a loser, but especially if the loser is a failed superpower. Nobody had any pity for the poor defunct Soviet Union; and nobody will have any pity for poor defunct America either.”
• “The United States is now facing a current account deficit that cannot be sustained, a falling currency, and an energy crisis, all at once. It is now the world's largest debtor nation, and most people do not see how it can avoid defaulting on its debt. According to a lot of analysts, it is technically bankrupt, and is being propped up by foreign reserve banks, which hold a lot of dollar-denominated assets, and, for the time being, want to protect the value of their reserves. This game can only go on for so long. Thus, while the Soviet Union deserves honorable mention for going bankrupt first, the gold in this category (pun intended) will undoubtedly go to the United States , for the largest default ever.”
• “Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agribusiness, addicted to fossil fuels. The American ones work better, as long as energy is cheap, and, after that, probably not at all.”
• I’ll have to paraphrase Dmitry on race and violence. But in that section he noted that not only was race not an important stress line in the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were also virtually no firearms in private hands. His advice for minorities in America was to find either an ethnically homogeneous community “while the rest would be well-advised to look for the few communities where inter-ethnic relations have been cemented through integrated living and intermarriage, and where the strange and fragile entity that is multi-ethnic society might have a chance of holding together.”
• “Another key difference between the US and the USSR : in the Soviet Union, nobody owned their place of residence. What this meant is that the economy could collapse without causing homelessness: just about everyone went on living in the same place as before. There were no evictions or foreclosures. Everyone stayed put, and this prevented society from disintegrating.”
• “One more difference: the place where they stayed put was generally accessible by public transportation, which continued to run during the worst of times. Most of the Soviet-era developments were centrally planned, and central planners do not like sprawl: it is too difficult and expensive to service. Few people owned cars, and even fewer depended on cars for getting around. Even the worst gasoline shortages resulted in only minor inconveniences for most people…”
• “Most people in the U.S. cannot survive very long without an income. This may sound curious to some people—how can anyone, anywhere survive without an income? Well, in post-collapse Russia, if you didn't pay rent or utilities—because no-one else was paying them either—and if you grew or gathered a bit of your own food, and you had some friends and relatives to help you out, then an income was not a prerequisite for survival. Most people got by, somehow.”
• “A collapsing economy is especially hard on those who are accustomed to prompt, courteous service. In the Soviet Union, most official service was rude and slow, and involved standing in long lines. Many of the products that were in short supply could not be obtained even in this manner, and required something called blat: special, unofficial access or favor. The exchange of personal favors was far more important to the actual functioning of the economy than the exchange of money. To Russians, blat is almost a sacred thing: a vital part of culture that holds society together. It is also the only part of the economy that is collapse-proof, and, as such, a valuable cultural adaptation.”
• And finally, Dmitry wrote, “In all, I expect drugs and alcohol to become one of the largest short-term post-collapse entrepreneurial opportunities in the United States , along with asset stripping, and security.”
As Dmitry wrote in his series, the collapse of Empires, as with Rome, has in the past sometimes taken centuries. In the case of the Mayans it happened in a much shorter period. But Dmitry was quick to observe that the first stages of collapse are often the most dislocative, painful, and demanding because that’s when the first psychological and physical shocks hit hardest. And I would argue—along with the likes of Joseph Tainter—that the collapse of modern, highly-complex empires is both accelerated and far more aggravated than what happened 1600 years ago in Rome.
The Soviet Empire collapsed and disappeared in less than four years and the devastation for the Russian people was both profound and deadly. I have been to Russia and I will never forget a little piece of Russian humor left over from the siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the Second World War. I told my Russian hosts that I wanted to get a little outside of the cosmopolitan center of Moscow and see some “real Russia ”.
The first thing they said was, “If you go into a restaurant, don’t order chicken.”
I hesitated and then asked, “Why?”
“Because”, they said, “ever since the Germans laid siege to Leningrad, chicken is what we have called it when we had to eat our comrades to stay alive and in the fight. In some parts of Russia one is still never sure.”
Do we dare assume that Americans are special and somehow exempt from all the vicissitudes that have befallen every other collapse of empire in history?
For those of you who chided me last year for predicting an American economic collapse this last winter, which some argue—in spite of this evidence—failed to materialize, let me point out that—and we will talk about it tonight—there are strong signs that collapse has already begun. I never said the collapse would be over last winter, I only said that it would begin. That collapse will most certainly be here—in emerging bloom and for all to see—this summer. No one will remain unaffected by it. Whenever it ends, it is not going to end prettily.
When one is preoccupied with survival, anything beyond survival becomes an imponderable luxury. And to mistakenly label a luxury a necessity makes it impossible to survive. The Peak Oil movement needs to ask itself now: what are its necessities and what are its luxuries? There is precious little room for error now. These decisions will be hard but they must be made.
If some Latin scholar had predicted the day that the barbarians would sack, loot, and occupy Rome and missed it by only four months, he or she today would be regarded as a prophet. I am content tonight, to just be the same asshole many of you have come to know and love—or hate—over the years. I’m just doing my job as I see it needs to be done. That is all I have ever done.
POST CARBON
And now we come to the second man I would like to honor tonight, Julian Darley of Global Public Media and the Post Carbon Institute.
Put simply, the Post Carbon Institute’s mission is to save lives. Put a little more succinctly, the Post Carbon Institute’s mission is to work with local groups around North America and the world to facilitate their construction of their own lifeboats, specifically tailored to the strengths and weaknesses faced by each unique locale that presents itself for help.
To facilitate this, the Post Carbon Institute has adopted a unique approach. Rather than dictate top-down policies or provide cookie-cutter solutions which may or may not prove helpful as collapse accelerates, the Institute facilitates relocalization by insisting that each Post-Carbon “outpost,” as it calls them, operate autonomously while receiving only guidance, support, and updated information and news from the Institute itself. Each outpost then has only one mission, to focus on immediate improvements to its community such as, but certainly not limited to: local farming, car sharing, local currencies and event organization. As Julian puts it, “the stakes are the survival of this project we call civilization.”
Since beginning its work in the second half of 2003, the Post Carbon Institute has fostered the creation of more than 90 local groups all over the US and Canada, as well as in the UK, Australia, Sweden and even Yemen. It has grown explosively as small, aware groups of citizens have seen the wisdom of Julian’s approach which begins with one of the first rules in any survival situation: Let the people on the ground make the decisions according to their own judgment, in their own place.
Instead of 90 Post Carbon groups around the world there should be 9,000. These are the kinds of numbers we need to see if we are to really make a difference in helping to decide who eats and stays warm, who lives and who dies.
If you have not yet visited the Post Carbon web site, you must.
If this conference has motivated you to start preparing for the challenges that lie ahead, you need to begin by accepting the head start that the Post Carbon Institute has given you. Richard Heinberg—another great hero of this movement—has said, “The Post Carbon Institute is clearly the first medic on the scene—the first organized response to Peak Oil.”
About a year and a half ago, seeing what was coming, I looked around and saw a crying need for someone to take the lead on this challenge. Before that, my expertise and that of From the Wilderness had been geopolitical and economic analysis. I had precious little experience or training on issues of sustainability, agriculture, water, alternative construction, and all the other things we need to learn.
Nevertheless I was willing to take FTW and my writings in that direction even though I knew that there had to be others far more capable than I was. I am happy to report to you tonight that I and FTW no longer need to go in that direction. An expert—and I know Julian will protest that label—has arrived and this has made a huge difference for us. It is now vastly more effective for me and FTW to say that on the key issues of relocalization, downsizing and sustainability, we encourage everyone to look to the Post Carbon Institute for guidance and leadership. Julian has invented that wheel for us. We only need a few more and we can make a wagon to take us down survival’s path.
As a result, I and FTW are free to return to what we do best: geopolitical and macro-economic analysis. Since our recent move to Ashland, Oregon, we have hired three new staff. We have increased our production of original stories by more than 50% and we plan on doubling our output within the next four months. In this way FTW can work as a strategic partner with the Post Carbon Institute and all of the other great groups that have come here to New York to provide what no one else can: an early warning system and the kind of analysis that will identify hot spots, key issues, trends, and pending crises far enough ahead so that each locality can prioritize its own efforts according to its own needs in light of a rapidly changing global map.
This is the way in which those who see Peak Oil for what it is can plan, prepare, and respond as needs dictate. This is the way in which true leadership, whether it be visionary and analytical as is the case with Dimity Orlov, or organizational and educational as with Julian Darley, can make a difference. This is the living embodiment of Catherine Austin Fitts’ maxim that “No one is as smart as all of us.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present to you my good friend, a man who I respect and admire, Mr. Julian Darley.
CONCLUSION
A well-known Peak Oil activist has already moved into a post-oil paradigm. He has no car. He has no cell phone. He travels only by train to avoid leaving a large energy footprint. Yet at the same time he tries to organize conferences around the country, leaving people who depend on quick responses and decision making to operate at levels not seen since the 1940s or 50s.
Does anyone here believe that Dick Cheney or Hillary Clinton or Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke or any of the world’s business leaders are making such self-sabotaging choices now? They may have to, someday. But for now they are taking every possible advantage, using whatever energy is needed, to prepare and position themselves to stay ahead of what are now certain coming events.
I hate to say it, but perhaps we should take a lesson from our enemies here.
Let us not forget that in order to get to the Post-carbon world that is inevitable we must first survive the collapse and the die off that is inevitable. The challenges of the transition period will be completely different from the challenges of living in a world without cheap energy.
It is the almost complete failure of the Peak Oil movement in the United States—and around the world—to grasp, ponder or even acknowledge these transitions that are pointing to a needed evolution in our approach to education, research, networking, and organizing. Psychologically it is always easier to plan along the lines of a single challenge rather than to try to prepare for chaos on a fluid, multi-dimensional field where serious challenges may be completely different from one day to the next. But the easiest path is not always the best choice.
The maxim that I live by is that what we need today, right now, is not a plan, but options. Plans do not bend well. They tend to break. And with breaks in plans come break downs in function. The only plan that I live by today—the only plan that I recommend to our subscribers—is to increase one’s options as much as possible and to selectively choose those options based upon what is happening in the world now and what those developments might mean for the future.
I would submit to you tonight that perhaps a more important question that needs to be answered first is: “How do we get from a civilization where collapse and dislocation is just beginning to a place where we can prepare to transition away from oil and gas when the time is appropriate”?
John Lennon once wrote that “Life is what happens to you while you were busy making other plans.” This movement needs to reflect on that.
A dear friend of mine, Dr. Faiz Khan, once said that a paradigm is what you think about something before you think about it.
If the global economic paradigm that we live under dictates infinite growth, then we must disengage individually and by community from that paradigm.
If the activist paradigm that we live under says that we must slow down the process of reform and planning to make room for all and offend no one, no matter how much they may slow down or confuse the process, then we must disengage from that paradigm. This is no longer about protracted—and almost always ineffective—social change. This is about survival. I refuse to die, and I refuse to encourage anyone else to risk death or to slow down for or argue with people who are either incapable of understanding, too lazy to do the necessary homework, or too tightly wedded to old ideas.
Are these old ideas and cherished values and principles now luxuries or necessities? We will each make our own decisions, and in a world that will give us near instantaneous feedback. We will suffer or prosper, we will stop or continue, we will live and die accordingly.
Buddhist philosophy teaches us that life is suffering. It is amazing how much joy and liberation can be achieved from that viewpoint. It has to do with lowering expectations so that little pieces of joy and cause for celebration are more accessible to our hearts and minds.
Judeo-Christianity, as practiced in America, tends to make us all believe that if we are spiritually and morally correct, we will be rewarded with abundance. As Dmitry Orlov observed, Christianity in other parts of the world teaches that the path to salvation and redemption lies through suffering and denial. Which is it then?
If the spiritual or religious paradigm that you live under influences your thinking in either direction, then that paradigm is your enemy and my enemy. What is it that you think about before you think? Find it, identify it, and discard anything that is not a survival necessity.
The only thing that the universe is offering the human species now is the opportunity to change—to evolve…or to perish.
Perhaps there is a new understanding of God awaiting those who survive. I have long held the personal belief that religion is for people who are afraid of going to Hell and that true spirituality is for those who have already been there.
What I do know, because I have faced many survival challenges in my life, is that the less baggage one takes into any survival situation, the more likely one is to survive.
Perhaps this philosophy is best summed up by one of my favorite quotes of all time. In his classic science fiction novel Dune, Frank Herbert wrote:
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
When the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
Monday, May 01, 2006
April 21, 2006
The Tragedy of George W. Bush
http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/2006/04/the_tragedy_of_george_w_bush_1.html
"Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq...If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam."
William F. Buckley, in an interview with Judy Woodruff for Bloomberg several weeks back.
Mr. Bush's Presidency has now mostly run aground amidst the harsh wilds of Mesopotamia. Iraq will likely be viewed by historians as a foolhardy over-reaching that put the lie to Bush's forward democratization strategy (and perhaps the Bush doctrine too, of which more below), indeed left it largely eviscerated, cast brutally against the rocky shoals of too grim realities. No, the war is not lost, and perhaps, just, some 'peace with honor' style settlement might still be salvaged from the wreckage. But the time has come for deep sobriety indeed about the state of the so-called global war on terror. Now, almost five years since approximately 3,000 Americans were brutally killed literally inside the very symbols of our national power, it is time for some serious reckonings.
The main perpetrator of these ghastly attacks, Osama bin Laden, remains at large. This in itself bespeaks a massive failure (albeit many key al-Qaeda figures have been brought to justice despite this woeful shortcoming, and al-Qaeda has not been able to strike the American homeland since 9/11, worth noting). America remains immensely distrusted through vast swaths of the Islamic world, so that it continues to serve as ready incubator for fanatical terrorists hell-bent on conjuring ways to maim and kill millions of Americans, if and when they can find their window of opportunity. Parts of Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan, are serving as reconstituted safe-haven for neo-Talibs and other assorted al-Qaeda sympathizers that are stealthfully regrouping every day. And, in Iraq, we struggle to form even the semblance of a unitary government, an insurgency rages through Anbar Province (alone the size of Belgium), militias are multiplying, and American soldiers and Iraqis continue to bleed amidst a veritable epidemic of continuing violence. The capital and geographical lodestone of establishing a successful democracy in Iraq, Baghdad, resembles the Beirut of the late '70s more and more every day, or at least it seems so to this far-away observer.
But there is more. The global war on terror, after all, is nothing if it is not a global counter-insurgency campaign. We are meant to win hearts and minds, to lessen the anti-American animus that, fairly or unfairly, animates large swaths of the globe, from Caracas to Jakarta; from Lagos to Ankara. But we've done a very poor job of this indeed. America has shunted aside bedrock civilizational values stemming from way back to the Magna Carta, such as the concept of habeus corpus, with the detainee facility at Guantanamo (Article 39 of the Magna Carta, written in 1215: "No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.") In addition, the American military suffered its worse moral disgrace since My Lai with the revelations of torture and abuse from Bagram to Abu Ghraib.
America, very unfortunately, is no longer seen as undisptuted avatar and protector of human rights on the world stage. Putting aside hyperbole about gulags, putting aside the varied hypocrisies of UN Human Rights Commisions run by the Syrians or related manifest absurdities, the simple reality is that America no longer automatically stands for, say, preservation of a relatively magnanimous post-war Achesonian order. It is viewed too often as an overly militaristic, indulgent, brash power. (For instance, its chattering classes of late breezily speak of new adventures in neighboring Iran, whilst two major projects to its East and West remain in, respectively, alarming and crisis-ridden state). Put simply, America is no longer seen often enough, as it should be especially among our friends at least, as a responsible power that moves, strongly and with resolve when need be, but always deliberately, with maturity, with steadiness.
The Bush Doctrine posited that those who harbor terrorists would be held to account as much as the terrorist themselves. But, 'blog-swarms' ferreting out Iraq-al Qaeda links, rapt sophomoric communion with Iraqi intelligence files or, still, the Weekly Standards hyperbole aside, our first post-Afghanistan target was likely ill-chosen, as Saddam's ties to international terror were relatively de minimis. Yes, he was a monster, a genocidaire, a perilous presence in the neighborhood. But now disabused of the erroneous information about WMD, in hindsight, mightn't we have preferred to contain this beast rather than expend the lives of now almost as many Americans who died on 9/11 to unseat him, not to mention the almost 20,000 wounded, likely 35,000 and up Iraqis killed, coalition forces felled, hundreds of billions of dollars spent (though we forget containment was not cost-free either, not by a long shot), and other assorted gruesome pain and expenditure?
We Americans are meant to be pragmatists, after all, and so we look at things through a prism of cost and benefits. And so now as the Iraq war languishes along and begins to approach WWII in duration, we wonder, was it worth it? Was it worth this blood and treasure to put into power Shi'a political parties, to varying degrees close to Iran, that will likely visit, some day, crude Shi'a majoritarian revanchism on Sunnis in their midst, setting off a cycle of violence that will go on for years until the parties exhaust themselves, while meantime the Kurds will perhaps, someday, precipitate some crisis with Turkey if they over-play their hand with their new quasi-state in the north? As I said above, the war isn't lost, and rosier outcomes remain possible. But still, but still.
George Ball, during another war, once famously advised LBJ: "You know, once on the tiger's back, we can't pick the time to dismount. You're going to lose control of this situation, and this could be very serious." Once again, we are at a very serious juncture indeed. Unlike Vietnam, we are not escalating in Iraq, and it seems all but pre-ordained that troop levels will go down, not up. The question remains, however, is the team currently in office even capable of disengaging competently, or will they make a hash of that too? Will they be too confident of the Iraqi Armies capabilities? Will it be too little too late to restore order in Baghdad? Will Anbar remain so problematic because we still don't have convincing amounts of troops, whether American or truly trained Iraqi ones, to provide order so as to win hearts and minds and then clear, build and hold? And do we have a convincing diplomatic strategy, in terms of intelligently ensuring Iraq's neighbors minimize their nefarious meddling, or will we continue, as is our wont too often, to hyper-ventilate and issue empty diktats hither dither to assorted 'bad guys'? Do we have the sleeper issue of Kurdish federalism fully gauged? Have we planned for contingencies like a serious resumption of the Shi'a insurgency, or an Iranian land-grab in the south, near Basra?
As I said, it is time for some reckonings. So here are some, in no particular order. Mr. Bush never understood the complex history of Iraq (particularly the epic ethnic tensions he was walking into), the massive nation-building task that would be necessary, or, put simply, that democracy in pre-Enlightenment societies in regions convulsed with geopolitical tension are not created on the breezy fly. Saddam was so demonized as the new Adolf Hitler, that policy-makers apparently believed he was so loathed (true) that his unseating would lead to petals being thrown at the feet of the conquering heroes (untrue). Mr. Bush, unfortunately, was ill-served by his instincts. He appeared to gravitate towards what he saw as the no-nonsense machismo of the Rumsfelds and Cheneys, and poo-pooed the cautionary notes of men who had seen war up close and personal, like Colin Powell and Richard Armitage. Rumsfeld and Cheney, in turn, were advised by men like Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and Scooter Libby, men who, whatever their intellectual bona fides, displayed an appalling lack of judgment in thinking that an Ahmad Chalabi, say, a man with no grass-roots support among the Shi'a, and wanted by Jordan for alleged financial chicanery, could be somehow airdropped into Nasariya to spark the Great Iraqi Revolution, allowing for troops to be drawn down with utmost speed, and that this liberationist love-fest would then (voila!) all be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. No one apparently gave sustained thought to how quickly the ostensibly 'liberated' become ingrates to their heretofore saviors, to the specter of a resilient insurgency (sorry, 'dead-enders'), to the worrisome prospects of ethnic conflagration and the dissolution of the country into three sectarian or ethnically homogenous para-states. These were errors born of utopic over-enthusiams, of hubris, of short-sightedness. Tragic ones. (Yes, this is all well covered ground, and not the real tragedy in all this, finally. Yet it bears remembering, not because it is fun to beat up on anyone, as many of us including this blogger supported this war knowing the above-described team was at the helm, but rather as cautionary note to attempt to at least tone down some in this very same crowd who today, not yet appropriately chastened apparently, tell us Iran, say, wouldn't be too hard either. How soon we forget, how the hubris and faith-based confidence and arrogance are so pervasive, how memories are so short!)
But the more painful tragedy is that Bush could have changed course, really changed course (more than small-scale tactical adjustments), at various junctures. Mr. Bush could have held his failed Defense Secretary to account after the Abu Ghraib debacle or, more recently, after two of the key generals leading the Iraq War on the ground (Swannack and Batiste) fingered him for a spent, discredited force that rendered even harder the prosecution of the Iraq war effort. He could have finally surmised the critical importance of establishing order in Iraq, rather than allowing his advisors to breezily contend the 'battlespace' was increasingly under control, and that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Forces were at the ready to protect the nation from all nefarious comers. He could have recognized that 'whack-a-mole' needed to be replaced by 'ink-spotting' and 'clear, build, hold' much earlier. He could have realized that the dangers of appearing too much the 'foreign occupier', or of fostering Iraqi 'dependency,' were necessarily high class problems, if you will, concerns to be given more weight once the country was at least better stabilized. He could have realized that no serious war leader says "stuff happens" or "freedom is messy" about massive looting that convinced the majority of Iraqis that the Americans were not serious about protecting their security, at least apart from the Oil Ministry, thus losing the Coalition reservoirs of good will at a critical juncture. He could have realized that the approach of a CEO hell-bent on boosting shareholder value, looking to cut inventory and boost profits wherever possible (off-ramp the First Cavalry prematurely, based on erroneous assumptions and ignorance about troop to population ratios need for effective nation-building, so as to minimize resource-spend in Iraq, the better to prove that troop-lite worked so more funds could be budgeted for modernization rather than expanding the size of the Army). Mr. Bush could have muted his Defense Secretary who free-lanced as a Secretary of State too, with talk of "Old Europe", or the "so-called Occupied Territories", or that the British weren't really needed either push come to shove. As Chuck Hagel has noted, "we need friends". So why did we so purposefully allow major Cabinet officers to needlessly alienate many of them, even those we rightly considered rather frequently perfidious or otherwise nettlesome? We were in a position of strength, the better to rise above the fray and not get nasty in the sand-box.
But, no. No major course corrections appear afoot. This would be interpreted as a sign of weakness, you see, and this is not the way of the Bush White House. So no top down truly independent investigation, say, with Congressional involvement, of the scandals surrounding detainee policy are in the offing. No true recognition of how perilous Iraq remains, as Michael Yon passionately explains in the immediately preceding post. No thought to whether all the resources diverted from the Afghan effort are materially impacting our effort there, including the capture of Zawahiri and UBL. Instead, continuing easy bromides that 'freedom is on the march', as chaos reigns in Iraq, as Egypt and Russia and Pakistan and Uzbekistan remain mightily authoritarian (who lost Russia, the seemingly perennial question for foreign policy groupies, appears to loom large again). At the same time, our diplomats prattle on endlessly about terror and freedom to East Asian and other audiences, who in turn are more interested in sketching out a new security infrastructure in that neighborhood, or are busily attempting to outflank us via localized trading and other arrangements, with less hands-on U.S. involvement than is advisable. As for South America, our influence is on the wane, with populists gaining power in Bolivia, and demagogues in Venezuela and Cuba continuing to gain marketshare in the battleplace of ideas about what should lie in store for the future of the South American continent.
In the Holy Land, we seem to have abdicated any real role as the proverbial 'honest broker' in the Arab-Israeli dispute, pretty much agreeing to allow the Israelis (somewhat understandably, of course) to pursue a strategy of unilateral disengagement so as to present the Palestinians with something of a fait accompli on the shape of going forward borders and status of Jerusalem. No adult supervision there, but rather a sense that our policy has run adrift and that the roadmap, while still ostensibly official American policy, is something of a dead plan walking. And while commentators vacuously cheerlead a too infantile version of democracy (presto, elections!), when the results seem to run against the grain of our national interest (or that of important allies), as with the Hamas victory, we do not really follow through with the courage of our convictions. A major experiment in democracy in Palestine is greeted with, well, cutting off aid to the democratically elected victors. Meantime, the Muslim Brotherhood gains in Egypt (and reportedly more than we realize, covertly, in Jordan and Syria), and religious parties are still strong in Lebanon.
What has our democratization strategy really wrought in the Middle East, especially with Iraq still in chaos? At least arguably, it has made us look more hypocritical (Palestine), or very sloppy (Iraq), or increased Islamist influence (Egypt). Does this mean this policy makes no sense, at all? No, of course not. Creating political space in an atrophying political environment like the Middle East is critical, but it must be pursued with much greater caution. If securing a Middle East peace settlement is critical to our national interest, two states living side by side, why would we allow for conditions whereby an irredentist terror group would take power? Wouldn't it make sense to let progress on the peace process moderate Palestinian behavior, rather than rush to elections whatever the consequences, and then alienate them even further by denying them the same quantum of aid as had previously been bestowed? Is this intelligent policy?
A man with a deeper world-view would sense this veritable maelstrom of contradictions, and shades of gray, and pitfalls and perils--and perhaps challenge original assumptions, adapt policies to changing circumstances in more fundamental fashion, inject new blood into policymaking circles, not at the press secretary level in some pitiably irrelevant re-juggle, but among the very highest players of his national security team. Rather than bovine loyalty, even to proven incompetents, a man of strength and conviction and high intelligence would seek to make a new start of it, to improve our posture on the international stage, one so problematic in so many respects as sketched above. But such a man is not in power. George Bush is not that man. Mr. Bush is a man who mistakes stubborness for resolve, absolutist aims for high moral bearing, blindly staying an erroneously charted course for rock-ribbed Crawford fortitude. Thus, we stumble along and continue to endanger the national interest.
Like his father, Bush wished to put to bed forever the Vietnam syndrome, and restore a warrior ethos to our armed forces that, as some experts believed, were suffering under the effete obligations to perform such tasks as building kindergartens in Kosovo. Like a parody of some ennobled timarchic leader, Mr. Bush strode onto the Abraham Lincoln, festooned in martial, cock-sure gear, and declared Mission Accomplished, surely a moment that showcased imperial decadence and delusion if there ever was one. Instead, without realizing it, Mr. Bush created even larger peacemaking obligations for the armed forces, by never establishing order in Iraq because of trying to wage war there on the cheap. His Army is under real pressure in Iraq, and it is hurting, with some soldiers on their third or even fourth tours. Still, there is no serious talk of expanding the Army and Marines, still we err more towards transformation than established military doctrine and the manpower and troop mix requirements necessary for successful counter-insurgency, still it's heckuva job Rummie.
No, the tragedy of George Bush is ultimately one of his own making, and one that he cannot readily extricate himself from, because rigid absolutism and an overly simplistic worldview seem deeply embedded in his character. It is meant to be tough. It is meant to show resolve. It is meant to project national strength and purpose. But, no, the too often utopic aspirations instead lead to myopia. It is actually stubborn, actually short-sighted, actually too often negatively impacting the American national interest. So he (and we) are in a jam, all right, as Bill Buckley said. Yes, even if he invented the Bill of Rights, let alone went a good way towards sullying our human rights record instead. Iraq, and the continuing real risk of failure there, are tragic, of course. But it is perhaps an even more painful tragedy that, per chance, it might have been very different, were it not for profound shortcomings of Mr. Bush's character, the advisors he chose to place his trust in and rely on, and the resulting strategic and tactical blunders that were the result of the interplay of these factors, among others.
Posted by Gregory at April 21, 2006 04:29 AM | TrackBack (0)
The Tragedy of George W. Bush
http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/2006/04/the_tragedy_of_george_w_bush_1.html
"Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq...If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam."
William F. Buckley, in an interview with Judy Woodruff for Bloomberg several weeks back.
Mr. Bush's Presidency has now mostly run aground amidst the harsh wilds of Mesopotamia. Iraq will likely be viewed by historians as a foolhardy over-reaching that put the lie to Bush's forward democratization strategy (and perhaps the Bush doctrine too, of which more below), indeed left it largely eviscerated, cast brutally against the rocky shoals of too grim realities. No, the war is not lost, and perhaps, just, some 'peace with honor' style settlement might still be salvaged from the wreckage. But the time has come for deep sobriety indeed about the state of the so-called global war on terror. Now, almost five years since approximately 3,000 Americans were brutally killed literally inside the very symbols of our national power, it is time for some serious reckonings.
The main perpetrator of these ghastly attacks, Osama bin Laden, remains at large. This in itself bespeaks a massive failure (albeit many key al-Qaeda figures have been brought to justice despite this woeful shortcoming, and al-Qaeda has not been able to strike the American homeland since 9/11, worth noting). America remains immensely distrusted through vast swaths of the Islamic world, so that it continues to serve as ready incubator for fanatical terrorists hell-bent on conjuring ways to maim and kill millions of Americans, if and when they can find their window of opportunity. Parts of Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan, are serving as reconstituted safe-haven for neo-Talibs and other assorted al-Qaeda sympathizers that are stealthfully regrouping every day. And, in Iraq, we struggle to form even the semblance of a unitary government, an insurgency rages through Anbar Province (alone the size of Belgium), militias are multiplying, and American soldiers and Iraqis continue to bleed amidst a veritable epidemic of continuing violence. The capital and geographical lodestone of establishing a successful democracy in Iraq, Baghdad, resembles the Beirut of the late '70s more and more every day, or at least it seems so to this far-away observer.
But there is more. The global war on terror, after all, is nothing if it is not a global counter-insurgency campaign. We are meant to win hearts and minds, to lessen the anti-American animus that, fairly or unfairly, animates large swaths of the globe, from Caracas to Jakarta; from Lagos to Ankara. But we've done a very poor job of this indeed. America has shunted aside bedrock civilizational values stemming from way back to the Magna Carta, such as the concept of habeus corpus, with the detainee facility at Guantanamo (Article 39 of the Magna Carta, written in 1215: "No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.") In addition, the American military suffered its worse moral disgrace since My Lai with the revelations of torture and abuse from Bagram to Abu Ghraib.
America, very unfortunately, is no longer seen as undisptuted avatar and protector of human rights on the world stage. Putting aside hyperbole about gulags, putting aside the varied hypocrisies of UN Human Rights Commisions run by the Syrians or related manifest absurdities, the simple reality is that America no longer automatically stands for, say, preservation of a relatively magnanimous post-war Achesonian order. It is viewed too often as an overly militaristic, indulgent, brash power. (For instance, its chattering classes of late breezily speak of new adventures in neighboring Iran, whilst two major projects to its East and West remain in, respectively, alarming and crisis-ridden state). Put simply, America is no longer seen often enough, as it should be especially among our friends at least, as a responsible power that moves, strongly and with resolve when need be, but always deliberately, with maturity, with steadiness.
The Bush Doctrine posited that those who harbor terrorists would be held to account as much as the terrorist themselves. But, 'blog-swarms' ferreting out Iraq-al Qaeda links, rapt sophomoric communion with Iraqi intelligence files or, still, the Weekly Standards hyperbole aside, our first post-Afghanistan target was likely ill-chosen, as Saddam's ties to international terror were relatively de minimis. Yes, he was a monster, a genocidaire, a perilous presence in the neighborhood. But now disabused of the erroneous information about WMD, in hindsight, mightn't we have preferred to contain this beast rather than expend the lives of now almost as many Americans who died on 9/11 to unseat him, not to mention the almost 20,000 wounded, likely 35,000 and up Iraqis killed, coalition forces felled, hundreds of billions of dollars spent (though we forget containment was not cost-free either, not by a long shot), and other assorted gruesome pain and expenditure?
We Americans are meant to be pragmatists, after all, and so we look at things through a prism of cost and benefits. And so now as the Iraq war languishes along and begins to approach WWII in duration, we wonder, was it worth it? Was it worth this blood and treasure to put into power Shi'a political parties, to varying degrees close to Iran, that will likely visit, some day, crude Shi'a majoritarian revanchism on Sunnis in their midst, setting off a cycle of violence that will go on for years until the parties exhaust themselves, while meantime the Kurds will perhaps, someday, precipitate some crisis with Turkey if they over-play their hand with their new quasi-state in the north? As I said above, the war isn't lost, and rosier outcomes remain possible. But still, but still.
George Ball, during another war, once famously advised LBJ: "You know, once on the tiger's back, we can't pick the time to dismount. You're going to lose control of this situation, and this could be very serious." Once again, we are at a very serious juncture indeed. Unlike Vietnam, we are not escalating in Iraq, and it seems all but pre-ordained that troop levels will go down, not up. The question remains, however, is the team currently in office even capable of disengaging competently, or will they make a hash of that too? Will they be too confident of the Iraqi Armies capabilities? Will it be too little too late to restore order in Baghdad? Will Anbar remain so problematic because we still don't have convincing amounts of troops, whether American or truly trained Iraqi ones, to provide order so as to win hearts and minds and then clear, build and hold? And do we have a convincing diplomatic strategy, in terms of intelligently ensuring Iraq's neighbors minimize their nefarious meddling, or will we continue, as is our wont too often, to hyper-ventilate and issue empty diktats hither dither to assorted 'bad guys'? Do we have the sleeper issue of Kurdish federalism fully gauged? Have we planned for contingencies like a serious resumption of the Shi'a insurgency, or an Iranian land-grab in the south, near Basra?
As I said, it is time for some reckonings. So here are some, in no particular order. Mr. Bush never understood the complex history of Iraq (particularly the epic ethnic tensions he was walking into), the massive nation-building task that would be necessary, or, put simply, that democracy in pre-Enlightenment societies in regions convulsed with geopolitical tension are not created on the breezy fly. Saddam was so demonized as the new Adolf Hitler, that policy-makers apparently believed he was so loathed (true) that his unseating would lead to petals being thrown at the feet of the conquering heroes (untrue). Mr. Bush, unfortunately, was ill-served by his instincts. He appeared to gravitate towards what he saw as the no-nonsense machismo of the Rumsfelds and Cheneys, and poo-pooed the cautionary notes of men who had seen war up close and personal, like Colin Powell and Richard Armitage. Rumsfeld and Cheney, in turn, were advised by men like Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and Scooter Libby, men who, whatever their intellectual bona fides, displayed an appalling lack of judgment in thinking that an Ahmad Chalabi, say, a man with no grass-roots support among the Shi'a, and wanted by Jordan for alleged financial chicanery, could be somehow airdropped into Nasariya to spark the Great Iraqi Revolution, allowing for troops to be drawn down with utmost speed, and that this liberationist love-fest would then (voila!) all be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. No one apparently gave sustained thought to how quickly the ostensibly 'liberated' become ingrates to their heretofore saviors, to the specter of a resilient insurgency (sorry, 'dead-enders'), to the worrisome prospects of ethnic conflagration and the dissolution of the country into three sectarian or ethnically homogenous para-states. These were errors born of utopic over-enthusiams, of hubris, of short-sightedness. Tragic ones. (Yes, this is all well covered ground, and not the real tragedy in all this, finally. Yet it bears remembering, not because it is fun to beat up on anyone, as many of us including this blogger supported this war knowing the above-described team was at the helm, but rather as cautionary note to attempt to at least tone down some in this very same crowd who today, not yet appropriately chastened apparently, tell us Iran, say, wouldn't be too hard either. How soon we forget, how the hubris and faith-based confidence and arrogance are so pervasive, how memories are so short!)
But the more painful tragedy is that Bush could have changed course, really changed course (more than small-scale tactical adjustments), at various junctures. Mr. Bush could have held his failed Defense Secretary to account after the Abu Ghraib debacle or, more recently, after two of the key generals leading the Iraq War on the ground (Swannack and Batiste) fingered him for a spent, discredited force that rendered even harder the prosecution of the Iraq war effort. He could have finally surmised the critical importance of establishing order in Iraq, rather than allowing his advisors to breezily contend the 'battlespace' was increasingly under control, and that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Forces were at the ready to protect the nation from all nefarious comers. He could have recognized that 'whack-a-mole' needed to be replaced by 'ink-spotting' and 'clear, build, hold' much earlier. He could have realized that the dangers of appearing too much the 'foreign occupier', or of fostering Iraqi 'dependency,' were necessarily high class problems, if you will, concerns to be given more weight once the country was at least better stabilized. He could have realized that no serious war leader says "stuff happens" or "freedom is messy" about massive looting that convinced the majority of Iraqis that the Americans were not serious about protecting their security, at least apart from the Oil Ministry, thus losing the Coalition reservoirs of good will at a critical juncture. He could have realized that the approach of a CEO hell-bent on boosting shareholder value, looking to cut inventory and boost profits wherever possible (off-ramp the First Cavalry prematurely, based on erroneous assumptions and ignorance about troop to population ratios need for effective nation-building, so as to minimize resource-spend in Iraq, the better to prove that troop-lite worked so more funds could be budgeted for modernization rather than expanding the size of the Army). Mr. Bush could have muted his Defense Secretary who free-lanced as a Secretary of State too, with talk of "Old Europe", or the "so-called Occupied Territories", or that the British weren't really needed either push come to shove. As Chuck Hagel has noted, "we need friends". So why did we so purposefully allow major Cabinet officers to needlessly alienate many of them, even those we rightly considered rather frequently perfidious or otherwise nettlesome? We were in a position of strength, the better to rise above the fray and not get nasty in the sand-box.
But, no. No major course corrections appear afoot. This would be interpreted as a sign of weakness, you see, and this is not the way of the Bush White House. So no top down truly independent investigation, say, with Congressional involvement, of the scandals surrounding detainee policy are in the offing. No true recognition of how perilous Iraq remains, as Michael Yon passionately explains in the immediately preceding post. No thought to whether all the resources diverted from the Afghan effort are materially impacting our effort there, including the capture of Zawahiri and UBL. Instead, continuing easy bromides that 'freedom is on the march', as chaos reigns in Iraq, as Egypt and Russia and Pakistan and Uzbekistan remain mightily authoritarian (who lost Russia, the seemingly perennial question for foreign policy groupies, appears to loom large again). At the same time, our diplomats prattle on endlessly about terror and freedom to East Asian and other audiences, who in turn are more interested in sketching out a new security infrastructure in that neighborhood, or are busily attempting to outflank us via localized trading and other arrangements, with less hands-on U.S. involvement than is advisable. As for South America, our influence is on the wane, with populists gaining power in Bolivia, and demagogues in Venezuela and Cuba continuing to gain marketshare in the battleplace of ideas about what should lie in store for the future of the South American continent.
In the Holy Land, we seem to have abdicated any real role as the proverbial 'honest broker' in the Arab-Israeli dispute, pretty much agreeing to allow the Israelis (somewhat understandably, of course) to pursue a strategy of unilateral disengagement so as to present the Palestinians with something of a fait accompli on the shape of going forward borders and status of Jerusalem. No adult supervision there, but rather a sense that our policy has run adrift and that the roadmap, while still ostensibly official American policy, is something of a dead plan walking. And while commentators vacuously cheerlead a too infantile version of democracy (presto, elections!), when the results seem to run against the grain of our national interest (or that of important allies), as with the Hamas victory, we do not really follow through with the courage of our convictions. A major experiment in democracy in Palestine is greeted with, well, cutting off aid to the democratically elected victors. Meantime, the Muslim Brotherhood gains in Egypt (and reportedly more than we realize, covertly, in Jordan and Syria), and religious parties are still strong in Lebanon.
What has our democratization strategy really wrought in the Middle East, especially with Iraq still in chaos? At least arguably, it has made us look more hypocritical (Palestine), or very sloppy (Iraq), or increased Islamist influence (Egypt). Does this mean this policy makes no sense, at all? No, of course not. Creating political space in an atrophying political environment like the Middle East is critical, but it must be pursued with much greater caution. If securing a Middle East peace settlement is critical to our national interest, two states living side by side, why would we allow for conditions whereby an irredentist terror group would take power? Wouldn't it make sense to let progress on the peace process moderate Palestinian behavior, rather than rush to elections whatever the consequences, and then alienate them even further by denying them the same quantum of aid as had previously been bestowed? Is this intelligent policy?
A man with a deeper world-view would sense this veritable maelstrom of contradictions, and shades of gray, and pitfalls and perils--and perhaps challenge original assumptions, adapt policies to changing circumstances in more fundamental fashion, inject new blood into policymaking circles, not at the press secretary level in some pitiably irrelevant re-juggle, but among the very highest players of his national security team. Rather than bovine loyalty, even to proven incompetents, a man of strength and conviction and high intelligence would seek to make a new start of it, to improve our posture on the international stage, one so problematic in so many respects as sketched above. But such a man is not in power. George Bush is not that man. Mr. Bush is a man who mistakes stubborness for resolve, absolutist aims for high moral bearing, blindly staying an erroneously charted course for rock-ribbed Crawford fortitude. Thus, we stumble along and continue to endanger the national interest.
Like his father, Bush wished to put to bed forever the Vietnam syndrome, and restore a warrior ethos to our armed forces that, as some experts believed, were suffering under the effete obligations to perform such tasks as building kindergartens in Kosovo. Like a parody of some ennobled timarchic leader, Mr. Bush strode onto the Abraham Lincoln, festooned in martial, cock-sure gear, and declared Mission Accomplished, surely a moment that showcased imperial decadence and delusion if there ever was one. Instead, without realizing it, Mr. Bush created even larger peacemaking obligations for the armed forces, by never establishing order in Iraq because of trying to wage war there on the cheap. His Army is under real pressure in Iraq, and it is hurting, with some soldiers on their third or even fourth tours. Still, there is no serious talk of expanding the Army and Marines, still we err more towards transformation than established military doctrine and the manpower and troop mix requirements necessary for successful counter-insurgency, still it's heckuva job Rummie.
No, the tragedy of George Bush is ultimately one of his own making, and one that he cannot readily extricate himself from, because rigid absolutism and an overly simplistic worldview seem deeply embedded in his character. It is meant to be tough. It is meant to show resolve. It is meant to project national strength and purpose. But, no, the too often utopic aspirations instead lead to myopia. It is actually stubborn, actually short-sighted, actually too often negatively impacting the American national interest. So he (and we) are in a jam, all right, as Bill Buckley said. Yes, even if he invented the Bill of Rights, let alone went a good way towards sullying our human rights record instead. Iraq, and the continuing real risk of failure there, are tragic, of course. But it is perhaps an even more painful tragedy that, per chance, it might have been very different, were it not for profound shortcomings of Mr. Bush's character, the advisors he chose to place his trust in and rely on, and the resulting strategic and tactical blunders that were the result of the interplay of these factors, among others.
Posted by Gregory at April 21, 2006 04:29 AM | TrackBack (0)
Talk about a negative nellie...
From the May 1, 2006 comments on Clusterfuck Nation:
"Will Jesus return to Save Us from our own self-destruction? No. Humans exhausted God's sympathy a long time ago, long before this latest episode of exponentially destructive behaviors made possible by fossil fuels.
Will science save us from our own self-destruction? No, it is not science's job to save humankind from self-destruction. Science has done a whole lot to empower humans to self-destruct. Since humans lack wisdom I suppose that we will use this power for its intended purpose.
Will technology save us? No, please ... don't speak in such a silly manner. Technology gave us all of the WMDs and the automobile and the cell phone and the television. In other words, technology has made humans increasingly violent, fat, lazy and more dependant upon technology.
God, science and technology will not save us. Do you suppose that humans are capable of saving our species from our inevitable fate?
No. Look at these humans, see how they behave. Notice that they are completely overwhelmed with the cheap crap that you can buy and absolutely disinterested in the living Earth which pretty much makes human life possible in a Universe which is harsh and hostile to life.
Humans are made happy by buying and destroying things. Humans are entertained by hate, prejudice and violence. Humans are about the most miserable animal on the planet yet we are insane enough to claim pre-eminence over all other forms of life.
Nature has a way of punishing creatures that behave in an arrogant, foolish and self-destructive manner. By all objective measures humans are worthy of all of these penalties.
Life will first become difficult, and then life may become impossible. If you need cars, phones, televisions and grocery stores to survive there's a pretty good chance that you will not.
Unfortunately, those who want to depend upon the local environment for their own suvival will soon discover that humans have pretty much destroyed and depleted all of these local environments. Going local is a wonderful ideal but impractical and usually impossible. If you are forced to sustain your life by utilizing only local products there's a pretty good chance that you will not survive.
What other options are available for survival? None. The great die-off is about the begin. Hopefully some primitive self-sustaining tribes still exist in remote areas. These people are the best equipped to survive the end of the oil age because they never became addicted to the poisonous drug.
But modern energy-intensive technological society will come to an end. As it should."
From the May 1, 2006 comments on Clusterfuck Nation:
"Will Jesus return to Save Us from our own self-destruction? No. Humans exhausted God's sympathy a long time ago, long before this latest episode of exponentially destructive behaviors made possible by fossil fuels.
Will science save us from our own self-destruction? No, it is not science's job to save humankind from self-destruction. Science has done a whole lot to empower humans to self-destruct. Since humans lack wisdom I suppose that we will use this power for its intended purpose.
Will technology save us? No, please ... don't speak in such a silly manner. Technology gave us all of the WMDs and the automobile and the cell phone and the television. In other words, technology has made humans increasingly violent, fat, lazy and more dependant upon technology.
God, science and technology will not save us. Do you suppose that humans are capable of saving our species from our inevitable fate?
No. Look at these humans, see how they behave. Notice that they are completely overwhelmed with the cheap crap that you can buy and absolutely disinterested in the living Earth which pretty much makes human life possible in a Universe which is harsh and hostile to life.
Humans are made happy by buying and destroying things. Humans are entertained by hate, prejudice and violence. Humans are about the most miserable animal on the planet yet we are insane enough to claim pre-eminence over all other forms of life.
Nature has a way of punishing creatures that behave in an arrogant, foolish and self-destructive manner. By all objective measures humans are worthy of all of these penalties.
Life will first become difficult, and then life may become impossible. If you need cars, phones, televisions and grocery stores to survive there's a pretty good chance that you will not.
Unfortunately, those who want to depend upon the local environment for their own suvival will soon discover that humans have pretty much destroyed and depleted all of these local environments. Going local is a wonderful ideal but impractical and usually impossible. If you are forced to sustain your life by utilizing only local products there's a pretty good chance that you will not survive.
What other options are available for survival? None. The great die-off is about the begin. Hopefully some primitive self-sustaining tribes still exist in remote areas. These people are the best equipped to survive the end of the oil age because they never became addicted to the poisonous drug.
But modern energy-intensive technological society will come to an end. As it should."
Friday, April 28, 2006
No. 159 - July 2005
by Richard Heinberg
Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply
A paper presented at the FEASTA Conference, "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?", June 23-25, 2005, Dublin Ireland
Food is energy. And it takes energy to get food. These two facts, taken together, have always established the biological limits to the human population and always will.
The same is true for every other species: food must yield more energy to the eater than is needed in order to acquire the food. Woe to the fox who expends more energy chasing rabbits than he can get from eating the rabbits he catches. If this energy balance remains negative for too long, death results; for an entire species, the outcome is a die-off event, perhaps leading even to extinction.
Humans have become champions at developing new strategies for increasing the amount of energy - and food - they capture from the environment. The harnessing of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, the adoption of ards and plows, the deployment of irrigation networks, and the harnessing of traction animals - developments that occurred over tens of thousands of years - all served this end.
The process was gradual and time-consuming. Not only were new tools developed, but, over centuries, small inventions and tiny modifications of existing tools - from scythes to horse-collars - enabled human and animal muscle power to be leveraged more effectively.
This entire exercise took place within a framework of natural limits. The yearly input of solar radiation to the planet was always immense relative to human needs (and still is), but it was finite nevertheless, and while humans directly appropriated only a tiny proportion of this abundance the vast majority of that radiation served functions that indirectly supported human existence - giving rise to air currents by warming the surface of the planet, and maintaining the lives of countless other kinds of creatures in the oceans and on land.
The amount of available human muscle power was limited by the number of humans, who, of course, had to be fed. Draft animals (bred for their muscle-power) also entailed energy costs, as they likewise needed to eat but also had to be cared for in various ways. Therefore, even with clever refinements in tools and techniques, in crops development and animal breeding, it was inevitable that humans would reach a point of diminishing returns in their ability to continue increasing their energy harvest, and therefore the size of their population.
By the nineteenth century these limits were beginning to become apparent. Famine and hunger had long been common throughout even the wealthiest regions of the planet. But, for Europeans, the migration of surplus populations to other nations, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were gradually making those events less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was again in view.
But again crisis was narrowly averted, this time due to fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process produces 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, equaling the total amount of available nitrogen introduced annually by all natural sources combined.
Fossil fuels went on to offer still other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.
Early steam-driven tractors came into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the size and effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia from the 1920s through the '50s. In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of US cropland had to be set aside for the growing of grain to feed horses - most of which worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans.
Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after WWII, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.
In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.
At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way.
The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.
William Catton, in his classic book Overshoot, terms the trade of essential life-support commodities "scope expansion."1 Carrying capacity is always limited by whatever necessity is in least supply, as Justus von Liebig realized nearly a century-and-a-half ago. If one region can grow food but has no exploitable metal deposits, its carrying capacity is limited by the lack of metals for the production of farm tools. Another region may have metals but insufficient topsoil or rain; there, carrying capacity is limited by the lack of food. If a way can be found to make up for local scarcity by taking advantage of distant abundance (as by exporting metal ores or finished tools from region A to help with food production in region B, and then exporting food from B to A), the total carrying capacity of the two regions combined can be increased substantially. We can put this into a crude formula:
CC of A+B > (CC of A) + (CC of B)
From an ecological as well as an economic point of view, this is why people trade. But trade has historically been limited by the amount of energy that could be applied to the transport of materials. Fossil fuels temporarily but enormously expanded that limit.
The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just a three-fold leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown five-fold since dawn of industrial revolution.
Agriculture at a Crossroads
All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but, if it proves not to be, then a temporary exuberance of the human species will have been purchased by an eventual, unprecedented human die-off. So how long can the present regime be sustained? Let us briefly survey some of the current trends in global food production and how they are related to the increased use of inexpensive fossil fuels.
Arable cropland: For millennia, the total amount of arable cropland gradually increased due to the clearing of forests and brush, and the irrigation of land that would otherwise be too arid for cultivation. That amount reached a maximum within the past two decades and is now decreasing because of the salinization of irrigated soils and the relentless growth of cities, with their buildings, roads, and parking lots. Irrigation has become more widespread because of the availability of cheap energy to operate pumps, while urbanization is largely a result of cheap fuel-fed transportation and the flushing of the peasantry from the countryside as a consequence of their inability to buy or to compete with fuel-fed agricultural machinery. Roads that cover former cropland are built from oil, and the erection of buildings has been facilitated by the mechanization of construction processes and the easy transport of materials.
Topsoil: The world's existing soils were generated over thousands and millions of years at a rate averaging an inch per 500 years. The amount of soil available to farmers is now decreasing at an alarming rate, due mostly to wind and water erosion. In the US Great Plains, roughly half the quantity in place at the beginning of the last century is now gone. In Australia, after two centuries of European land-use, more than 70 percent of land has become seriously degraded.2 Erosion is largely a function of tillage, which fractures and loosens soil; thus, as the introduction of fuel-fed tractors has increased the ease of tillage, the rate of soil loss has increased dramatically.
The number of farmers as a percentage of the population: In the US at the turn of the last century, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas and farmed. Today less than two percent of Americans farm for a living. This change came primarily because fuel-fed farm machinery replaced labor, which meant that fewer farmers were needed. Hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of families that desperately wanted to farm could not continue to do so because they could not afford the new machines, or could not compete with their neighbors who had them. Another way of saying this is that economies of scale (driven by mechanization) gave an advantage to ever-larger farms. But the loss of farmers also meant a gradual loss of knowledge of how to farm and a loss of rural farming culture. Many farmers today merely follow the directions on bags of fertilizer or pesticide, and live so far from their neighbors that their children have no desire to continue the agricultural way of life.
The genetic diversity of domesticated crop varieties: This is decreasing dramatically due to the consolidation of the seed industry. Farmers on the island of Bali in Indonesia once planted 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a different microclimate; now only four varieties are grown. In 2000, Semenis, the world's largest vegetable seed corporation, eliminated 25 percent of its product line as a cost-cutting measure. This ongoing, massive genetic consolidation is also being driven by the centralization of the seed industry (the largest three field seed companies - DuPont, Monsanto, and Novartis - now account for 20 percent of the global seed trade), which is in turn consequent upon fuel-fed globalization.
Grain production per capita: A total of 2,029 million tons of grain were produced globally in 2004; this was a record in absolute numbers. But for the past two decades population has grown faster than grain production, so there is actually less available on a per-head basis. In addition, grain stocks are being drawn down: According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, "in each of the last four . . . years production fell short of consumption. The shortfalls of nearly 100 million tons in 2002 and again in 2003 were the largest on record."3 This trend suggests that the strategy of boosting food production by the use of fossil fuels is already yielding diminishing returns.
Global climate: This is being increasingly destabilized as a result of the famous greenhouse effect, resulting in problems for farmers that are relatively minor now but that are likely to grow to catastrophic proportions within the next decade or two. Global warming is now almost universally acknowledged as resulting from CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Available fresh water: In the US, 85 percent of fresh water use goes toward agricultural production, requiring the drawing down of ancient aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall, ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water, requiring ever more energy usage. By 2020, according to the Worldwatch Institute and the UN, virtually every country will face shortages of fresh water.
The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides: In the US, over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold, yet, each year a greater amount of crops is lost to pests, which are evolving immunities faster than chemists can invent new poisons. Like falling grain production per capita, this trend suggests a declining return from injecting the process of agricultural production with still more fossil fuels.
Now, let us add to this picture the imminent peak in world oil production. This will make machinery more expensive to operate, fertilizers more expensive to produce, and transportation more expensive. While the adoption of fossil fuels created a range of problems for global food production, as we have just seen, the decline in the availability of cheap oil will not immediately solve those problems; in fact, over the short term they will exacerbate them, bringing simmering crises to a boil.
That is because the scale of our dependency on fossil fuels has grown to enormous proportions.
In the US, agriculture is directly responsible for well over 10 percent of all national energy consumption. Over 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer production, 20 percent to operate machinery, 16 percent for transportation, 13 percent for irrigation, 8 percent for livestock raising, (not including the feed), and 5 percent for pesticide production. This does not include energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retailers, or cooking.
Trucks move most of the world's food, even though trucking is ten times more energy-intensive than moving food by train or barge. Refrigerated jets move a small but growing proportion of food, almost entirely to wealthy industrial nations, at 60 times the energy cost of sea transport.
Processed foods make up three-quarters of global food sales by price (though not by quantity). This adds dramatically to energy costs: for example, a one-pound box of breakfast cereal may require over 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing, while the cereal itself provides only 1,100 kilocalories of food energy.
Over all - including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, and processing, and oil and natural gas used as feedstocks for agricultural chemicals - the modern food system consumes roughly ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.4
But the single most telling gauge of our dependency is the size of the global population. Without fossil fuels, the stupendous growth in human numbers that has occurred over the past century would have been impossible. Can we continue to support so many people as the availability of cheap oil declines?
Feeding a Growing Multitude
The problems associated with the modern global food system are widely apparent, there is widespread concern over the sustainability of the enterprise, and there is growing debate over the question of how to avoid an agricultural Armageddon. Within this debate two viewpoints have clearly emerged.
The first advises further intensification of industrial food production, primarily via the genetic engineering of new crop and animal varieties. The second advocates ecological agriculture in its various forms - including organic, biodynamic, Permaculture, and Biointensive methods.
Critics of the latter contend that traditional, chemical-free forms of agriculture are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. Here is a passage by John John Emsley of University of Cambridge, from his review of Vaclav Smil's Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food:
If crops are rotated and the soil is fertilized with compost, animal manure and sewage, thereby returning as much fixed nitrogen as possible to the soil, it is just possible for a hectare of land to feed 10 people - provided they accept a mainly vegetarian diet. Although such farming is almost sustainable, it falls short of the productivity of land that is fertilized with "artificial" nitrogen; this can easily support 40 people, and on a varied diet.5
This seems unarguable on its face. However, given the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, it will be increasingly difficult to continue to supply chemical fertilizers in present quantities. Nitrogen can be synthesized using hydrogen produced from the electrolysis of water, with solar or wind power as a source of electricity. But currently no ammonia is being commercially produced this way because of the uncompetitive cost of doing so. To introduce and scale up the process will require many years and considerable investment capital.
The bioengineering of crop and animal varieties does little or nothing to solve this problem. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, the genetic engineering of complex life forms on a commercial scale appears to pose unprecedented environmental hazards, as has been amply documented by Dr. Mae Wan-Ho among many others.6 And the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.
Those arguing in favor of small-scale, ecological agriculture tend to be optimistic about its ability to support large populations. For example, the 2002 Greenpeace report, "The Real Green Revolution: Organic and Agroecological Farming in the South," while acknowledging the lack of comparative research on the subject, nevertheless notes:
In general . . . it is thought that [organic and agroecological farming] can bring significant increases in yields in comparison to conventional farming practices. Compared to "Green Revolution'"farming systems, OAA is thought to be neutral in terms of yields, although it brings other benefits, such as reducing the need for external inputs.7
Eco-agricultural advocates often contend that there is plenty of food in the world; existing instances of hunger are due to bad policy and poor distribution. With better policy and distribution, all could easily be fed. Thus, given the universally admitted harmful environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming, the choice should be simple.
Some eco-ag proponents are even more sanguine, and suggest that their methods can produce far higher yields than can mechanized, chemical-based agriculture. Experiments have indeed shown that small-scale, biodiverse gardening or farming can be considerably more productive on a per-hectare basis than monocropped megafarms.8 However, some of these studies have ignored the energy and land-productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the study plots. In any case, and there is no controversy on this point, Permaculture and Biointensive forms of horticulture are dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture. Thus the adoption of these methods will require an economic transformation of societies.
Therefore even if the nitrogen problem can be solved in principle by agro-ecological methods and/or hydrogen production from renewable energy sources, there may be a carrying-capacity bottleneck ahead in any case, simply because of the inability of societies to adapt to these very different energy and economic needs quickly enough, and also because of the burgeoning problems mentioned above (loss of fresh water resources, unstable climate, etc.). According to widely-accepted calculations, humans are presently appropriating at least 40 percent of Earth's primary biological productivity.9 It seems unlikely that we, a single species after all, can do much more than that. Even though it may not be politically correct in many circles to discuss the population problem, we must recognize that we are nearing or past fundamental natural limits, no matter which course we pursue.
Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and we are already in view of the global oil production peak, the debate over the potential productivity of chemical-gene engineered agriculture versus that of organic and agroecological farming may be relatively pointless. We must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if it does prove to be less productive.
The Example of Cuba
How we might do that is suggested by perhaps the best recent historical example of a society experiencing a fossil-fuel famine. In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their American counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The population lost 20 pounds on average and malnutrition was nearly universal, especially among young children. The Cuban GDP fell by 85 percent and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.
Cuban authorities responded by breaking up large state-owned farms, offering land to farming families, and encouraging the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.
As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine. Today the nation is changing from an industrial to an agrarian society. While energy use in Cuba is now one-twentieth of that in the US, the economy is growing at a slow but steady rate. Food production has returned to 90 percent of its pre-crisis levels.10
The Way Ahead
The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. And it must be emphasized that we are discussing a systemic transformation - we cannot just remove oil in the forms of agrochemicals from the current food system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a rapid pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.
Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations on their regional resource base. One has only to contemplate the local productivity of a place like Nevada, to appreciate the enormous challenge of continuing to feed people in such a city such as Las Vegas without easy transportation.
We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Currently, Oakland California is debating a food policy initiative that would mandate by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.11 If the example of Cuba were followed, rooftop gardens would result, as well as rooftop raising of food animals like chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs.
Localization of the food process means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.
Clearly, we must minimize chemical inputs to agriculture (direct and indirect - such as those introduced in packaging and processing).
We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains.
Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake simply to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks, and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding.
Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.
It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap grain. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.
In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might in itself be advantageous; but, given the fact that a rapid transition is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.
Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.
All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying more technological intensification - will almost certainly result in dire consequences. In that case, existing farmers would fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worrisome existing trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.
In sum, the transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a utopian proposal. It is an immense challenge and will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. But in the end it is the only rational option for averting human calamity on a scale never before seen.
by Richard Heinberg
Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply
A paper presented at the FEASTA Conference, "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?", June 23-25, 2005, Dublin Ireland
Food is energy. And it takes energy to get food. These two facts, taken together, have always established the biological limits to the human population and always will.
The same is true for every other species: food must yield more energy to the eater than is needed in order to acquire the food. Woe to the fox who expends more energy chasing rabbits than he can get from eating the rabbits he catches. If this energy balance remains negative for too long, death results; for an entire species, the outcome is a die-off event, perhaps leading even to extinction.
Humans have become champions at developing new strategies for increasing the amount of energy - and food - they capture from the environment. The harnessing of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, the adoption of ards and plows, the deployment of irrigation networks, and the harnessing of traction animals - developments that occurred over tens of thousands of years - all served this end.
The process was gradual and time-consuming. Not only were new tools developed, but, over centuries, small inventions and tiny modifications of existing tools - from scythes to horse-collars - enabled human and animal muscle power to be leveraged more effectively.
This entire exercise took place within a framework of natural limits. The yearly input of solar radiation to the planet was always immense relative to human needs (and still is), but it was finite nevertheless, and while humans directly appropriated only a tiny proportion of this abundance the vast majority of that radiation served functions that indirectly supported human existence - giving rise to air currents by warming the surface of the planet, and maintaining the lives of countless other kinds of creatures in the oceans and on land.
The amount of available human muscle power was limited by the number of humans, who, of course, had to be fed. Draft animals (bred for their muscle-power) also entailed energy costs, as they likewise needed to eat but also had to be cared for in various ways. Therefore, even with clever refinements in tools and techniques, in crops development and animal breeding, it was inevitable that humans would reach a point of diminishing returns in their ability to continue increasing their energy harvest, and therefore the size of their population.
By the nineteenth century these limits were beginning to become apparent. Famine and hunger had long been common throughout even the wealthiest regions of the planet. But, for Europeans, the migration of surplus populations to other nations, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were gradually making those events less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was again in view.
But again crisis was narrowly averted, this time due to fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process produces 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, equaling the total amount of available nitrogen introduced annually by all natural sources combined.
Fossil fuels went on to offer still other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.
Early steam-driven tractors came into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the size and effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia from the 1920s through the '50s. In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of US cropland had to be set aside for the growing of grain to feed horses - most of which worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans.
Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after WWII, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.
In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.
At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way.
The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.
William Catton, in his classic book Overshoot, terms the trade of essential life-support commodities "scope expansion."1 Carrying capacity is always limited by whatever necessity is in least supply, as Justus von Liebig realized nearly a century-and-a-half ago. If one region can grow food but has no exploitable metal deposits, its carrying capacity is limited by the lack of metals for the production of farm tools. Another region may have metals but insufficient topsoil or rain; there, carrying capacity is limited by the lack of food. If a way can be found to make up for local scarcity by taking advantage of distant abundance (as by exporting metal ores or finished tools from region A to help with food production in region B, and then exporting food from B to A), the total carrying capacity of the two regions combined can be increased substantially. We can put this into a crude formula:
CC of A+B > (CC of A) + (CC of B)
From an ecological as well as an economic point of view, this is why people trade. But trade has historically been limited by the amount of energy that could be applied to the transport of materials. Fossil fuels temporarily but enormously expanded that limit.
The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just a three-fold leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown five-fold since dawn of industrial revolution.
Agriculture at a Crossroads
All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but, if it proves not to be, then a temporary exuberance of the human species will have been purchased by an eventual, unprecedented human die-off. So how long can the present regime be sustained? Let us briefly survey some of the current trends in global food production and how they are related to the increased use of inexpensive fossil fuels.
Arable cropland: For millennia, the total amount of arable cropland gradually increased due to the clearing of forests and brush, and the irrigation of land that would otherwise be too arid for cultivation. That amount reached a maximum within the past two decades and is now decreasing because of the salinization of irrigated soils and the relentless growth of cities, with their buildings, roads, and parking lots. Irrigation has become more widespread because of the availability of cheap energy to operate pumps, while urbanization is largely a result of cheap fuel-fed transportation and the flushing of the peasantry from the countryside as a consequence of their inability to buy or to compete with fuel-fed agricultural machinery. Roads that cover former cropland are built from oil, and the erection of buildings has been facilitated by the mechanization of construction processes and the easy transport of materials.
Topsoil: The world's existing soils were generated over thousands and millions of years at a rate averaging an inch per 500 years. The amount of soil available to farmers is now decreasing at an alarming rate, due mostly to wind and water erosion. In the US Great Plains, roughly half the quantity in place at the beginning of the last century is now gone. In Australia, after two centuries of European land-use, more than 70 percent of land has become seriously degraded.2 Erosion is largely a function of tillage, which fractures and loosens soil; thus, as the introduction of fuel-fed tractors has increased the ease of tillage, the rate of soil loss has increased dramatically.
The number of farmers as a percentage of the population: In the US at the turn of the last century, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas and farmed. Today less than two percent of Americans farm for a living. This change came primarily because fuel-fed farm machinery replaced labor, which meant that fewer farmers were needed. Hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of families that desperately wanted to farm could not continue to do so because they could not afford the new machines, or could not compete with their neighbors who had them. Another way of saying this is that economies of scale (driven by mechanization) gave an advantage to ever-larger farms. But the loss of farmers also meant a gradual loss of knowledge of how to farm and a loss of rural farming culture. Many farmers today merely follow the directions on bags of fertilizer or pesticide, and live so far from their neighbors that their children have no desire to continue the agricultural way of life.
The genetic diversity of domesticated crop varieties: This is decreasing dramatically due to the consolidation of the seed industry. Farmers on the island of Bali in Indonesia once planted 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a different microclimate; now only four varieties are grown. In 2000, Semenis, the world's largest vegetable seed corporation, eliminated 25 percent of its product line as a cost-cutting measure. This ongoing, massive genetic consolidation is also being driven by the centralization of the seed industry (the largest three field seed companies - DuPont, Monsanto, and Novartis - now account for 20 percent of the global seed trade), which is in turn consequent upon fuel-fed globalization.
Grain production per capita: A total of 2,029 million tons of grain were produced globally in 2004; this was a record in absolute numbers. But for the past two decades population has grown faster than grain production, so there is actually less available on a per-head basis. In addition, grain stocks are being drawn down: According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, "in each of the last four . . . years production fell short of consumption. The shortfalls of nearly 100 million tons in 2002 and again in 2003 were the largest on record."3 This trend suggests that the strategy of boosting food production by the use of fossil fuels is already yielding diminishing returns.
Global climate: This is being increasingly destabilized as a result of the famous greenhouse effect, resulting in problems for farmers that are relatively minor now but that are likely to grow to catastrophic proportions within the next decade or two. Global warming is now almost universally acknowledged as resulting from CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Available fresh water: In the US, 85 percent of fresh water use goes toward agricultural production, requiring the drawing down of ancient aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall, ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water, requiring ever more energy usage. By 2020, according to the Worldwatch Institute and the UN, virtually every country will face shortages of fresh water.
The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides: In the US, over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold, yet, each year a greater amount of crops is lost to pests, which are evolving immunities faster than chemists can invent new poisons. Like falling grain production per capita, this trend suggests a declining return from injecting the process of agricultural production with still more fossil fuels.
Now, let us add to this picture the imminent peak in world oil production. This will make machinery more expensive to operate, fertilizers more expensive to produce, and transportation more expensive. While the adoption of fossil fuels created a range of problems for global food production, as we have just seen, the decline in the availability of cheap oil will not immediately solve those problems; in fact, over the short term they will exacerbate them, bringing simmering crises to a boil.
That is because the scale of our dependency on fossil fuels has grown to enormous proportions.
In the US, agriculture is directly responsible for well over 10 percent of all national energy consumption. Over 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer production, 20 percent to operate machinery, 16 percent for transportation, 13 percent for irrigation, 8 percent for livestock raising, (not including the feed), and 5 percent for pesticide production. This does not include energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retailers, or cooking.
Trucks move most of the world's food, even though trucking is ten times more energy-intensive than moving food by train or barge. Refrigerated jets move a small but growing proportion of food, almost entirely to wealthy industrial nations, at 60 times the energy cost of sea transport.
Processed foods make up three-quarters of global food sales by price (though not by quantity). This adds dramatically to energy costs: for example, a one-pound box of breakfast cereal may require over 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing, while the cereal itself provides only 1,100 kilocalories of food energy.
Over all - including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, and processing, and oil and natural gas used as feedstocks for agricultural chemicals - the modern food system consumes roughly ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.4
But the single most telling gauge of our dependency is the size of the global population. Without fossil fuels, the stupendous growth in human numbers that has occurred over the past century would have been impossible. Can we continue to support so many people as the availability of cheap oil declines?
Feeding a Growing Multitude
The problems associated with the modern global food system are widely apparent, there is widespread concern over the sustainability of the enterprise, and there is growing debate over the question of how to avoid an agricultural Armageddon. Within this debate two viewpoints have clearly emerged.
The first advises further intensification of industrial food production, primarily via the genetic engineering of new crop and animal varieties. The second advocates ecological agriculture in its various forms - including organic, biodynamic, Permaculture, and Biointensive methods.
Critics of the latter contend that traditional, chemical-free forms of agriculture are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. Here is a passage by John John Emsley of University of Cambridge, from his review of Vaclav Smil's Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food:
If crops are rotated and the soil is fertilized with compost, animal manure and sewage, thereby returning as much fixed nitrogen as possible to the soil, it is just possible for a hectare of land to feed 10 people - provided they accept a mainly vegetarian diet. Although such farming is almost sustainable, it falls short of the productivity of land that is fertilized with "artificial" nitrogen; this can easily support 40 people, and on a varied diet.5
This seems unarguable on its face. However, given the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, it will be increasingly difficult to continue to supply chemical fertilizers in present quantities. Nitrogen can be synthesized using hydrogen produced from the electrolysis of water, with solar or wind power as a source of electricity. But currently no ammonia is being commercially produced this way because of the uncompetitive cost of doing so. To introduce and scale up the process will require many years and considerable investment capital.
The bioengineering of crop and animal varieties does little or nothing to solve this problem. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, the genetic engineering of complex life forms on a commercial scale appears to pose unprecedented environmental hazards, as has been amply documented by Dr. Mae Wan-Ho among many others.6 And the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.
Those arguing in favor of small-scale, ecological agriculture tend to be optimistic about its ability to support large populations. For example, the 2002 Greenpeace report, "The Real Green Revolution: Organic and Agroecological Farming in the South," while acknowledging the lack of comparative research on the subject, nevertheless notes:
In general . . . it is thought that [organic and agroecological farming] can bring significant increases in yields in comparison to conventional farming practices. Compared to "Green Revolution'"farming systems, OAA is thought to be neutral in terms of yields, although it brings other benefits, such as reducing the need for external inputs.7
Eco-agricultural advocates often contend that there is plenty of food in the world; existing instances of hunger are due to bad policy and poor distribution. With better policy and distribution, all could easily be fed. Thus, given the universally admitted harmful environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming, the choice should be simple.
Some eco-ag proponents are even more sanguine, and suggest that their methods can produce far higher yields than can mechanized, chemical-based agriculture. Experiments have indeed shown that small-scale, biodiverse gardening or farming can be considerably more productive on a per-hectare basis than monocropped megafarms.8 However, some of these studies have ignored the energy and land-productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the study plots. In any case, and there is no controversy on this point, Permaculture and Biointensive forms of horticulture are dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture. Thus the adoption of these methods will require an economic transformation of societies.
Therefore even if the nitrogen problem can be solved in principle by agro-ecological methods and/or hydrogen production from renewable energy sources, there may be a carrying-capacity bottleneck ahead in any case, simply because of the inability of societies to adapt to these very different energy and economic needs quickly enough, and also because of the burgeoning problems mentioned above (loss of fresh water resources, unstable climate, etc.). According to widely-accepted calculations, humans are presently appropriating at least 40 percent of Earth's primary biological productivity.9 It seems unlikely that we, a single species after all, can do much more than that. Even though it may not be politically correct in many circles to discuss the population problem, we must recognize that we are nearing or past fundamental natural limits, no matter which course we pursue.
Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and we are already in view of the global oil production peak, the debate over the potential productivity of chemical-gene engineered agriculture versus that of organic and agroecological farming may be relatively pointless. We must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if it does prove to be less productive.
The Example of Cuba
How we might do that is suggested by perhaps the best recent historical example of a society experiencing a fossil-fuel famine. In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their American counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The population lost 20 pounds on average and malnutrition was nearly universal, especially among young children. The Cuban GDP fell by 85 percent and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.
Cuban authorities responded by breaking up large state-owned farms, offering land to farming families, and encouraging the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.
As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine. Today the nation is changing from an industrial to an agrarian society. While energy use in Cuba is now one-twentieth of that in the US, the economy is growing at a slow but steady rate. Food production has returned to 90 percent of its pre-crisis levels.10
The Way Ahead
The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. And it must be emphasized that we are discussing a systemic transformation - we cannot just remove oil in the forms of agrochemicals from the current food system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a rapid pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.
Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations on their regional resource base. One has only to contemplate the local productivity of a place like Nevada, to appreciate the enormous challenge of continuing to feed people in such a city such as Las Vegas without easy transportation.
We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Currently, Oakland California is debating a food policy initiative that would mandate by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.11 If the example of Cuba were followed, rooftop gardens would result, as well as rooftop raising of food animals like chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs.
Localization of the food process means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.
Clearly, we must minimize chemical inputs to agriculture (direct and indirect - such as those introduced in packaging and processing).
We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains.
Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake simply to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks, and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding.
Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.
It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap grain. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.
In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might in itself be advantageous; but, given the fact that a rapid transition is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.
Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.
All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying more technological intensification - will almost certainly result in dire consequences. In that case, existing farmers would fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worrisome existing trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.
In sum, the transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a utopian proposal. It is an immense challenge and will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. But in the end it is the only rational option for averting human calamity on a scale never before seen.
I Smell Gas
A subject that makes congressmen stupid.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, April 26, 2006, at 3:51 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2140613/?nav=mpp
Few topics seem to addle the collective brain of Washington like high gas prices. Politicians who raise this issue can generally be assumed to be partisan, cynical, demagogic, and dishonest. But one must not discount the possibility that something about the subject actually makes them stupid.
With gasoline prices now spiking around $3 a gallon—near their inflation-adjusted 1981 peak—we are witnessing stupidity on wheels. Republicans, who as incumbents fear that they will be blamed, are in a kind of frenzy to abandon free-market principles, basic economic reasoning, and increasingly, reason itself. Their week began with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert calling upon the Bush administration to investigate possible price-gouging and market manipulation. The Republican leaders went so far as to recommend "sweeps" of gas stations to confirm that price increases reflect "changes in market conditions" and are not merely attempts by businesses to earn money. The next day, President Bush joined in calling on the Bush administration to launch an investigation. As it happens, a Federal Trade Commission investigation into possible market manipulation is already under way from last year, when Bush and Congress asked for one following a post-Hurricane Katrina gas-price rise. While he was at it, Bush also asked Congress to repeal the tax breaks they joined together to give to the oil companies last year.
Republican talk about price-gouging is inane at several levels. If you don't have some sort of monopoly power, gouging is another word for charging the highest price the market will bear, also known as capitalism. This is why the FTC investigation has turned up nothing. What constrains filling stations from marking up gas excessively is not the fear of prosecution but competition from other filling stations. Even many Republican congressmen understand this, but calling for an investigation is a good way to deflect attention from the party's favoritism toward corporations that are now so profitable that they have become unpopular. Of course, there is outrageous anti-competitive conduct in the petroleum industry—it's called OPEC. But no presidential administration, especially the current one, takes seriously the idea that this price-fixing cartel is a criminal conspiracy under American law. Republicans would sooner propose a windfall-profits tax—an anti-market notion if ever there was one—as Sen. Arlen Specter recently did.
Democrats, who can barely restrain their glee at this political opportunity, bandy the same implausible complaints about gouging and "speculation" and speak even more enthusiastically about confiscating oil-company profits. They also have their own distinctive form of gas-price stupidity, which is to ignore the conflict between the environmentalism they espouse and the cheap fuel they demand. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi even moaned about high gas prices in her Earth Day statement last week. If you care, as Pelosi claims to, about clean air and preserving the coastline, you should welcome high gas prices. Even Al Gore, who once called cars "a mortal threat to the security of every nation," decried high gas prices when he ran for president in 2000. Democrats like to argue that gas prices are high because Bush has done too little to develop alternative energy sources and reduce dependence on imported oil. But it is high oil prices, far more than ethanol subsidies or incentives to buy hybrids cars, that will drive the development of new fuels.
And then there are the gas-related idiocies that afflict both sides. Bob Menendez, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, has already raised the perennial Republican notion of "suspending" the 18-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax, an idea that is bad for too many reasons to enumerate in a single day. A number of Republicans are now repeating the Democratic shibboleth that overpaid oil-company executives, rather than supply and demand, are somehow to blame. Whichever party is out of office tries to assert that the party in office has the power to reduce gas prices but simply chooses not to do so. Everything Democrats are now saying about Bush echoes what Republicans said about Bill Clinton when gas prices spiked in 2000. When you're out of power, you attack the president for not using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or, if he gives in to your demands, you denounce him for misusing it. "The strategic reserve is meant for times of war or a major disruption in oil supplies," Bush told an audience in October 2000, when he was criticizing Al Gore for (hypocritically) proposing to do the same thing Bush has just ordered done. If you are a Democrat, you get the option of either attacking the president for not leaning on his Saudi buddies to turn on the oil spigot, or accusing him of manipulating the Saudi oil supply for political gain in advance of an election.
What none can acknowledge is that higher gas prices in the United States are a good thing. To be sure, oil at $70 a barrel causes hardships for working people and delights some of the world's worst dictators. But cheap gasoline imposes its own costs on society: greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and its attendant health risks, traffic congestion, and accidents. The ideal way to cope with these externalities would be with higher gas taxes or a carbon tax. But these are politically impossible ideas at the moment—Democrats lost control of Congress in part because they passed a 4-cent-per-gallon tax increase in 1993. The next best solution is the one that has arrived on its own: a high market price for oil, which spurs conservation and substitution. Sustained high prices will bring about behavioral and political changes: energy conservation, public transportation, less exurban sprawl, and eventually the economic viability of alternative fuel sources such as biomass, fuel cells, wind, and solar power, which may one day undermine the power of the oil oligarchs. Are politicians too stupid to understand this, or just smart enough not to say it aloud?
A subject that makes congressmen stupid.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, April 26, 2006, at 3:51 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2140613/?nav=mpp
Few topics seem to addle the collective brain of Washington like high gas prices. Politicians who raise this issue can generally be assumed to be partisan, cynical, demagogic, and dishonest. But one must not discount the possibility that something about the subject actually makes them stupid.
With gasoline prices now spiking around $3 a gallon—near their inflation-adjusted 1981 peak—we are witnessing stupidity on wheels. Republicans, who as incumbents fear that they will be blamed, are in a kind of frenzy to abandon free-market principles, basic economic reasoning, and increasingly, reason itself. Their week began with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert calling upon the Bush administration to investigate possible price-gouging and market manipulation. The Republican leaders went so far as to recommend "sweeps" of gas stations to confirm that price increases reflect "changes in market conditions" and are not merely attempts by businesses to earn money. The next day, President Bush joined in calling on the Bush administration to launch an investigation. As it happens, a Federal Trade Commission investigation into possible market manipulation is already under way from last year, when Bush and Congress asked for one following a post-Hurricane Katrina gas-price rise. While he was at it, Bush also asked Congress to repeal the tax breaks they joined together to give to the oil companies last year.
Republican talk about price-gouging is inane at several levels. If you don't have some sort of monopoly power, gouging is another word for charging the highest price the market will bear, also known as capitalism. This is why the FTC investigation has turned up nothing. What constrains filling stations from marking up gas excessively is not the fear of prosecution but competition from other filling stations. Even many Republican congressmen understand this, but calling for an investigation is a good way to deflect attention from the party's favoritism toward corporations that are now so profitable that they have become unpopular. Of course, there is outrageous anti-competitive conduct in the petroleum industry—it's called OPEC. But no presidential administration, especially the current one, takes seriously the idea that this price-fixing cartel is a criminal conspiracy under American law. Republicans would sooner propose a windfall-profits tax—an anti-market notion if ever there was one—as Sen. Arlen Specter recently did.
Democrats, who can barely restrain their glee at this political opportunity, bandy the same implausible complaints about gouging and "speculation" and speak even more enthusiastically about confiscating oil-company profits. They also have their own distinctive form of gas-price stupidity, which is to ignore the conflict between the environmentalism they espouse and the cheap fuel they demand. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi even moaned about high gas prices in her Earth Day statement last week. If you care, as Pelosi claims to, about clean air and preserving the coastline, you should welcome high gas prices. Even Al Gore, who once called cars "a mortal threat to the security of every nation," decried high gas prices when he ran for president in 2000. Democrats like to argue that gas prices are high because Bush has done too little to develop alternative energy sources and reduce dependence on imported oil. But it is high oil prices, far more than ethanol subsidies or incentives to buy hybrids cars, that will drive the development of new fuels.
And then there are the gas-related idiocies that afflict both sides. Bob Menendez, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, has already raised the perennial Republican notion of "suspending" the 18-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax, an idea that is bad for too many reasons to enumerate in a single day. A number of Republicans are now repeating the Democratic shibboleth that overpaid oil-company executives, rather than supply and demand, are somehow to blame. Whichever party is out of office tries to assert that the party in office has the power to reduce gas prices but simply chooses not to do so. Everything Democrats are now saying about Bush echoes what Republicans said about Bill Clinton when gas prices spiked in 2000. When you're out of power, you attack the president for not using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or, if he gives in to your demands, you denounce him for misusing it. "The strategic reserve is meant for times of war or a major disruption in oil supplies," Bush told an audience in October 2000, when he was criticizing Al Gore for (hypocritically) proposing to do the same thing Bush has just ordered done. If you are a Democrat, you get the option of either attacking the president for not leaning on his Saudi buddies to turn on the oil spigot, or accusing him of manipulating the Saudi oil supply for political gain in advance of an election.
What none can acknowledge is that higher gas prices in the United States are a good thing. To be sure, oil at $70 a barrel causes hardships for working people and delights some of the world's worst dictators. But cheap gasoline imposes its own costs on society: greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and its attendant health risks, traffic congestion, and accidents. The ideal way to cope with these externalities would be with higher gas taxes or a carbon tax. But these are politically impossible ideas at the moment—Democrats lost control of Congress in part because they passed a 4-cent-per-gallon tax increase in 1993. The next best solution is the one that has arrived on its own: a high market price for oil, which spurs conservation and substitution. Sustained high prices will bring about behavioral and political changes: energy conservation, public transportation, less exurban sprawl, and eventually the economic viability of alternative fuel sources such as biomass, fuel cells, wind, and solar power, which may one day undermine the power of the oil oligarchs. Are politicians too stupid to understand this, or just smart enough not to say it aloud?
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Saudi Aramco boosts drilling efforts to offset declining fields Dubai (Platts)--11Apr2006
Saudi Aramco's mature crude oil fields are expected to decline at a gross
average rate of 8%/year without additional maintenance and drilling, a Saudi
Aramco spokesman said Tuesday.
But Saudi Aramco has taken a number of measures to offset a decline in
output from the country's aging oil fields, the spokesman added.
"A variety of remedial activities are always being taken in oil fields
influencing their effective decline rates," the spokesman said. "The drilling
of additional development wells in the producing fields is Saudi Aramco's
standard practice to offset normal declines of older wells."
This is particularly important when oil fields are progressively depleted
under a well thought out strategy of maximizing the sweep and displacement
efficiencies, leading to high ultimate oil recovery, the spokesman said.
"This maintain potential drilling in mature fields combined with a
multitude of remedial actions and the development of new fields, with long
plateau lives, lowers the composite decline rate of producing fields to around
2%," the spokesman said.
Underscoring these efforts, Saudi Aramco signed two contracts with J. Ray
McDermott Middle East and McDermott Arabia Company Ltd, subsidiaries of J. Ray
McDermott, to detail design, procure, fabricate, transport and install
offshore facilities for the Maintain Potential and Khursaniyah Upstream
Pipeline programs, Saudi Aramco said April 6.
The first contract includes two drilling support structures in Zuluf
field to be installed in December 2006 and one new wellhead production
platform in the Central Safaniya oil field to support onstream start-up in May
2007, Saudi Aramco said.
Three additional wellhead platforms will be installed in the Central
Safaniya and Zuluf fields by December 2007. New associated flowlines will
connect these platforms to existing offshore tie-in (manifold) platforms.
To support increasing production in the Central Safaniya field, a new
tie-in platform (Safaniya TP-18) will also be engineered, procured, fabricated
and installed by December 2007, along with a 24-inch trunkline between it and
a subsea connection on the new 42-inch trunkline flowing to the onshore
Safaniya GOSP-1, installed under a separate contract.
The second contract is associated with the subsea portion, some 22 km (14
miles) long, of the 30-inch gas pipeline from Abu Ali Island to an onshore
site at Khursaniyah to be installed by May 2007.
This subsea portion is part of the new 66 km BKTG-1 pipeline that will
transport 220 million cubic feet/day of gas from Abu Ali Plant to Khursaniyah
Gas Plant.
--Glen Carey, glen_carey@platts.com
For more news, request a free trial to Platts Oilgram News at
http://www.platts.com/Request%20More%20Information/ Saudi Aramco boosts drilling efforts to offset declining fields
Saudi Aramco's mature crude oil fields are expected to decline at a gross
average rate of 8%/year without additional maintenance and drilling, a Saudi
Aramco spokesman said Tuesday.
But Saudi Aramco has taken a number of measures to offset a decline in
output from the country's aging oil fields, the spokesman added.
"A variety of remedial activities are always being taken in oil fields
influencing their effective decline rates," the spokesman said. "The drilling
of additional development wells in the producing fields is Saudi Aramco's
standard practice to offset normal declines of older wells."
This is particularly important when oil fields are progressively depleted
under a well thought out strategy of maximizing the sweep and displacement
efficiencies, leading to high ultimate oil recovery, the spokesman said.
"This maintain potential drilling in mature fields combined with a
multitude of remedial actions and the development of new fields, with long
plateau lives, lowers the composite decline rate of producing fields to around
2%," the spokesman said.
Underscoring these efforts, Saudi Aramco signed two contracts with J. Ray
McDermott Middle East and McDermott Arabia Company Ltd, subsidiaries of J. Ray
McDermott, to detail design, procure, fabricate, transport and install
offshore facilities for the Maintain Potential and Khursaniyah Upstream
Pipeline programs, Saudi Aramco said April 6.
The first contract includes two drilling support structures in Zuluf
field to be installed in December 2006 and one new wellhead production
platform in the Central Safaniya oil field to support onstream start-up in May
2007, Saudi Aramco said.
Three additional wellhead platforms will be installed in the Central
Safaniya and Zuluf fields by December 2007. New associated flowlines will
connect these platforms to existing offshore tie-in (manifold) platforms.
To support increasing production in the Central Safaniya field, a new
tie-in platform (Safaniya TP-18) will also be engineered, procured, fabricated
and installed by December 2007, along with a 24-inch trunkline between it and
a subsea connection on the new 42-inch trunkline flowing to the onshore
Safaniya GOSP-1, installed under a separate contract.
The second contract is associated with the subsea portion, some 22 km (14
miles) long, of the 30-inch gas pipeline from Abu Ali Island to an onshore
site at Khursaniyah to be installed by May 2007.
This subsea portion is part of the new 66 km BKTG-1 pipeline that will
transport 220 million cubic feet/day of gas from Abu Ali Plant to Khursaniyah
Gas Plant.
--Glen Carey, glen_carey@platts.com
For more news, request a free trial to Platts Oilgram News at
http://www.platts.com/Request%20More%20Information/ Saudi Aramco boosts drilling efforts to offset declining fields
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Published on 4 Apr 2006 by GraphOilogy. Archived on 4 Apr 2006.
Open letter to Texas newspapers about peak oil: 'Why aren’t you listening?'
by Jeffrey J. Brown
April 2, 2006
Mr. Wesley R. Turner, President & Publisher
Fort Worth Star Telegram
Mr. James H. Moroney , III, Publisher & CEO
The Dallas Morning News
Subject: What Are Two Texas Billionaires,
Richard Rainwater & T. Boone Pickens,
Saying About Peak Oil & Why Aren’t You Listening?
Gentlemen:
I realize that I don’t have to introduce Richard Rainwater and Boone Pickens to you two gentlemen, but for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with Messrs. Rainwater and Pickens, following are brief introductions.
Richard Rainwater is the Texas based businessman who was chiefly responsible for turning the Bass Family’s inheritance of $50 into a $5 billion dollar fortune. Mr. Rainwater was therefore indirectly responsible for the remarkable urban renaissance of downtown Fort Worth, as a result of the Bass family’s massive investments. Mr. Rainwater also had a material role in George W. Bush’s selection as Managing Partner of the Texas Rangers Baseball Team, which launched Mr. Bush on his way to the Governor’s Mansion and then to the White House.
Mr. Pickens, now based in Dallas, has had a long and storied career in the oil and gas industry. Like most Texas oilmen, Mr. Pickens has had his ups and downs. Most recently he has been on an up cycle, via his investment firm, BP Capital.
These two gentlemen share an uncanny and proven ability to accurately predict future trends. The only real mistake that I am aware of is Mr. Pickens’ timing regarding natural gas prices some years ago. He was right about the price move, but he was just a little early.
Mr. Rainwater was profiled in the 12/14/05 issue of Fortune Magazine, “The Rainwater Prophecy.” Mr. Rainwater is deeply concerned about Peak Oil. In the article, Mr. Rainwater said, “This is the first scenario I’ve seen where I question the survivability of mankind.” Mr. Rainwater first became concerned about Peak Oil after reading “The Long Emergency” by James Howard Kunstler.
According to Bill McKenzie, with the Dallas Morning News, the primary reason that President Bush used the “Addicted to OIl” phrase in his state of the Union Speech was the Fortune article about Richard Rainwater, and again Mr. Rainwater became concerned about Peak Oil after reading Mr. Kunstler’s book.
On November 1, 2005 the Greater Dallas Planning Council and the Southern Methodist University Environmental Sciences Department cosponsored a symposium featuring Mr. Kunstler and Matthew R. Simmons entitled “The Unfolding Energy Crisis and its Impact on Development Patterns.” Mr. Pickens, via BP Capital, was one of the lead underwriters of the event.
Mr. Pickens, several of his associates, and several other notable Dallas businessmen such as Herbert Hunt were at the Simmons/Kunstler symposium, but no one from your respective editorial and news departments were able to make the event--despite multiple notices of the event.
In any case, Mr. Pickens has publicly stated that he believes that the world is at peak oil production. Mr. Pickens has publicly suggested increasing the gasoline tax, in an attempt to reduce oil consumption, with offsetting tax cuts elsewhere.
I certainly don’t speak for either Richard Rainwater or Boone Pickens, but my impression of these two gentlemen--along with Matt Simmons and Jim Kunstler--is that they are American patriots, in the truest sense of the word, who are trying to warn their fellow Americans about the dangers posed by Peak Oil.
In the Fortune interview, Mr. Rainwater was quoted as follows, “I believe in Hubbert’s Peak. I came out of Texas. I watched oil fields reach peak and go over, and I’ve watched how people would do all they could, put whatever amount of money into the field, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”
Much of the Peak Oil debate is based on pioneering work done by a famous Texas born geoscientist, M. King Hubbert. My coauthor, “Khebab,” and I wrote an article that was published on the Energy Bulletin website, “M. King Hubbert's Lower 48 Prediction Revisited: What can 1970 and Earlier Lower 48 Oil Production Data Tell Us About Post-1970 Lower 48 Oil Production?” Following is an excerpt from that article.
Fifty years ago this week, on March 8, 1956, at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, Texas, M. King Hubbert, in the preprinted version of his prepared remarks, had the following statement, "According to the best currently available information, the production of petroleum and natural gas on a world scale will probably pass its climax within the order of a half century (i.e., by 2006), while for both the United States and for Texas, the peaks of production may be expected to occur with the next 10 or 15 years (i.e., 1966 to 1971)." As more and more people are learning, Lower 48 oil production, as predicted by Dr. Hubbert, peaked in 1970, and it has fallen fairly steadily since 1970.
Kenneth Deffeyes, in Chapter Three of his recent book, "Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak," described a simplified way of predicting the production peaks for various regions and for their subsequent declines. One simply plots annual production (P) divided by cumulative production to date (Q) on the vertical axis, or P/Q, versus Q on the horizontal axis. Stuart Staniford, on The Oil Drum Blog, has described this technique as "Hubbert Linearization" or HL.
With time, a HL data set starts to show a linear progression, and one can extrapolate the data down to where P is effectively zero, which gives one Qt, or ultimate recoverable reserves for the region. Based on the assumption that production tends to peak at about 50% of Qt, one can generate a predicted production profile for the region. The Lower 48 peaked at 48.5% of Qt.
Using the HL technique, Dr. Deffeyes, an associate of Dr. Hubbert, predicted that the world crossed the mathematical 50% of Qt mark on December 16, 2005. In other words, Dr. Deffeyes believes that the world is now where the Lower 48 was at in the early Seventies.
We used the HL method to predict post-1970 Lower 48 cumulative oil production, using only 1970 and earlier production data. Our work indicated that the HL method was 98.7% accurate in predicting post-1970 Lower 48 cumulative oil production.
We need to differentiate between conventional and nonconventional oil. Perhaps the best way to differentiate the two types of oil is to classify it the following way. Conventional--the oil will move to a wellbore on its own. Nonconventional--the oil and oil-like solids have to be surface mined or heated in order to move to a wellbore (or synthesized from lighter hydrocarbons).
Dr. Deffeyes estimates that we that we have two trillion barrels of recoverable conventional oil reserves worldwide and that we have used half of this amount.
Fossil fuels can be viewed as a continuum, from natural gas, to natural gas liquids, to condensate, to light sweet crude oil to heavy sour crude oil to bitumen to coal. (Kerogen, a precursor to bitumen, can also be processed to yield oil.) This list is a progression from gas, to liquid to solid. It is also a progression from cleanest, natural gas, to dirtiest, coal.
The world wants Liquid Transportation Fuels (LTF’s)--gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. LTF’s can be obtained for the least expenditures of energy and capital from light sweet crude. It only makes sense that light sweet crude will peak before heavy sour, and based on the current historically high spreads between light sweet crude and heavy sour crude, that appears to be the case.
The world is increasingly turning toward the endpoints--natural gas/natural gas liquids on the light end and bitumen/coal on the heavy end--in an attempt to maintain and increase our supply of LTF’s. There are several problems. These are hugely capital intensive programs that tend to produce liquids at very low rates compared to conventional oil sources, and on the heavy end there are some fairly severe environmental consequences. Another point that is often overlooked is that every fossil fuel resource, except for kerogen, is currently being commercially exploited. In other words, we are simply talking about increasing our rate of extraction of our finite fossil fuel resource base in a desperate attempt to maintain the current American way of life of driving $50,000 SUV’s on 50 mile roundtrips to and from $500,000 mortgages.
Currently, the most significant source of nonconventional oil is the tar sands play in Alberta, Canada, where bitumen is being extracted via surface mining or via the injection of steam into deeper beds.
From fossil fuel and nuclear sources, the world currently uses the energy equivalent of a billion barrels of oil (Gb) every five days. The mighty East Texas Oil Field, the foundation of so many Dallas fortunes, the largest oil field in the Lower 48, and the field that was largely responsible for providing the oil to power the Allies victory over the Axis powers in World War II, made about 5.5 Gb. The field is currently producing 1.2 million barrels of water per day, with a 1% oil cut. It took about 75 years to pretty much fully deplete the East Texas Field. In terms of oil equivalent, the Barnett Shale Gas Play in North Texas should ultimately produce, over several decades, on the order of 4-5 Gbe.
The world uses, from nuclear and fossil fuel sources, the energy equivalent of the recoverable reserves in the East Texas oil Field or the Barnett Shale Play in less than 30 days.
In the 4/2/06 Star Telegram, Automotive Journalist Ed Wallace, in the classified advertising section, wrote a rebuttal to the Peak Oil theories. Mr. Wallace’s two basic points: (1) improved technology will increase recoverable conventional reserves by 50% to 3,000 Gb and (2) nonconventional oil sources will add another 3,000 Gb. Therefore, based on Mr. Wallace’s estimates, we have used 1,000 Gb out of a 6,000 Gb resource base.
In the Viewpoints (Op-Ed) section of the Dallas Morning News, similar “cornucopian” energy abundance articles were published last year making basically the same points that Mr. Wallace made.
In regard to the technology issue, this assertion is directly contradicted by our experience in Texas (peaked at 54% of Qt), the overall Lower 48 (peaked at 49% of Qt) and the North Sea (peaked at 52% of Qt). Nothing the industry has tried in these regions has reversed the production declines once about half of the oil reserves were consumed. The reason is best illustrated by the East Texas field, now producing water with a 1% oil cut. What can better technology do to help a field that has watered out?
In regard to the nonconventional sources of oil, Mr. Wallace is primarily focused on the Canadian tar sands and shale oil (kerogen). The tar sands play is a proven commercial success, that is however hugely energy intensive and that is also yielding vast amounts of contaminated waste water. Mr. Wallace cites the most widely used estimate of 175 Gb in recoverable reserves (note that this should be discounted by about 35% to 50% to get net energy equivalent). He also cited a vague estimate by a Shell executive of 2,000 Gb, that can’t be currently recovered. There is one interesting research program testing some new shale oil technologies, but there is nothing commercial yet.
In any case, let’s look at past and current estimates of Canadian tar sands production. In 2003, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimated that total Canadian oil production--driven by increasing tar sands production--would increase by 700,000 BOPD from 2003 to 2005. The reality? Total Canadian oil production fell from 2003 to 2005. The tar sands production fell short of estimates, and the increasing tar sands production the Canadians had could not make up for the decline in conventional Canadian oil production.
The Canadians themselves are estimating that tar sands production will only increase to about three million BOPD (mbpd) in 2016 from one mbpd today. Note that we will probably start losing a net two mbpd to four mbpd in conventional oil production per year, starting this year. Again, note that you have to discount the tar sands production by 35% to 50% to get net energy.
In effect, Mr. Wallace, and the other energy cornucopians see no problem with the $50,000 Hummer, $500,000 mortgage way of life.
Messrs. Rainwater and Pickens disagree. I can’t speak for them, but I assume that they believe that while nonconventional oil will help, it will only serve to slow the rate of decline of total oil production.
Some types of ethanol production (not from corn sources) appear have some possibilities, but there are a number of problems. Among the problems is a basic conflict between land devoted to food production and land devoted to fuel production. By the way, the US is probably now a net food importer. Currently, the US uses up to 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce one calorie of food. Ponder the impact on our food supply of a declining oil supply.
I realize that US media companies are facing severe economic pressures, and I realize that you are heavily dependent on advertising revenues from the housing/auto industries and from related companies. However, in my opinion we have hit the iceberg. The US media can lash themselves to the sinking ship, by failing to face reality, or you can face the reality of finite energy resources and start heading for the lifeboats.
I am supporting a proposal to abolish the Payroll (Social Security + Medicare) Tax and to replace it with an energy tax, principally a tax on liquid transportation fuels. This would unleash powerful economic forces against profligate energy use. Since it is in effect a consumption tax, it would tax those who currently don’t pay the Payroll Tax, by using cash. Instead of taxing payrolls to fund the Social Security and Medicare systems, we would instead tax energy consumption.
Alan Drake, a consulting engineer, has written a compelling article advocating a crash program of electrifying our transportation system, with special emphasis on Urban Rail.
I am working with a small group regarding the possibility of a Fall symposium on the Energy Tax and Urban Rail proposals, and we would be delighted to have support from The Fort Worth Star Telegram and/or The Dallas Morning News.
Note that these two proposals would address: the Social Security/Medicare crisis; the Peak Oil crisis; the loss of farmland due to suburban sprawl and Global Warming issues. We would replace “dumb growth” with “smart growth,” New Urbanism projects along mass transit lines.
In addition, I would at least ask you to give your readers a balanced report on the Peak Oil issue. Two leading citizens of your respective cities--Richard Rainwater and T. Boone Pickens--are deeply concerned about Peak Oil. The stated mission of the Fort Worth Star Telegram is: “Earning the People’s Trust Daily.” I assume that the Dallas Morning New concurs with this mission statement.
In my opinion, the US media have two choices regarding the Peak Oil issue. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, you can now have either your honor or the status quo. If you do nothing regarding Peak Oil, you will soon have neither the status quo nor your honor.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey J. Brown
Open letter to Texas newspapers about peak oil: 'Why aren’t you listening?'
by Jeffrey J. Brown
April 2, 2006
Mr. Wesley R. Turner, President & Publisher
Fort Worth Star Telegram
Mr. James H. Moroney , III, Publisher & CEO
The Dallas Morning News
Subject: What Are Two Texas Billionaires,
Richard Rainwater & T. Boone Pickens,
Saying About Peak Oil & Why Aren’t You Listening?
Gentlemen:
I realize that I don’t have to introduce Richard Rainwater and Boone Pickens to you two gentlemen, but for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with Messrs. Rainwater and Pickens, following are brief introductions.
Richard Rainwater is the Texas based businessman who was chiefly responsible for turning the Bass Family’s inheritance of $50 into a $5 billion dollar fortune. Mr. Rainwater was therefore indirectly responsible for the remarkable urban renaissance of downtown Fort Worth, as a result of the Bass family’s massive investments. Mr. Rainwater also had a material role in George W. Bush’s selection as Managing Partner of the Texas Rangers Baseball Team, which launched Mr. Bush on his way to the Governor’s Mansion and then to the White House.
Mr. Pickens, now based in Dallas, has had a long and storied career in the oil and gas industry. Like most Texas oilmen, Mr. Pickens has had his ups and downs. Most recently he has been on an up cycle, via his investment firm, BP Capital.
These two gentlemen share an uncanny and proven ability to accurately predict future trends. The only real mistake that I am aware of is Mr. Pickens’ timing regarding natural gas prices some years ago. He was right about the price move, but he was just a little early.
Mr. Rainwater was profiled in the 12/14/05 issue of Fortune Magazine, “The Rainwater Prophecy.” Mr. Rainwater is deeply concerned about Peak Oil. In the article, Mr. Rainwater said, “This is the first scenario I’ve seen where I question the survivability of mankind.” Mr. Rainwater first became concerned about Peak Oil after reading “The Long Emergency” by James Howard Kunstler.
According to Bill McKenzie, with the Dallas Morning News, the primary reason that President Bush used the “Addicted to OIl” phrase in his state of the Union Speech was the Fortune article about Richard Rainwater, and again Mr. Rainwater became concerned about Peak Oil after reading Mr. Kunstler’s book.
On November 1, 2005 the Greater Dallas Planning Council and the Southern Methodist University Environmental Sciences Department cosponsored a symposium featuring Mr. Kunstler and Matthew R. Simmons entitled “The Unfolding Energy Crisis and its Impact on Development Patterns.” Mr. Pickens, via BP Capital, was one of the lead underwriters of the event.
Mr. Pickens, several of his associates, and several other notable Dallas businessmen such as Herbert Hunt were at the Simmons/Kunstler symposium, but no one from your respective editorial and news departments were able to make the event--despite multiple notices of the event.
In any case, Mr. Pickens has publicly stated that he believes that the world is at peak oil production. Mr. Pickens has publicly suggested increasing the gasoline tax, in an attempt to reduce oil consumption, with offsetting tax cuts elsewhere.
I certainly don’t speak for either Richard Rainwater or Boone Pickens, but my impression of these two gentlemen--along with Matt Simmons and Jim Kunstler--is that they are American patriots, in the truest sense of the word, who are trying to warn their fellow Americans about the dangers posed by Peak Oil.
In the Fortune interview, Mr. Rainwater was quoted as follows, “I believe in Hubbert’s Peak. I came out of Texas. I watched oil fields reach peak and go over, and I’ve watched how people would do all they could, put whatever amount of money into the field, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”
Much of the Peak Oil debate is based on pioneering work done by a famous Texas born geoscientist, M. King Hubbert. My coauthor, “Khebab,” and I wrote an article that was published on the Energy Bulletin website, “M. King Hubbert's Lower 48 Prediction Revisited: What can 1970 and Earlier Lower 48 Oil Production Data Tell Us About Post-1970 Lower 48 Oil Production?” Following is an excerpt from that article.
Fifty years ago this week, on March 8, 1956, at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, Texas, M. King Hubbert, in the preprinted version of his prepared remarks, had the following statement, "According to the best currently available information, the production of petroleum and natural gas on a world scale will probably pass its climax within the order of a half century (i.e., by 2006), while for both the United States and for Texas, the peaks of production may be expected to occur with the next 10 or 15 years (i.e., 1966 to 1971)." As more and more people are learning, Lower 48 oil production, as predicted by Dr. Hubbert, peaked in 1970, and it has fallen fairly steadily since 1970.
Kenneth Deffeyes, in Chapter Three of his recent book, "Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak," described a simplified way of predicting the production peaks for various regions and for their subsequent declines. One simply plots annual production (P) divided by cumulative production to date (Q) on the vertical axis, or P/Q, versus Q on the horizontal axis. Stuart Staniford, on The Oil Drum Blog, has described this technique as "Hubbert Linearization" or HL.
With time, a HL data set starts to show a linear progression, and one can extrapolate the data down to where P is effectively zero, which gives one Qt, or ultimate recoverable reserves for the region. Based on the assumption that production tends to peak at about 50% of Qt, one can generate a predicted production profile for the region. The Lower 48 peaked at 48.5% of Qt.
Using the HL technique, Dr. Deffeyes, an associate of Dr. Hubbert, predicted that the world crossed the mathematical 50% of Qt mark on December 16, 2005. In other words, Dr. Deffeyes believes that the world is now where the Lower 48 was at in the early Seventies.
We used the HL method to predict post-1970 Lower 48 cumulative oil production, using only 1970 and earlier production data. Our work indicated that the HL method was 98.7% accurate in predicting post-1970 Lower 48 cumulative oil production.
We need to differentiate between conventional and nonconventional oil. Perhaps the best way to differentiate the two types of oil is to classify it the following way. Conventional--the oil will move to a wellbore on its own. Nonconventional--the oil and oil-like solids have to be surface mined or heated in order to move to a wellbore (or synthesized from lighter hydrocarbons).
Dr. Deffeyes estimates that we that we have two trillion barrels of recoverable conventional oil reserves worldwide and that we have used half of this amount.
Fossil fuels can be viewed as a continuum, from natural gas, to natural gas liquids, to condensate, to light sweet crude oil to heavy sour crude oil to bitumen to coal. (Kerogen, a precursor to bitumen, can also be processed to yield oil.) This list is a progression from gas, to liquid to solid. It is also a progression from cleanest, natural gas, to dirtiest, coal.
The world wants Liquid Transportation Fuels (LTF’s)--gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. LTF’s can be obtained for the least expenditures of energy and capital from light sweet crude. It only makes sense that light sweet crude will peak before heavy sour, and based on the current historically high spreads between light sweet crude and heavy sour crude, that appears to be the case.
The world is increasingly turning toward the endpoints--natural gas/natural gas liquids on the light end and bitumen/coal on the heavy end--in an attempt to maintain and increase our supply of LTF’s. There are several problems. These are hugely capital intensive programs that tend to produce liquids at very low rates compared to conventional oil sources, and on the heavy end there are some fairly severe environmental consequences. Another point that is often overlooked is that every fossil fuel resource, except for kerogen, is currently being commercially exploited. In other words, we are simply talking about increasing our rate of extraction of our finite fossil fuel resource base in a desperate attempt to maintain the current American way of life of driving $50,000 SUV’s on 50 mile roundtrips to and from $500,000 mortgages.
Currently, the most significant source of nonconventional oil is the tar sands play in Alberta, Canada, where bitumen is being extracted via surface mining or via the injection of steam into deeper beds.
From fossil fuel and nuclear sources, the world currently uses the energy equivalent of a billion barrels of oil (Gb) every five days. The mighty East Texas Oil Field, the foundation of so many Dallas fortunes, the largest oil field in the Lower 48, and the field that was largely responsible for providing the oil to power the Allies victory over the Axis powers in World War II, made about 5.5 Gb. The field is currently producing 1.2 million barrels of water per day, with a 1% oil cut. It took about 75 years to pretty much fully deplete the East Texas Field. In terms of oil equivalent, the Barnett Shale Gas Play in North Texas should ultimately produce, over several decades, on the order of 4-5 Gbe.
The world uses, from nuclear and fossil fuel sources, the energy equivalent of the recoverable reserves in the East Texas oil Field or the Barnett Shale Play in less than 30 days.
In the 4/2/06 Star Telegram, Automotive Journalist Ed Wallace, in the classified advertising section, wrote a rebuttal to the Peak Oil theories. Mr. Wallace’s two basic points: (1) improved technology will increase recoverable conventional reserves by 50% to 3,000 Gb and (2) nonconventional oil sources will add another 3,000 Gb. Therefore, based on Mr. Wallace’s estimates, we have used 1,000 Gb out of a 6,000 Gb resource base.
In the Viewpoints (Op-Ed) section of the Dallas Morning News, similar “cornucopian” energy abundance articles were published last year making basically the same points that Mr. Wallace made.
In regard to the technology issue, this assertion is directly contradicted by our experience in Texas (peaked at 54% of Qt), the overall Lower 48 (peaked at 49% of Qt) and the North Sea (peaked at 52% of Qt). Nothing the industry has tried in these regions has reversed the production declines once about half of the oil reserves were consumed. The reason is best illustrated by the East Texas field, now producing water with a 1% oil cut. What can better technology do to help a field that has watered out?
In regard to the nonconventional sources of oil, Mr. Wallace is primarily focused on the Canadian tar sands and shale oil (kerogen). The tar sands play is a proven commercial success, that is however hugely energy intensive and that is also yielding vast amounts of contaminated waste water. Mr. Wallace cites the most widely used estimate of 175 Gb in recoverable reserves (note that this should be discounted by about 35% to 50% to get net energy equivalent). He also cited a vague estimate by a Shell executive of 2,000 Gb, that can’t be currently recovered. There is one interesting research program testing some new shale oil technologies, but there is nothing commercial yet.
In any case, let’s look at past and current estimates of Canadian tar sands production. In 2003, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimated that total Canadian oil production--driven by increasing tar sands production--would increase by 700,000 BOPD from 2003 to 2005. The reality? Total Canadian oil production fell from 2003 to 2005. The tar sands production fell short of estimates, and the increasing tar sands production the Canadians had could not make up for the decline in conventional Canadian oil production.
The Canadians themselves are estimating that tar sands production will only increase to about three million BOPD (mbpd) in 2016 from one mbpd today. Note that we will probably start losing a net two mbpd to four mbpd in conventional oil production per year, starting this year. Again, note that you have to discount the tar sands production by 35% to 50% to get net energy.
In effect, Mr. Wallace, and the other energy cornucopians see no problem with the $50,000 Hummer, $500,000 mortgage way of life.
Messrs. Rainwater and Pickens disagree. I can’t speak for them, but I assume that they believe that while nonconventional oil will help, it will only serve to slow the rate of decline of total oil production.
Some types of ethanol production (not from corn sources) appear have some possibilities, but there are a number of problems. Among the problems is a basic conflict between land devoted to food production and land devoted to fuel production. By the way, the US is probably now a net food importer. Currently, the US uses up to 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce one calorie of food. Ponder the impact on our food supply of a declining oil supply.
I realize that US media companies are facing severe economic pressures, and I realize that you are heavily dependent on advertising revenues from the housing/auto industries and from related companies. However, in my opinion we have hit the iceberg. The US media can lash themselves to the sinking ship, by failing to face reality, or you can face the reality of finite energy resources and start heading for the lifeboats.
I am supporting a proposal to abolish the Payroll (Social Security + Medicare) Tax and to replace it with an energy tax, principally a tax on liquid transportation fuels. This would unleash powerful economic forces against profligate energy use. Since it is in effect a consumption tax, it would tax those who currently don’t pay the Payroll Tax, by using cash. Instead of taxing payrolls to fund the Social Security and Medicare systems, we would instead tax energy consumption.
Alan Drake, a consulting engineer, has written a compelling article advocating a crash program of electrifying our transportation system, with special emphasis on Urban Rail.
I am working with a small group regarding the possibility of a Fall symposium on the Energy Tax and Urban Rail proposals, and we would be delighted to have support from The Fort Worth Star Telegram and/or The Dallas Morning News.
Note that these two proposals would address: the Social Security/Medicare crisis; the Peak Oil crisis; the loss of farmland due to suburban sprawl and Global Warming issues. We would replace “dumb growth” with “smart growth,” New Urbanism projects along mass transit lines.
In addition, I would at least ask you to give your readers a balanced report on the Peak Oil issue. Two leading citizens of your respective cities--Richard Rainwater and T. Boone Pickens--are deeply concerned about Peak Oil. The stated mission of the Fort Worth Star Telegram is: “Earning the People’s Trust Daily.” I assume that the Dallas Morning New concurs with this mission statement.
In my opinion, the US media have two choices regarding the Peak Oil issue. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, you can now have either your honor or the status quo. If you do nothing regarding Peak Oil, you will soon have neither the status quo nor your honor.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey J. Brown
Demand May Outpace Saudi Oil CapacityBy JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
Mon Apr 3, 2:14 PM ET
DAMMAM, Saudi Arabia - The world's only oil superpower boosted output last month, launching a pair of projects that are part of a massive $55 billion endeavor to keep pace with the world's ever-intensifying thirst for oil.
But demand for the world's premiere source of energy is rising so fast — by around 2 million barrels per day each year — that even Saudi Arabia's vast resources will be unable to cope without drastic help, oil executives and analysts say.
Remarkably, even Saudis, who control over a quarter of the world's known oil, are calling for relief from relentless consumption.
"The current out-of-control demand is not good for us," Ghazi Al-Rawi, head of private equity at Gulf One Investment Bank, said in a recent interview. "When you have this kind of demand, you're forced to supply beyond the optimal rate. That's not a positive thing."
Most urgently needed is energy conservation, especially in the United States, which now burns up a quarter of the oil sold to the world, said Saddad al-Husseini, the former head of production at state-owned Saudi Aramco.
Also critical is the development of fuels from oil-rich sands or natural gas that can act as substitutes for oil. Other producing countries — especially OPEC's No. 2 and 3 leaders Iran and Iraq — could ease the crunch by boosting exports to handle a greater share of the surging demand in China and India, Saudi experts said.
"We need some help," said Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi petroleum adviser with close ties to the government.
If such help doesn't materialize and Saudi Arabia maxes its output — cranking out perhaps 35 percent more oil than it does today — the kingdom's proven reserves might only sustain those gushing flows for a couple of decades before starting to dwindle, al-Husseini said.
"Can (global consumers) afford to keep increasing demand by almost 2 million barrels a day each year? Is it Saudi Arabia's role to meet that demand?" asked al-Husseini, who retired in 2004 after working 32 years in the kingdom's oil sector. "You're leading yourself to having to find an alternative source of energy very quickly."
Few analysts believe oil worldwide is actually running out. But experts differ on whether the current soaring oil demand will outstrip the current supplies, and how quickly.
Many blame today's tight market on 20 years of low oil prices that stifled investment in new wells, refining and exports.
Keeping prices high is the best way to meet demand over the next decade or two, said Leonardo Maugeri, an executive with the Italian energy company ENI. High prices give investors incentive to spend the billions needed to boost oil production and develop alternate fuels, Maugeri wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
But Maugeri also wrote that it takes six to eight years for oil from a new well to reach consumers. Developing oil sands or natural gas-based diesel fuel is even slower and more expensive.
Saudis worry that consumer demand could overwhelm the slow progress in bringing new energies to market. "If this continues, you'll have demand outstripping supply over the next five years by a wide margin," said Obaid.
Others, like Sharif Ghalib of Energy Intelligence Research in New York, say the world's cushion of excess oil production capacity — a safety margin that keeps a lid on prices — is so low that demand could outstrip supplies now. All it would take is a single oil producer going off-line for any reason.
"The crunch is already here. It's not five years down the road," Ghalib said. "There is no thought being given in the U.S. to raising gasoline taxes or increasing mileage on U.S. cars. In China, automobile use is skyrocketing."
For now, Saudi Arabia is bent on meeting this demand by drilling wells and laying pipe.
In March, state-owned Saudi Aramco and Japan's Sumitomo Chemical Co. broke ground on a $10 billion oil refinery and petrochemical plant that will be one of the world's largest when finished in 2008.
The refinery, one of two planned in the kingdom, is aimed at opening bottlenecks on delivery of refined products like gasoline and diesel. The plant will boost Riyadh's output because it can refine heavy sulfurous crude that the kingdom is now unable to sell.
Saudi Arabia and its partners plan to invest a further $28 billion in three more huge refineries, in China, India and Texas, Obaid said.
Also last month, Saudi Arabia began opening valves on a 300,000 barrel-per-day expansion in output from the world's largest oilfield. By summer, the full flow of the black oil is supposed to be under way.
These are just the latest installments of what experts describe as the world's largest oil expansion effort, which will boost Saudi Arabia's output capacity by 2009 by almost 14 percent — from 11 to 12.5 million barrels per day.
If demand warrants, the Petroleum Ministry could decide to invest another $8.5 billion in a further boost of 800,000 barrels a day by 2013, bringing sustainable capacity to 13.05 million barrels a day, Obaid said.
Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi has said the kingdom could reach and sustain 15 million barrels per day in output if needed.
But even leaping to those frantic levels won't satisfy spiraling world demand for long, analysts say.
"The Saudis can't do it alone," said Ehsan Ul-Haq, chief analyst of Vienna-based energy broker PVM Oil Associates.
And pumping at 15 million barrels a day, the lifespan of Saudi's 260 billion barrels of proven oil reserves would be shortened by 30 percent, with output dwindling about two decades from now — "within our lifetimes," al-Husseini said.
The kingdom has already used up 100 billion barrels. Production typically declines when a country has produced half of its reserves. That's 180 billion barrels in Riyadh's case, al-Husseini said.
"If instead of reliable oil production lasting 20 years, it were to last for 40 years, then we would all be ahead," he said. "That's why there is a need to supplement conventional oil with other sources of energy."
Energy demand heats up far more readily than it cools off. Only steep and painful price increases have much effect on oil consumption, said Dalton Garis, an oil economist at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi.
Prices could also drop, however, Garis said, if Saudi Arabia's expansion is met by slowing demand.
That is starting to happen. In two years, the increase in world demand has slipped from a high of 2.7 million barrels a day in 2004 to an expected 1.6 million barrels per day in 2006, Ul-Haq said.
Overall, Ul-Haq said he expected global demand to grow yearly by 2 million barrels per day in the next few years, with most of the growth coming from Asia.
"We're really not going to change our consumption behavior until oil hits $80 a barrel," Garis said.
Mon Apr 3, 2:14 PM ET
DAMMAM, Saudi Arabia - The world's only oil superpower boosted output last month, launching a pair of projects that are part of a massive $55 billion endeavor to keep pace with the world's ever-intensifying thirst for oil.
But demand for the world's premiere source of energy is rising so fast — by around 2 million barrels per day each year — that even Saudi Arabia's vast resources will be unable to cope without drastic help, oil executives and analysts say.
Remarkably, even Saudis, who control over a quarter of the world's known oil, are calling for relief from relentless consumption.
"The current out-of-control demand is not good for us," Ghazi Al-Rawi, head of private equity at Gulf One Investment Bank, said in a recent interview. "When you have this kind of demand, you're forced to supply beyond the optimal rate. That's not a positive thing."
Most urgently needed is energy conservation, especially in the United States, which now burns up a quarter of the oil sold to the world, said Saddad al-Husseini, the former head of production at state-owned Saudi Aramco.
Also critical is the development of fuels from oil-rich sands or natural gas that can act as substitutes for oil. Other producing countries — especially OPEC's No. 2 and 3 leaders Iran and Iraq — could ease the crunch by boosting exports to handle a greater share of the surging demand in China and India, Saudi experts said.
"We need some help," said Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi petroleum adviser with close ties to the government.
If such help doesn't materialize and Saudi Arabia maxes its output — cranking out perhaps 35 percent more oil than it does today — the kingdom's proven reserves might only sustain those gushing flows for a couple of decades before starting to dwindle, al-Husseini said.
"Can (global consumers) afford to keep increasing demand by almost 2 million barrels a day each year? Is it Saudi Arabia's role to meet that demand?" asked al-Husseini, who retired in 2004 after working 32 years in the kingdom's oil sector. "You're leading yourself to having to find an alternative source of energy very quickly."
Few analysts believe oil worldwide is actually running out. But experts differ on whether the current soaring oil demand will outstrip the current supplies, and how quickly.
Many blame today's tight market on 20 years of low oil prices that stifled investment in new wells, refining and exports.
Keeping prices high is the best way to meet demand over the next decade or two, said Leonardo Maugeri, an executive with the Italian energy company ENI. High prices give investors incentive to spend the billions needed to boost oil production and develop alternate fuels, Maugeri wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
But Maugeri also wrote that it takes six to eight years for oil from a new well to reach consumers. Developing oil sands or natural gas-based diesel fuel is even slower and more expensive.
Saudis worry that consumer demand could overwhelm the slow progress in bringing new energies to market. "If this continues, you'll have demand outstripping supply over the next five years by a wide margin," said Obaid.
Others, like Sharif Ghalib of Energy Intelligence Research in New York, say the world's cushion of excess oil production capacity — a safety margin that keeps a lid on prices — is so low that demand could outstrip supplies now. All it would take is a single oil producer going off-line for any reason.
"The crunch is already here. It's not five years down the road," Ghalib said. "There is no thought being given in the U.S. to raising gasoline taxes or increasing mileage on U.S. cars. In China, automobile use is skyrocketing."
For now, Saudi Arabia is bent on meeting this demand by drilling wells and laying pipe.
In March, state-owned Saudi Aramco and Japan's Sumitomo Chemical Co. broke ground on a $10 billion oil refinery and petrochemical plant that will be one of the world's largest when finished in 2008.
The refinery, one of two planned in the kingdom, is aimed at opening bottlenecks on delivery of refined products like gasoline and diesel. The plant will boost Riyadh's output because it can refine heavy sulfurous crude that the kingdom is now unable to sell.
Saudi Arabia and its partners plan to invest a further $28 billion in three more huge refineries, in China, India and Texas, Obaid said.
Also last month, Saudi Arabia began opening valves on a 300,000 barrel-per-day expansion in output from the world's largest oilfield. By summer, the full flow of the black oil is supposed to be under way.
These are just the latest installments of what experts describe as the world's largest oil expansion effort, which will boost Saudi Arabia's output capacity by 2009 by almost 14 percent — from 11 to 12.5 million barrels per day.
If demand warrants, the Petroleum Ministry could decide to invest another $8.5 billion in a further boost of 800,000 barrels a day by 2013, bringing sustainable capacity to 13.05 million barrels a day, Obaid said.
Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi has said the kingdom could reach and sustain 15 million barrels per day in output if needed.
But even leaping to those frantic levels won't satisfy spiraling world demand for long, analysts say.
"The Saudis can't do it alone," said Ehsan Ul-Haq, chief analyst of Vienna-based energy broker PVM Oil Associates.
And pumping at 15 million barrels a day, the lifespan of Saudi's 260 billion barrels of proven oil reserves would be shortened by 30 percent, with output dwindling about two decades from now — "within our lifetimes," al-Husseini said.
The kingdom has already used up 100 billion barrels. Production typically declines when a country has produced half of its reserves. That's 180 billion barrels in Riyadh's case, al-Husseini said.
"If instead of reliable oil production lasting 20 years, it were to last for 40 years, then we would all be ahead," he said. "That's why there is a need to supplement conventional oil with other sources of energy."
Energy demand heats up far more readily than it cools off. Only steep and painful price increases have much effect on oil consumption, said Dalton Garis, an oil economist at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi.
Prices could also drop, however, Garis said, if Saudi Arabia's expansion is met by slowing demand.
That is starting to happen. In two years, the increase in world demand has slipped from a high of 2.7 million barrels a day in 2004 to an expected 1.6 million barrels per day in 2006, Ul-Haq said.
Overall, Ul-Haq said he expected global demand to grow yearly by 2 million barrels per day in the next few years, with most of the growth coming from Asia.
"We're really not going to change our consumption behavior until oil hits $80 a barrel," Garis said.
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