TRANSCRIPTION OF INTERVIEW
Matthew R. Simmons
Chairman, Simmons & Company, Int'l &
Author, Twilight in the Desert
April 29, 2006
"Tough Times Ahead for Energy"
[Edited for clarity]
JIM PUPLAVA: Well, energy prices are back on the front pages in the news stories today. Some think energy prices will stabilize, maybe they’ll come down a bit, while others think we’re headed for the perfect energy storm. To discuss this issue, joining me on the program is Matt Simmons, he’s Chairman of Simmons and Company International, and he's also author of a best-selling book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.
You know, Matt, the last time that we spoke was last August, and little did we know a few weeks later our whole energy infrastructure would be devastated by a good series of hurricanes. I would have thought that our hurricanes would have been our 9/11 or energy wake-up call, and yet I was surprised by the lack of response, and since then we’ve done very little. I believe we still don’t understand the gravity of our energy situation.
MATTHEW R. SIMMONS: You’re precisely right, and ironically you could argue that they were almost the reverse. There was this general sense by too many people that the only reason we have these temporary problems is because of these abnormal hurricanes. I’ll tell you a very odd story. I was on a BBC global radio program and it was the Tuesday afternoon after Katrina. They had a senior professor emeritus from Erasmus University on, who’s written a book called Hydrocarbon in the 21st Century [Peter Odell - Why Carbon Fuels Will Dominate the 21st Century's Global Energy Economy], and he claims we’ll be using twice as much oil in 2100 as we are today because oil in fact is renewable.
And so both of us were asked, since oil prices were at $70, do you think now this is the ultimate oil crisis? And the Professor said, “Oh, no, no, no – this is just a series of exogenous events, and within about 3 months it will all be corrected, and then oil prices will go to 35.” He said, “Mr. Simmons, what do you think?” I said, “first, I don’t know what ‘exogenous’ even means, but I think what Katrina did was actually bomb the Gulf of Mexico the same way [they] bombed Pearl Harbor. And we’re not even through the hurricane season yet and I think we’ll be very lucky if in 3 months we’ll even know the extent of the damage. And I think it will be a miracle if we have everything fixed before the next hurricane season starts in the Summer of 2006.”
And it turns out I was unerringly right, but the fact is that we had very funny oil statistics that came out when all of a sudden people couldn’t drive, and we had no way to count barrels in the areas where most of the storage was, and it created the illusion the high prices had really brought demand down. And so we had a price collapse. [3:12]
JIM: That’s absolutely amazing. Well, let’s move forward if we can to today’s headlines of record gas prices. Matt, how much of this is attributable to new government regulations on let’s say, sulfur content, and last year’s energy legislation requiring ethanol, and of course higher oil prices? I wonder if you could explain these changes and the impact they’ve made on gasoline prices.
MATT: The switch from MTBE to ethanol was, in my opinion, largely overlooked at such an unbelievably complex series of logistics we were putting on the system. And I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we are basically days away from having gas lines erupt in a lot of key places. But I don’t think, so far, that’s really been the driver. I think the driver of gasoline and diesel prices is crude oil, and the fact that crude oil is back up in the mid-70s. And the reason it’s in the mid-70s, in my opinion, is we’re out of capacity every place. So I think the switch to ethanol and coming right behind it is this unbelievable specification for ultra-clean diesel fuel is probably something that doesn’t work. And that might be the triggering point for the same sort of gas lines we had in '79, but I think in the background is just the serious problem of the fact that this is just exactly where current prices should be if you think there’s nothing abnormal about crude oil being at 75. And every time I’m asked how in the world you could justify $75 price for oil, I say -- it’s in barrels: $75 happens to be 11 cents a cup. [There is] nothing we sell any place in the world for 11 cents a cup other than oil to refineries. [4:58]
JIM: In response, however, to these higher prices over the weekend, we have two Senators, one Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, and Arlen Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania, they propose a windfall profits tax, and in Specter’s case anti-trust legislation, and some Congressmen are talking about price controls. What would these proposals do to alleviate our current energy problem, if not exacerbate them?
MATT: Well, the price controls is really stupid because then that basically artificially just encourages consumption. I think at some point I’m a little – I hate to say this because it’s so counter anything I thought I would ever say – but to the extent that the major oil companies can continue to advertise that they’re really not making much money, and that they’re doing everything possible and that these are just temporary, and the cash builds up, and builds up, and builds up, and builds up, the governments of the world are going to basically take it away from them. Now, whether they should or not is a whole different reason, but I think had the companies been more forthright about and maybe they had done their homework a little better and said, “we are in a jam now and we’re not quite sure how we get out of it,” it would be easier to defend these prices. But what they’ve done is exactly the opposite, you know, “and this is just very temporary, oil’s a cyclical thing, what goes up comes down, over 15 years we’ve spent all this money.” And you know it won’t be long before one of the major oil companies has $100 billion of excess cash on the balance sheet. [6:29]
JIM: In the meantime, since Katrina and Rita, and others following – heck, we’re already into a new season…
MATT: Yup, the one thing we’ll know about the new season is that they’ve taken Rita and Katrina out of the hurricane language.
JIM: Since then, looking back however, we haven’t built a refinery, we’re not building wind turbines and we’ve done nothing with the rail system, are we committing energy suicide.
MATT: We’re certainly playing a game of Russian roulette or chicken. Now, both of those games have actually created over the years occasional suicide.
JIM: When you sit, however, and look at the way this is debated, I don’t believe the nation or many citizens understand how critical energy is to the economy, and the lifestyle we enjoy in this country from water, food production, technology to healthcare.
MATT: I’ve had the luxury of actually speaking in quite a few different places around the world over the course of the last 4 months and I would say that don’t just blame the United States for our ignorance, we’re basically just about as educated…last Thursday I spent a fabulous day at the University of Limerick in Ireland, and the question I got repeatedly asked, “why haven’t people come here and told us this story? This is shocking!” And I got the same reaction in New Zealand, and the same reaction in Aberdeen, Scotland. So we basically got 30 years of very, very low prices that got lower and lower because they never rose. So an inflation-adjusted basis really led us into dreaming that we had the right to basically get energy effectively for free and we could worry about other things. [8:12]
JIM: From my chair it almost looks, Matt, that we’re heading into a perfect energy storm. On one storm front you have supply versus demand; on the second, geopolitical issues. And then maybe a third storm front, a lack of a silver bullet, and even if there was something out there, it's the long lead time on alternatives.
MATT: Yes, and then you have all these flashpoints – the fact that the energy infrastructure is too old and it’s rusting away. Each one of these things is a separate issue.
JIM: Describe the origins of this crisis. How did we get into this predicament?
MATT: Well, if you wanted basically to go back and say when the seeds were really started: they were started when I was a kid in the '50s, and the world began believing that the Middle East had unlimited amounts of oil that we had barely just started to find, and its costs were so inexpensive that our biggest problem was basically how do we keep the world from being flooded with too much of it. So we have some sort of diversity of supply. At the same time, we're finalizing atomic energy. There was a debate going on – and this was long before I can remember about it, I’ve just gone and read about it out of curiosity – atomic energy was going to be so free that it didn’t actually warrant creating meters, the meters were way too expensive. Just give it to people for free.
So we kind of laid a foundation of an illusion that we could basically rely on effectively very expensive energy forever, and that the cornucopia of all cornucopias was in the Middle East. What amazes me is that it would appear to me now from a lot of feedback I’ve had that until I stumbled into the curiosity of finding these technical papers, and spent 2 ½ years working on what came out last June, and my book Twilight in the Desert, nobody had actually ever questioned the whole card. We just basically assumed. And so many people assumed it. It was one of those things. There’s no reason to ask how do you know that, because everybody knows it.
And then we made another egregious assumption or mistake – we created satellite TV, and out of that we let the whole world peek on how we lived. As a result China and India and Pakistan and Bolivia said, “I’d really love to live like those people in Canada and the United States do – and Europe. That really looks neat.” So we set the seeds [where] demand is going to grow forever and obviously we’ll be able to supply it because technology is making supply easier and easier to do, and we’ve always got the Middle East. And the problem is that demand was too young and supply was too old and we were giving the energy away for free. [11:03]
JIM: Something that relates to this is I believe that a lot of economists, analysts or forecasters have missed out that by the end of the 20th Century, this energy miracle that we experienced in the latter half of the 20th Century – actually throughout the 20th Century – had become globalized at that point. So now we’re dealing with emerging economic giants such as China and India – this is something that we didn’t have to deal with, let’s say in the '81 recession.
MATT: Oh heavens no. No, you’re absolutely right. And I’ll tell you what I don’t find very amusing is how many of these name-plate economists say, “well, what we all missed was China,” because I love to remind people that I wrote a white paper in the Summer of 1997 called China’s Insatiable Energy Needs, and I predicted that by 2005 that they would basically be using 6 ½ million barrels a day of oil – and that’s exactly what they were. So, all you had to do was actually go to China and have your eyes open. [11:56]
JIM: Matt, if we were looking at the energy situation in the '50s and '60s, things looked pretty bright. Then we got a wakeup call in the '70s. Then in the '80s and '90s, the pendulum swung again to the bright side. Now, I think we’re dealing with reality again, but this time I think it’s more serious.
MATT: The wake-up call we got in the '70s was a fire drill that actually created the illusion that the only thing we have to worry about is a fire in the back office. And what I mean by that is it was basically we need to be careful if these dangerous countries in the Middle East don’t artificially hold oil off the market. And as long as they don’t artificially do that, we’ll never ever have a problem. Whereas the real problem was the fact that basically in about 20 or 30 more years, their oil fields – unless they suddenly found any more – were going to be so old and they were going to go into decline. And no one ever took the time to worry about that. We actually got the classic ‘general fighting the last war.’ [12:54]
JIM: Now, in the '80s and '90s, we experienced an almost two-decade oil depression. How did this reshape the energy landscape and how did it change our thinking? I mean we went from an era of conservation to one of over consumption: cars got bigger and got less mileage; homes got bigger and were built further away from where people worked. How did that change the landscape in the sense of not only what we did economically, but maybe does that explain some of the thinking of oil company executives today?
MATT: Well, first of all, it codified several concepts in the conventional wisdom that turned out all to be wrong. The first was that we had a new suite of technology that was going to allow us to bring oil prices down lower and lower and people could be successful at it. And the technology meant that we had to drill fewer wells, so we didn’t worry about the fact that we let our drilling rigs rust away; and we didn’t worry about the fact that almost no new people came into the industry, because somehow we were going to do it through robotics, and GPS systems, and so forth. And literally there was some whacko people – there are still some whacko people – that are very prominent speakers that talk about digitized oil fields, and GPS systems and you know, satellites and so forth, and they’re just absolutely Buck Rogers – they should become Jules Verne.
And in the meantime, [for] the oil companies the technology created decline curves that were far steeper than they had ever been before because they were basically pulling the harder crumbs out of the ground at a faster and faster rate. And we didn’t find very many things of any size. And then because we were drilling fewer wells, we basically could end up very aggressively doing reserve estimations so you could kind of plug your F&D costs to your peers so you’d get the same amount of bonus. So we really went through a decade of imagining reserve additions. Had there not been this whistleblower at Shell Oil company in February 2004 who sent this big document kit to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, we never would have had this revelation that most reserves had been made up. The whole thing turned out to be a very unfortunate two decades where we dug ourselves in a very deep hole based on just one myth after another. [15:19]
JIM: Well, you know, a lot of those myths are still with us because out of the '80s and '90s we developed some pretty strong opinions that still exist today: that demand growth would slow down, that the cost of energy would get cheaper, technology would solve the problem, and we had in reserve non-conventional energy which would become abundant and profitable.
MATT: Yup, and unfortunately non-conventional energy takes an awful lot of conventional energy used up to make it useable, so we’re turning gold into lead.
JIM: Haven’t the facts, though, disputed a lot of these assumptions and yet they still exist?
MATT: Well, you know, the problem is that there really weren’t a lot of people that really had the time and inclination to actually doggedly chase down the facts, and there were an awful lot of people that basically loved to give the same talk because they’d heard it ten times so it must be right. And what’s been going on in the last 2 to 3 years is the beginning of an enormously important debate between what are sort of euphemistically called the optimists and the pessimists. And I know most of the optimists. And I know most of the pessimists. The optimists don’t have any facts. They have some firm hunches and beliefs. And the pessimists tend to be scientists who aren’t necessarily very good communicators. People in the audience tend to want to hear good news anyway and a lot of these optimists are very humorous speakers. They make great jokes and then wise people say, “well, the real answer must be half way between.”
But I have to tell you I am very encouraged over the course of the last year by the way the media has reacted. I think the media is doing fabulous work. I think there are at least 50 times more good speakers than there were two years ago on this subject who have done their homework. I think it helped that we ended up having a seven-fold rise in oil prices to start opening people’s eyes. About 100,000 people have read my book, which I think has opened some eyes. I’ve had so many people compliment me that I’m really humbled by it, saying, “you know, whether you’re totally right or slightly off, at least we’ll never again just merrily assume that the Middle East had unlimited amounts of oil.” [17:38]
JIM: The thing that sometimes surprises me when you turn on some of the financial stations you will hear an anchor saying, “how long will these prices persist?” And it’s almost a belief that maybe the high prices and the spikes that we’ve seen especially recently, are somewhat of an aberration. Remember after Katrina when they spiked at '70, they went down the next couple of months. And every time we seem to have these spikes, they always retreat. So everybody says, “Aha, this is what will happen again.”
MATT: Yup, and the oil bears, which there’s still herds of, come out and say, “OK, I told you so.” So that’s why I’m encouraged by the amount of increase in the dialog – I’m really discouraged that we actually haven’t had anything close to a listening to the alarm ringing, let alone a wake-up call.
JIM: Well given where we are today then what are the real questions we should be asking today, versus where the focus is?
MATT: We should be asking ourselves is it wise to ignore the reality of peak oil until it’s too late to fix it? Then we should ask ourselves if we recognize the problem is either here or approaching the front door, how quickly can we basically work out some sort of a global cooperation agreement so that we really significantly change the consumption of how we use oil in the transportation markets, so we don’t end up having a really awful tipping point. Now, those are the questions we ought to be asking ourselves. [19:11]
JIM: Yet, I get the IEA book every single year, and if you take a look at the government, the EIA [or the International Energy Agency], they all assume that the energy supply will be there to meet future demand.
MATT: I know. They have accidentally become cheer leaders for peace in our time. I’ve gotten to know quite a few of these people, and sadly enough I think they actually believe what they say. I think it would maybe I guess a little bit more comforting if they know that that’s not right, but they are just paid to say that. [19:42]
JIM: You know what’ll happen, and this happens with the optimist camp, they will cite these numbers of where future demand is going to be, and future supply is going to be there as well. And somebody with that kind of authority, you know to somebody that may not be familiar with all of this, that is almost very soothing.
MATT: It’s very soothing. But again, I have to say that I might be hallucinating, but I’m winning the PR war right now.
JIM: Well, you know, the one great thing I would say is [with] books like yours – Twilight in the Desert, which is an eye-opener and if our listeners have not read this book I highly recommend you pick up a copy – there are a plethora of voices however that [say] peak oil is a distant issue, and we’ve seen them on television this week.
MATT: I know all of them, but they’ll probably actually argue that until we go over Niagara Falls. But on the other hand, you know, there are precedents of this. If you go back and look at the history of…what’s really amazing is the weekend before Pearl Harbor, World War II was basically 25% over, and there were still people passionately saying the United States will never be at war, because they didn’t want the United States to be at war, it was inconvenient.
JIM: Just as peak oil.
MATT: Yes.
JIM: But what are executives thinking? I mean, I saw the January automobile shows. I’ve seen General Motors talk about a new lineup of SUVs, and the irony of the recent spike in gas prices they were – I think it was CNBC – interviewing some consumers and here’s a guy putting gas into his SUV and he’s upset about the price.
MATT: Yes, but you know, you’ve got to remember that sticker shock is totally different than prices really being high. And it was so interesting to come back from this trip to Italy and Ireland and see that they’re basically paying close to $7 a US gallon. And they’re kind of annoyed, as we are, because they would think it ought to be $4, which it was a couple of years ago.
But again, I continue to always convert it – because it is just so easy to – back into a cup, because if you go and order coffee, tea or wine or water, you basically buy it by the cup, and when you’re paying $3.20 a gallon in the United States is 20 cents a cup. And 45 cents of the $3.20 is taxes. Can you name me anything you can buy for 20 cents a cup anymore, other than gasoline?
JIM: Nothing.
MATT: And then when you say $75 a barrel – 11 cents a cup – refiners are the only purchasers in the world that can still buy valuable things at 11 cents a cup. I was asked in Ireland, “what do you think oil should sell for?”
“Well,” I said, “for the things that you think are dear. What do you pay for Irish whiskey?” I think basically the answer is on a per barrel basis about $4,000 a barrel.
JIM: If you look at it a six-pack of Coke, it is actually more expensive than if we were to take equivalent of gasoline.
MATT: Yes, a cup of gasoline sounds so trivial, but the reality is if you have access to a passenger car, you can basically get six people in it, some stuff in the trunk, and go two miles for 20 cents. Have you ever tried to negotiate with a guy on a donkey and a cart: “will you take me and my five friends 2 miles for 20 cents.” That guy’s going to swear at you for being stupid.
JIM: Well, why don’t you give us a run down on some of the cold hard facts, and this is something I really want to get to, and you do a good job of this in Twilight, regarding reserve additions and production profiles of the major producing countries because one statistics you will hear the optimists throw out continuously, “well, we have 175 billion barrels in the Canadian tar sands.”
MATT: Yup, it’s too bad we even have reserve data, because it’s so meaningless, and it’s so unreliable, and it doesn’t tell you anything about how much a country or company can produce in the next 2 to 3 years. And any time you start commingling light sweet oil that can come out of a pressurized well bore – one well bore – at the rate of 40,000 barrels a day, or 10,000 barrels a day with heavy oil from Canada [where] it costs you $10 billion per 100,000 barrel a day production, you’re really commingling Maseratis with jalopies, and some are saying, “I have a thousand vehicles.” It’s used all the time by the optimists and they don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.
What’s really also interesting is how little data we have of any quality about how much we have left of high quality sweet oil. And the answer is most of the key crude grades are basically now very tiny in their volumes. What we’ve made it up with is basically a lesser rating quality of crude that has a higher degree of sour properties in them, and poisonous gases and is also heavier. And what we’re doing in the heavy oil is chewing through natural gas primarily as a heat source and potable water too often to create steam to melt it into basically low quality crude. And that’s where I say, “Gentlemen, we have just turned gold into lead.” [25:07]
JIM: You know it was interesting after our interview last August, and having read your book and talking about the very likelihood of peak oil being upon our front door, we saw last year that Kuwait’s Burgan field, and Mexico’s Cantarell field peaking. Aren’t these examples of the first canaries starting to sing?
MATT: The day that the Chairman of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation announced that the great Burgan complex is exhausted that’s six decades of 2 million barrels a day, I said, “that’s the first canary in the mine shaft starting to sing.” Cantarell, that’s a very serious issue for the United States. Because if Cantarell has finished, wrapped up, over its tertiary recovery program, we don’t have a term in the oil for ‘quadrutiary’ recovery. So, it’s over. And if that actually falls to anywhere nearly as low as 500,000 barrels a day by 2009, Mexico will not be exporting oil to the United States, and that puts Hugo Chavez in an unbelievably powerful catbird seat to dictate terms to us as to the conditions under which he will sell us his heavy oil. [26:21]
JIM: The frightening thing about all of this - and you’ve used several analogies about our energy gauges are broken, despite being the largest industry in the world – the energy industry – it lacks transparency, something you have argued for a long time. But most people would be surprised to learn that most petroleum stocks are mostly computer guesses.
MATT: Yes – petroleum ‘stocks’ being inventory versus equities. We don’t have a fuel gauge that basically says, “oh, we’re almost empty.”
JIM: That’s kind of scary. Let’s say if you’ve got your buddies, you have 5 or 6 people in the car and you’re going across the Arizona desert and you have no idea what your fuel gauge is saying.
MATT: Yes, it’s interesting. At various times when I’ve been speaking at fairly large groups I ask a question, “is there anybody in the audience that’s run out of gas, please raise your hand.” It’s amazing but about 75-80% of the people in the audience always raise their hand. Almost everyone has had the indignity of sooner or later forgetting to look at the gas gauge and running out of gas. And you can be driving 75 miles an hour and one second later your car stops. We have gauges, but we forget to look at them. Here we don’t have a gauge. [27:31]
JIM: That’s a real problem if you take a look at any forecast for economic growth whether you’re talking about China, India, the United States, Europe, it’s all based on increased energy consumption. So if you’re talking about everything that we need for the necessities of life whether it’s growing food or getting basic goods to the stores that all requires energy. What happens when that energy isn’t there, or you can’t get enough of what you need?
MATT: Well, what happens is basically what we need disappears. See, that’s the irony. We’ll never run out of oil but we can easily run out of food on the shelves, and cars on the street, and it doesn’t mean we’ve run out of oil. It just means that we have no more useable oil in the system. When you run out of gas in a car, it doesn’t mean there’s no gasoline left. It’s just you don’t have any gasoline in your tank. [28:24]
JIM: Do you think, given these circumstances – I mean if you take a look at energy being on the front pages, the President mentioned it in his State of the Union message and he gave a major speech today – is this a growing recognition by Washington and the politicians that this is a serious issue that’s not going away?
MATT: I certainly think it is. I think history will actually remember President Bush’s State of the Union [where he] mentioned that it is time for America to end our addiction to oil, as one of the really major turning points in the thinking process of the United States of America. I’m not saying that from a partisan standpoint. I’d say the same thing if that had been said by President Clinton. [29:07]
JIM: I want to move on to something that is very difficult to assess or even predict, and that’s an aspect of energy which is geopolitics. I can think of several flashpoints – Middle East, Nigeria, Venezuela, the Straits of Malacca – just how vulnerable are we to a sudden supply disruption?
MATT: If we had 5 or 6 or 10 million barrels a day of spare shut-in capacity, the answer is not really, not very vulnerable. But the fact that we don’t have any spare capacity [makes us vulnerable]. Now the Straits of Malacca shutting down is a showstopper. That’s 11 million barrels a day of oil flows that basically allows oil to go from the Middle East and Africa into the Eastern Asian markets. If MEND [is successful], which is the movement to emancipate the Nigerian Delta, they’ve already shut in 650,000 barrels a day of Nigerian oil, and they’re going for all of Exxon’s next. They’ve publicly announced that. Shutting 2 million barrels a day of Nigerian oil that’s really high quality, light oil and it’s a very short distance by tanker from the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, so that’s another enormous vulnerability. If Mr. Chavez realizes that Cantarell really is now in decline and he announces, “I just don’t quite like the rich people in the United States. I’m willing to supply the US with oil, but only if they can certify that they’ve given it to the poor.” He’d become so popular throughout Latin America you couldn’t believe it. These aren’t all kind of Stephen King novel events. [30:43]
JIM: I’m never surprised when I turn on the TV. In fact I was reading – trying to think of the gentleman’s book on oil – and he was talking about in the chapter an attack on the Saudi oil facilities in Abqaiq, and the next morning I get up and I turn on the TV and there it is on the news.
MATT: It’s a very vulnerable facility. And what’s interesting is the good news is they killed the people in the cars, but two of the security guards also got killed. And the fact that they apparently breached the first gate was interesting.
JIM: Each kind of event it seems like they’re getting closer and closer.
MATT: Again, let me tell you an event that would be not terribly difficult for some whacko person to pull off, take a pick up truck and fill it with the same sort of energy that the guys did in Oklahoma City, and park it under the Alyeska pipeline. We have so many fragile choke points today that any of them now matter because we don’t have any spare capacity. [31:48]
JIM: Well, given this, how would you describe where we are today in terms of peak oil and gas? Is it approaching the front door, knocking at the world’s door, or is it now inside the house?
MATT: I think now the more I’ve had a lot of time to get educated about this issue, the closer you get to approaching this is the highest we can produce, the more dangerous it is to produce at that rate. And the safest thing to do is lower your rate of production so you actually don’t have a precipitous decline on the other side. On that standard, I would basically say that peak oil is now inside the front room. And peak natural gas is right behind it and is far more serious and will decline faster than oil because gas is a vapor. [32:32]
JIM: Don’t we have a problem of what remains is in stranded areas? In other words, the United States has gotten a lot of its gas through pipelines from the Gulf of Mexico through imports from Canada. But if we were to continue, we would need to liquefy it, put it in a special ship, and create a special loading dock to receive it (or LNG terminals) and we don’t have enough of them.
MATT: Well, most of the stranded gas we have in the world is of the same quality as the almost unlimited amounts of oil in the Middle East – it’s an illusion. It has not yet been discovered, and we should basically not be calling undiscovered gas a usable energy source. You can call it a theoretical energy source, but until you actually drill wells and drill a lot of appraisal wells and then core the wells so you know what the rock properties are, you have no earthly idea of whether you have usable energy or not.
JIM: And yet here in Southern California we’re building an LNG terminal south of us at the border which is the only place you can build them in California.
MATT: It’s a field of dreams: build me a stadium and the team will be there.
JIM: I want to come back to your book Twilight in the Desert where you talk about a lot of the larger producers have all peaked, recent evidence with Mexico and Cantarell, even Kuwait with Burgan. In your research in Twilight you’re talking about this approaching peak, it seems like everybody – whether you’re looking at the EIA or the IEA – looks towards Saudi Arabia, and yet I don’t know maybe they believe this themselves that they’re going out and say, “well, we’re going to invest this much, and we’re going to take our production up to a certain level,” but I get from reading Twilight you doubt if that’s possible.
MATT: Well, first of all, it is not possible. I’ve had the luxury now of an enormous amount of feedback, including some really senior people within Saudi Aramco that have had the guts to say, “I really love reading your book, you accurately described the unbelievable challenges we’re dealing with.” I think part of the problem that some people there have is they’ve heard for so many years through our experts that they can produce 25 million barrels a day, that they say, “Pssht, sure we can, everybody has told us that.” [34:47]
JIM: Whether they can do that and taking a look at their difficulties, but these are some serious assumptions I think that…
MATT: There are some unbelievable assumptions. When you have gentlemen like Dr. Sadad al-Husseini who has his PhD from Brown University, and he was Executive Vice-President of Saudi Aramco in charge of E&P, and Dr al-Husseini and I have been on two programs together in England, and he’s been quoted in the English papers as saying the West is deluded to rely on Saudi oil. He’s basically said, “over 12 million barrels a day, it just isn’t in the cards.” And he was known in the '90s as the brains of Saudi Aramco, and he’s a fabulous human being. [35:30]
JIM: Let’s go to the optimists’ arguments for a minute and just show how serious this is. I wonder Matt if you would give us a quick rundown of the alternatives: tar sands; nuclear power; wind; solar; clean coal; and biofuels – which are in the headlines.
MATT: The first thing that the optimists rely on is that we always have had reserve appreciation, and so fields over time always get bigger. That happened 50 years ago. There’s not a scrap of data to support that concept for the last 25 years. It’s just wrong. The second concept is embrace technology. All you have to do is be a believer in technology. I continue to remind people that all the oil field technology we’re talking about was being invented in the early '70s when our firm started business. It took a decade to invent it, it took a decade to commercialize it, and it took 15 years to spread it around the world and the blackboard’s bare. There is no more technology of any significance that anybody is working on. So then you get into: look at all the unconventional oil we have that is now commercial. You can make money – if you’ve already paid for your facility and written it off – on oil sands, but oil sands are very different from tar sands. The oil sands can be strip mined and they’re still extremely energy intensive, but tar sands need to have these deep mine shafts of steam put in to melt the [tar] – it’s really basically bitumen, a recycle of La Brea tar pits – you chew up such an intensive amount of energy. And what they’re talking about is undiscovered natural gas in Northern Alberta, and potable river water from the Athabasca River, that to use either one as a steam source to create low quality oil is a crime.
And then they basically talk about – assume – all this stuff we’re basically going to discover, and I say, “you know, give me a break, Cantarell in Mexico was discovered in 1975 and 1976, that’s the last giant oil field we’ve ever found. Prudhoe Bay, the North Sea, and Western Siberia were all discovered in 1968, and that’s the last time we found a large or medium onshore oil field in the Middle East.” 1968 was a long time ago. [37:44]
JIM: What about, for example, Mexico announcing that they discovered a giant oil field, though we don’t know much about it.
MATT: They don’t know much about it because there’s been one well drilled and they haven’t yet cored it. You see until you core a well -- which is really basically a very technically tricky process of going down to the level of the earth where you think the oil rocks are productive, and literally cutting a core, and retrieving it and sending it to a laboratory, and saying let’s test the porosity, let’s test the permeability, you don’t know anything about the reservoir rocks and whether they will flow oil or not. Until you flow test the oil, you know nothing about whether it’s highly free flowing or very, very syrupy molasses. So, drilling a well is an important first step, but until you well test and core, you’re basically just guessing. [38:44]
JIM: What about biofuels?
MATT: There are probably some biofuels that are really good potential solutions, but any biofuel that has to be planted every year is by definition taking a lot of nutrients out of the soil. Unless you’re using very, very cheap labor, you’re using a lot of energy in your tractors and a lot of energy in your fertilizer. Now take sugarcane-based ethanol in Brazil for instance. They basically don’t uproot the cane. They have cheap labor with machetes that hack it, so that’s actually pretty energy-intensive. The work that’s being done on switch grass, which is this fabulous grass we sort of plowed up in most parts of the Midwest that covered the Great Plains and at one time fed 100 million buffalo, as long as you’re not grazing it with buffalo, it grows between 6 and 8 feet in the peak of the season. You cut it with hay machinery, so it regrows the next spring. There’s a lot of promise in those types of fuels. But what we’re doing is we’re promoting things basically for the sake of subsidies and being callously ignorant of the energy intensity. What we can’t afford the luxury of is creating a whole new suite of energy products that are net energy losers. [39:55]
JIM: How would you describe corn ethanol?
MATT: Net energy loser – big time.
JIM: And yet that’s what we just passed and that’s the direction we seem to be going in.
MATT: Yes, and the corn lobby is a very powerful lobby. They love the subsidy, but I think it’s time to kind of get off that stuff.
JIM: Given where we are and what you know, what should we be doing now?
MATT: Getting as educated as can be on how serious these issues are. Getting as educated as can be on how inexpensive energy still is. Start thinking through all the ways we can rapidly reduce the intensity of how we use oil and gas, so that we make sure we don’t basically waste it unnecessarily. Go on an R&D program the likes of which we’ve never done to create some new forms of energy. But I think that won’t happen soon enough.
So we really have to adopt a big conservation plan: liberating people to work wherever they want to, and when they want to, and pay by productivity, could be one of the really great sort of social revolution things that we do in the next 5 years and basically eliminate all the people in places like California and Texas, for instance, who are spending upwards of 4 hours a day crawling to work in traffic and crawling home so they’re mad when they get to work, and they’re mad when they get home, and they were mad when oil was free. Eliminating our kind of compulsive obsession with having exotic food from all around the world in our supermarkets every place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year – it’s too energy intensive. Growing stuff at home and canning it. And what we really need to do is ultimately reverse this concept of globalization and go back to actually living in what are euphemistically called villages close to where we work, which can be downtown, but it’s just not 3 hours commute. [41:42]
JIM: What about the rail system?
MATT: The rail system needs to be totally overhauled and totally rebuilt, and use the rail system to ship goods and people but in shipping goods only do it as far as you can ship goods to water, and then get goods on marine based transportation, barges or vessels, and use our water system as the way we basically deliver goods as close to where the kind of end point is – sort of like Federal Express does. And we can actually do all of this stuff. I mean if we applied this on a global basis with the same intensity as we had to build the war machine for World War II, we could get this done in 5 to 7 years. [42:24]
JIM: Do you think it’s going to take a crisis to launch that?
MATT: Sure it is. Go back again to where we started. If Katrina and Rita weren’t even looked at as they were flashing yellow lights, it’s going to take a crisis.
JIM: That’s what I fear, Matt. I fear we’re heading into this perfect energy storm because it’s like we’re sitting on the shore, and the sky looks blue, the winds are picking up but about 10 to 15 miles offshore, beyond sight, there’s a hurricane.
MATT: At least there are a lot more people in serious places that are starting to think through than there were about by a huge measure a year ago. But to galvanize the whole system, I think we’re going to have to have some form of an energy 9/11.
JIM: Any final thoughts for our listeners? Let’s say if there’s some skeptics in the crowd because you know we hear stories about abiotic oil, and there’s just a naturally gooey center in the middle of the Earth that replenishes every well in the world, I can’t help but think in terms of that argument that if you were ExxonMobil sitting on that cash that if there was a gooey spot in the earth somewhere, you would be going after it.
MATT: If the abiotic oil theory worked, why didn’t it ever refill any of our depleted oil fields? I think that we have basically created a fool’s paradise, and it’s really time for the fools to wake up and get real because this is actually something that could really destroy our lives, and not our kids’ lives, but our lives. But it doesn’t have to happen that way. [43:53]
JIM: It goes back to something you said mid-way in our conversation: it’s not at the front door, it’s inside the house. Matt, your book Twilight in the Desert did a lot to open people’s eyes. When’s it coming out in paperback?
MATT: In about a month, and also exciting for me is in about 2 months, it comes out in Chinese.
JIM: And the 100,000 copies that have sold globally, which is incredible, what are the sales overseas, has it been as popular there?
MATT: I don’t really know, all I can tell you is on Friday afternoon and I went into my favorite bookstore in London Hatchards, and I couldn’t believe as I walked up the stairs to see a ‘hot items’ [list] with Twilight in the Desert at the top, so I introduced myself to the guy at the desk, and he said, “come up stairs and sign the ten copies we have on the shelves,” and we got there and they were gone, and he’d just filled the shelves up on Thursday afternoon. He said, “we’re having people come in and buy this book five at a time. I can’t believe you wrote it.” You know, for a book that came out in the middle of last June, it’s pretty good news to me. Wiley has decided they’re going to continue publishing the hardback even though usually when the paperback comes out publishers sort of wind up the printing effort on the hardback. [45:06]
JIM: All I can say to my listeners is if you want to get educated, Matt’s book is certainly one of the top of the list because it opens up your eyes whenever you hear about oil being bountiful in the Middle East. Matt, I know you’re a busy person and you have to get off, but I want to thank you as always for giving us a good deal of your time and joining us on the Financial Sense Newshour.
MATT: Well, thank you for the opportunity for being on your program. I enjoyed the conversation last Fall, and I enjoyed it again today.
JIM: Alright, and all the best to you Sir, and may you sell another 100,000 copies.
Friday, May 05, 2006
An Alert Unlike Any Other
A nuclear waste vault in New Mexico will long outlive our society. Experts are working on elaborate ways to warn future civilizations.
By Charles Piller, Times Staff Writer
May 3, 2006
CARLSBAD, N.M. — Roger Nelson has a simple and unequivocal message for the people of the year 12006: Don't dig here.
As chief scientist of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Nelson oversees a cavernous salt mine that is the first geological lockbox for the "fiendishly toxic" detritus of nuclear weapons production: chemical sludge, lab gear and filters laced with tons of radioactive plutonium.
Nearly half a mile underground, workers push waste drums into crystalline labyrinths that seem as remote as the moon. A faint salty haze glows in powdery beams from miners' headlamps and settles on the lips like a desert kiss. Computer projections predict that within 1,000 years the ceilings and walls will collapse in a crushing embrace that seals the plutonium in place.
But plutonium remains deadly for 250 times that long — an unsettling reminder that some of today's hazards will outlast the civilizations that created them. The "forever problem," unique to the modern technological age, has made crafting the user manual for this toxic tomb the final daunting task in an already monumental project. The result is a gargantuan system that borrows elements equally from Stonehenge and "Star Trek."
Communicating danger may seem relatively straightforward, but countless human efforts to bridge the ages have failed as societies fall, languages die and words once poetic or portentous become the indecipherable marks of a long-forgotten scribbler.
To future generations, warnings about Nelson's dump may seem as impenetrable as the 600-year-old "Canterbury Tales" are for all but a few scholars today.
"No culture has ever tried, self-consciously and scientifically, to design a symbol that would last 10,000 years and still be intelligible," said David B. Givens, an anthropologist who helped plan the nuclear-site warnings. "And even if we succeed, would the message be believed?"
The Energy Department predicted such a problem when it began planning for the $9-billion waste dump, dubbed WIPP, in 1974 and for a similar repository in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas. That site has not yet been opened. Eventually it will store highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants as well as high-level waste from the weapons program.
Trying to communicate across 500 generations posed an unprecedented challenge of linguistics, semiotics and materials science, so the government first asked scientists, futurists and historians to envision what the far-distant future might be like.
Their report combines dry analysis and projections worthy of sci-fi disaster films, including massive climate change and feminist corporations that disbelieve WIPP warnings because they were written by men. Civilization is so interdependent and fragile, one panelist grimly noted, "that any massive global catastrophe might lead to reversion to at least a preindustrial era." Greed or desperation could give rise to legends that WIPP holds buried treasure — apparently confirmed by surface warnings to keep out.
In a sense, they're right. Oil and gas deposits lie thousands of feet below the plant. In 100 or 5,000 years, an energy-poor government, company or gasoline-addicted tribe in a ruined society, like those depicted in the film "The Road Warrior," could adopt a "drill first, ask questions later" policy — piercing the repository and pulling death to the surface.
Others predicted the invention of self-guided robotic "mole miners" that would penetrate the site from the side or below. In a scenario set in the year 11991, robotic slaves are infected with a computer virus that compels them to override their safety programming as they compulsively drill and construct mine shafts.
Opportunities for WIPP to fail, the experts agreed, are limited only by the imagination.
The government formed a separate panel of scientists, linguists and artists to create a warning scheme to counter the pessimistic projections. That group immediately rejected digital or paper records — only a solution cast in stone could hope to solve a problem for the ages.
If Egyptian pyramids have lasted more than 5,000 years, today's monuments should fare better — if built from prosaic materials, such as ultra-hard concrete. Scavengers stripped the pyramids bare for their once-shimmering marble skins.
The trefoil symbol for radioactive material might seem a natural alternative to text, but experts doubt that it will be understood by future societies any better than today's English. Consider the swastika, first used on pottery by European tribes in 4000 BC. It was adopted by ancient Troy and later became a holy icon of Hinduism. When the Nazis claimed it, the symbol became widely reviled.
The panelists also considered the plaque on the 1972 Pioneer space probe, now headed for deep space. It pictures a nude man and woman, a schematic drawing of the craft escaping our solar system and a basic interstellar map. They soon rejected it as a model, said Jon Lomberg, an artist who designed the plaque with the late astronomer Carl Sagan.
"You'd think it would be easier to communicate with humans" than extraterrestrials, he said. "But the [Pioneer] spacecraft will never land, so it's only going to be found by some highly developed technological culture. All we can guess about the future inhabitants of the area near WIPP is that they are human — unless they are cyborgs…. Once you have people with augmented brains or genetically engineered minds with enhanced perceptions, you can't be sure how human they will be."
There are at least two universally understood pictographic forms. The human stick figure has survived nearly unchanged from Stone Age cave drawings to the doors of modern public restrooms. And the sequential panel, or comic strip, was developed independently by ancient Egyptians, American Indians and medieval Japanese.
They also are far from foolproof. The South Africa Chamber of Mines learned this when it used a simple picture sequence to train illiterate miners to clear rocks from mine tracks. Instead of improving, the rock problem worsened.
"Miners were indeed reading the message, but from right to left," said Lomberg, a former WIPP advisor. "They obligingly dumped their rocks on the tracks."
Nelson considers such concerns far-fetched, citing 30,000-year-old cave drawings.
"I understand those cave drawings and I don't speak Neanderthal…. He's killing a bison, 'bison — food!' I can do pictographs just as well," he said. "I can convey an absolute sense of danger."
Yet the same Stone Age caves contain markings and handprints whose meaning remains obscure.
"The scribbles, we have no idea what they are…. The handprints — is that the artist's signature?" Lomberg said. "We don't know. Of course the big difference is that these were not intended as messages to the future — so far as we can tell."
With so many ways to fail, WIPP's planners opted for the classic American approach: Think big and leave no stone unturned. The plan will take more than a century to implement.
To grasp the scale of the warnings, start with the Great Pyramid in Egypt, built from more than 6.5 million tons of stone covering 13 acres. Multiply that mass by five, and you have the first warning layer: a 98-foot-wide, 33-foot-tall, 2-mile-long berm surrounding the site. That's just to get the attention of anyone who happens by.
"Size equates with importance. The bigger the animal the more that animal is to be reckoned with," Givens said.
Powerful magnets and radar reflectors would be buried inside the berm so that remote sensors could recognize the site as purposefully and elaborately designed.
It would be surrounded by 48 granite or concrete markers, 32 outside the berm and 16 inside, each 25 feet high and weighing 105 tons, engraved with warnings in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic and Navajo, with room for future discoverers to add warnings in contemporary languages. Pictures would denote buried hazards and human faces of horror and revulsion.
The same symbols would be printed on metal, plastic and ceramic disks with abrasion-resistant coatings, 9 inches in diameter, that would be buried just below the surface.
Three information rooms would archive detailed drawings of WIPP's chambers and the physics of its hazards on stone tablets. They would also provide a world map showing all other known waste repositories and a star chart to calculate the year the site was sealed.
One such room would stand in the center of the site. Another would be buried inside the berm, its only entrance a 2-foot hole to inhibit theft of the tablets, sealed with a 1,600-pound stone plug. The third room would be off site — perhaps inside the nearby Carlsbad Caverns.
The final thing WIPP needs is a kind of Rosetta stone, a pictorial dictionary to aid in translation.
The markers will take decades to build and test, to help ensure they stand the test of time. But there's no hurry. WIPP won't be full until 2033. It would then be guarded by the Energy Department for 100 years until it is abandoned; no one who designed the markers would be alive to see them succeed for even a single day.
Inspired by so long a view, one of the site's expert panels, in an epigraph to its report, quoted Rabbi Tarfon, a Jewish sage who lived 1,900 years ago:
"You are not obliged to finish the task, nor are you released from undertaking it."
Once the vault is locked, some of WIPP's advisors want the site left unmarked because any warnings would draw only more attention, they say. Warnings, they argue, would be misunderstood or dismissed, the same way ancient grave robbers ignored curses inscribed on the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs to seize the riches inside.
Leave it bare, they contend, and the site will melt unseen into the harsh New Mexico desert.
"Any monument would become a tourist attraction," said Gregory Benford, a UC Irvine physicist and former WIPP advisor. "People come; they need hotels. Hotels need water. They drill for water and break into the vault. 'No marker' is a strategy, but people regard it as immoral."
Such views reflect WIPP's one certainty: No one knows what will happen far in the future.
"I have to assume that the divine creator is going to take care of most of this stuff," said Steve Casey, the WIPP engineer charged with overseeing construction of the warning system. "No matter what confounded thing we come up with, all it takes is one catastrophic event and it's gone."
That so much time and effort are spent even thinking about how to warn future generations reflects a significant shift in nuclear attitudes. The past still can be glimpsed a short drive from WIPP at a site where an atomic warhead was detonated 1,151 feet underground in 1961.
Two corroded plaques glued to a 4-foot concrete slab commemorate the test, dubbed Project Gnome. The monument has been nudged several yards over the decades by cattle that use it as a rubbing post. Spent rifle shells crunch underfoot; the pockmarked shrine is favored by locals for target practice.
A third plaque was pried off, perhaps as a souvenir. According to earlier visitors, it read, in plain English, "This site will remain dangerous for 24,000 years."
A nuclear waste vault in New Mexico will long outlive our society. Experts are working on elaborate ways to warn future civilizations.
By Charles Piller, Times Staff Writer
May 3, 2006
CARLSBAD, N.M. — Roger Nelson has a simple and unequivocal message for the people of the year 12006: Don't dig here.
As chief scientist of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Nelson oversees a cavernous salt mine that is the first geological lockbox for the "fiendishly toxic" detritus of nuclear weapons production: chemical sludge, lab gear and filters laced with tons of radioactive plutonium.
Nearly half a mile underground, workers push waste drums into crystalline labyrinths that seem as remote as the moon. A faint salty haze glows in powdery beams from miners' headlamps and settles on the lips like a desert kiss. Computer projections predict that within 1,000 years the ceilings and walls will collapse in a crushing embrace that seals the plutonium in place.
But plutonium remains deadly for 250 times that long — an unsettling reminder that some of today's hazards will outlast the civilizations that created them. The "forever problem," unique to the modern technological age, has made crafting the user manual for this toxic tomb the final daunting task in an already monumental project. The result is a gargantuan system that borrows elements equally from Stonehenge and "Star Trek."
Communicating danger may seem relatively straightforward, but countless human efforts to bridge the ages have failed as societies fall, languages die and words once poetic or portentous become the indecipherable marks of a long-forgotten scribbler.
To future generations, warnings about Nelson's dump may seem as impenetrable as the 600-year-old "Canterbury Tales" are for all but a few scholars today.
"No culture has ever tried, self-consciously and scientifically, to design a symbol that would last 10,000 years and still be intelligible," said David B. Givens, an anthropologist who helped plan the nuclear-site warnings. "And even if we succeed, would the message be believed?"
The Energy Department predicted such a problem when it began planning for the $9-billion waste dump, dubbed WIPP, in 1974 and for a similar repository in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas. That site has not yet been opened. Eventually it will store highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants as well as high-level waste from the weapons program.
Trying to communicate across 500 generations posed an unprecedented challenge of linguistics, semiotics and materials science, so the government first asked scientists, futurists and historians to envision what the far-distant future might be like.
Their report combines dry analysis and projections worthy of sci-fi disaster films, including massive climate change and feminist corporations that disbelieve WIPP warnings because they were written by men. Civilization is so interdependent and fragile, one panelist grimly noted, "that any massive global catastrophe might lead to reversion to at least a preindustrial era." Greed or desperation could give rise to legends that WIPP holds buried treasure — apparently confirmed by surface warnings to keep out.
In a sense, they're right. Oil and gas deposits lie thousands of feet below the plant. In 100 or 5,000 years, an energy-poor government, company or gasoline-addicted tribe in a ruined society, like those depicted in the film "The Road Warrior," could adopt a "drill first, ask questions later" policy — piercing the repository and pulling death to the surface.
Others predicted the invention of self-guided robotic "mole miners" that would penetrate the site from the side or below. In a scenario set in the year 11991, robotic slaves are infected with a computer virus that compels them to override their safety programming as they compulsively drill and construct mine shafts.
Opportunities for WIPP to fail, the experts agreed, are limited only by the imagination.
The government formed a separate panel of scientists, linguists and artists to create a warning scheme to counter the pessimistic projections. That group immediately rejected digital or paper records — only a solution cast in stone could hope to solve a problem for the ages.
If Egyptian pyramids have lasted more than 5,000 years, today's monuments should fare better — if built from prosaic materials, such as ultra-hard concrete. Scavengers stripped the pyramids bare for their once-shimmering marble skins.
The trefoil symbol for radioactive material might seem a natural alternative to text, but experts doubt that it will be understood by future societies any better than today's English. Consider the swastika, first used on pottery by European tribes in 4000 BC. It was adopted by ancient Troy and later became a holy icon of Hinduism. When the Nazis claimed it, the symbol became widely reviled.
The panelists also considered the plaque on the 1972 Pioneer space probe, now headed for deep space. It pictures a nude man and woman, a schematic drawing of the craft escaping our solar system and a basic interstellar map. They soon rejected it as a model, said Jon Lomberg, an artist who designed the plaque with the late astronomer Carl Sagan.
"You'd think it would be easier to communicate with humans" than extraterrestrials, he said. "But the [Pioneer] spacecraft will never land, so it's only going to be found by some highly developed technological culture. All we can guess about the future inhabitants of the area near WIPP is that they are human — unless they are cyborgs…. Once you have people with augmented brains or genetically engineered minds with enhanced perceptions, you can't be sure how human they will be."
There are at least two universally understood pictographic forms. The human stick figure has survived nearly unchanged from Stone Age cave drawings to the doors of modern public restrooms. And the sequential panel, or comic strip, was developed independently by ancient Egyptians, American Indians and medieval Japanese.
They also are far from foolproof. The South Africa Chamber of Mines learned this when it used a simple picture sequence to train illiterate miners to clear rocks from mine tracks. Instead of improving, the rock problem worsened.
"Miners were indeed reading the message, but from right to left," said Lomberg, a former WIPP advisor. "They obligingly dumped their rocks on the tracks."
Nelson considers such concerns far-fetched, citing 30,000-year-old cave drawings.
"I understand those cave drawings and I don't speak Neanderthal…. He's killing a bison, 'bison — food!' I can do pictographs just as well," he said. "I can convey an absolute sense of danger."
Yet the same Stone Age caves contain markings and handprints whose meaning remains obscure.
"The scribbles, we have no idea what they are…. The handprints — is that the artist's signature?" Lomberg said. "We don't know. Of course the big difference is that these were not intended as messages to the future — so far as we can tell."
With so many ways to fail, WIPP's planners opted for the classic American approach: Think big and leave no stone unturned. The plan will take more than a century to implement.
To grasp the scale of the warnings, start with the Great Pyramid in Egypt, built from more than 6.5 million tons of stone covering 13 acres. Multiply that mass by five, and you have the first warning layer: a 98-foot-wide, 33-foot-tall, 2-mile-long berm surrounding the site. That's just to get the attention of anyone who happens by.
"Size equates with importance. The bigger the animal the more that animal is to be reckoned with," Givens said.
Powerful magnets and radar reflectors would be buried inside the berm so that remote sensors could recognize the site as purposefully and elaborately designed.
It would be surrounded by 48 granite or concrete markers, 32 outside the berm and 16 inside, each 25 feet high and weighing 105 tons, engraved with warnings in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic and Navajo, with room for future discoverers to add warnings in contemporary languages. Pictures would denote buried hazards and human faces of horror and revulsion.
The same symbols would be printed on metal, plastic and ceramic disks with abrasion-resistant coatings, 9 inches in diameter, that would be buried just below the surface.
Three information rooms would archive detailed drawings of WIPP's chambers and the physics of its hazards on stone tablets. They would also provide a world map showing all other known waste repositories and a star chart to calculate the year the site was sealed.
One such room would stand in the center of the site. Another would be buried inside the berm, its only entrance a 2-foot hole to inhibit theft of the tablets, sealed with a 1,600-pound stone plug. The third room would be off site — perhaps inside the nearby Carlsbad Caverns.
The final thing WIPP needs is a kind of Rosetta stone, a pictorial dictionary to aid in translation.
The markers will take decades to build and test, to help ensure they stand the test of time. But there's no hurry. WIPP won't be full until 2033. It would then be guarded by the Energy Department for 100 years until it is abandoned; no one who designed the markers would be alive to see them succeed for even a single day.
Inspired by so long a view, one of the site's expert panels, in an epigraph to its report, quoted Rabbi Tarfon, a Jewish sage who lived 1,900 years ago:
"You are not obliged to finish the task, nor are you released from undertaking it."
Once the vault is locked, some of WIPP's advisors want the site left unmarked because any warnings would draw only more attention, they say. Warnings, they argue, would be misunderstood or dismissed, the same way ancient grave robbers ignored curses inscribed on the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs to seize the riches inside.
Leave it bare, they contend, and the site will melt unseen into the harsh New Mexico desert.
"Any monument would become a tourist attraction," said Gregory Benford, a UC Irvine physicist and former WIPP advisor. "People come; they need hotels. Hotels need water. They drill for water and break into the vault. 'No marker' is a strategy, but people regard it as immoral."
Such views reflect WIPP's one certainty: No one knows what will happen far in the future.
"I have to assume that the divine creator is going to take care of most of this stuff," said Steve Casey, the WIPP engineer charged with overseeing construction of the warning system. "No matter what confounded thing we come up with, all it takes is one catastrophic event and it's gone."
That so much time and effort are spent even thinking about how to warn future generations reflects a significant shift in nuclear attitudes. The past still can be glimpsed a short drive from WIPP at a site where an atomic warhead was detonated 1,151 feet underground in 1961.
Two corroded plaques glued to a 4-foot concrete slab commemorate the test, dubbed Project Gnome. The monument has been nudged several yards over the decades by cattle that use it as a rubbing post. Spent rifle shells crunch underfoot; the pockmarked shrine is favored by locals for target practice.
A third plaque was pried off, perhaps as a souvenir. According to earlier visitors, it read, in plain English, "This site will remain dangerous for 24,000 years."
The Energy Wars
The rise of a new global energy elite means high oil and gas prices are here to stay.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 6:55 p.m. ET May 3, 2006
May 3, 2006 - It is a mantra of the globalization crowd. In today’s global economy, we are told, all that really matters is which country produces the best brains and skills. The world is flat, after all. The playing field is leveled. Wrong, wrong and wrong. What also matters, we are learning, is who controls the world's energy resources. Evo Morales's abrupt decision earlier this week to nationalize Bolivia's natural-gas industry was only the latest worrisome move in a long-term trend. Morales, a leftist elected president last December, was apparently influenced by a meeting he had in Havana last Saturday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who's rocketed to international prominence by doing much the same thing to his country's oil industry. President Chavez, sitting atop his growing pile of petrodollars, has gleefully thumbed his nose at Washington’s efforts to rein him in. Similarly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is defiantly enriching uranium and sneering at Western threats of sanctions. And he obviously thinks he can, perhaps because no one is threatening to cut off Iran's oil exports as part of the forthcoming sanctions plan.
The would-be czar of this new global energy elite is Vladimir Putin. Having spent the better part of his six years in office wresting control of his nation's vast oil and gas resources, the Russian president is now playing a brass-knuckle game of power politics. When Putin partially cut off gas supplies to Ukraine and therefore to Western Europe in the first three days of the year—mainly to bully Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko into taking a lower price—the European Union went into a state of near panic. According to the Energy Charter Secretariat in Brussels, by 2020 the Western Europeans are expected to get half their gas from Russia, which commands 28 percent of world gas reserves, more than any country in the world. Suddenly the Europeans realized there weren’t that many alternative suppliers. Putin’s Kremlin-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom, has hired German Chancellor Angela Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, as a consultant. Gazprom deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev admitted at an economic forum earlier this month that even Britain’s flagship utility, Centrica, should be considered a potential takeover target. "With our present financial strength, it is very difficult to find a company which is not on our watch list," he said.
What does all this geostrategic strutting have to do with soaring prices at the gas pump? For one thing, the uncertainty created by Iran, Iraq and Venezuela has added a $10-$20 risk premium to the price of oil per barrel, according to Wall Street analysts. The politics of energy also doesn't bode well for future prices, as U.S. Secretary of Energy Sam Bodman seemed to suggest last weekend when he said Americans might have to get used to paying $3-plus per gallon for gasoline.
Today, oil and gas experts around the world are growing alarmed not just at future scarcity—the idea that the world may have hit “peak oil” seems to be taking hold—but at who's in control of the precious stuff. As demand for energy explodes worldwide, there is less of it available and less exploration for it. That is partly because of a dropoff in investment created by the decline in oil prices in the '90s. But it is also because multinational corporations like ExxonMobil (despite its record profits) now own just 6 percent of supplies, versus a whopping 77 percent that's now owned by state-owned entities, according to the Petroleum Finance Corp., a Washington-based consulting group. State control guarantees less efficiency in the exploration for oil, and in the extraction and refinement of fuel. Further, these state-owned companies do not divulge how much they really own, or what the production and exploration numbers are. These have become the new state secrets.
Quietly an understanding of this power shift in the world is growing in Washington, as well. The price shock after Hurricane Katrina, especially—not to mention the plummeting poll numbers that followed for Bush—led administration officials to understand just how fragile U.S. economic security has become because of energy. Nothing quite like it has happened since the 1973 OPEC embargo. Administration sources say the Katrina effect, as well as concern over moves by Chavez, were mainly behind Bush's surprising call for an end to "America's oil addiction" in his State of the Union address last January. At the same time, U.S. officials have come to realize that there is deep anger and enmity in the Kremlin against the United States (particularly over U.S. efforts to win Ukraine and Georgia to the West), and that Putin has his own agenda. One example: even as Moscow has joined the Western effort to confront Tehran over its nuclear program, Russia and Iran are taking a unified stand in resisting a U.S. effort to build a trans-Caspian pipeline that would reroute gas out of the Russian system to Baku, Azerbaijan.
Putin has long been nursing ambitions of using Russia's vast oil and gas supplies as an instrument of power. In the mid '90s, after 15 years in the KGB, Putin went back to school, attending the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. He wrote a dissertation titled "Toward a Russian Transnational Energy Company." The topic: how to use energy resources for grand strategic planning. There is reason to believe that Putin's highly publicized confrontation with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the defunct Yukos—the last of the big private energy concerns in Russia—was about much more than wresting political power from the so-called oligarchs, former apparatchiks who gained control of Russia’s resources after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Putin is not known to be personally corrupt, or even particularly power-hungry. What he is hungry for—and indeed has been since he was elected in 2000—is a restoration of Russia's power and influence. Some observers believe that Putin's trumped-up arrest of Khodorkovsky—who will be spending the next few years in a Siberian labor camp—was mainly about taking control of the energy sector, rather than edging aside a political rival.
It is tempting to say that oil and gas have become the new strategic weapons of the 21st century. But in one crucial respect that is not true. As Putin discovered from his aborted effort to cut off Ukraine’s gas—and as even Ahmadinejad is learning—when you threaten to cut off your customers, you only cut off your own nose. You have to sell oil to someone; otherwise crude is just black muck. Where the control of energy counts is in accumulating wealth, and therefore power and influence. As former U.S. under secretary of State Marc Grossman says, "The question is what are they doing with the money."
The Bush administration may think it has one trump card in Iraq. U.S. interests obviously lie with the vast proven and potential Iraqi oil fields, said to be the world's largest. The Iraqi oil ministry has signed about 40 memorandums of understanding, many with U.S. companies, according to industry sources. Under them, the majors such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips are giving technical advice "free" to the ministry (a typical get-in-the-door strategy for the industry). Challenged at a congressional hearing in March, CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid was frank in suggesting that, while oil was not the reason America went to war, it may provide a critical reason for staying. "The United States and its allies have a vital interest in the oil-rich region," Abizaid said. "Ultimately it comes down to the free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our own nation and everybody else in the world depend."
But after three years of explosive anger against the U.S. occupation, it would be foolish to think that the Iraqi government, too, won’t catch the nationalist bug that’s spreading worldwide, in what appears to be an outgrowth of both antiglobalization sentiments and anti-Americanism. “I think the likelihood is high that American companies will have some significant position in Iraq,” says J. Robinson West, head of Petroleum Finance Corp. “On the other hand I think it’s highly unlikely that the petroleum sector will be dominated by American companies. We really didn't go to war over oil, and I think at this late date we don't want to make it look like we did.” ExxonMobil spokesman Russ Roberts adds, "The Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people. If the Iraqi people determine that they want the help of international oil companies in developing their resources, then ExxonMobil would certainly be interested in participating."
What does it all mean? "Welcome to the age of energy insecurity," says West, a former Reagan administration official (and friend of Dick Cheney's, the man who once dismissed energy conservation as a "personal virtue"). "Worldwide production will peak. The result will be skyrocketing prices, with a huge, sustained economic shock. Jobs will be lost. Without action, the crisis will certainly bring energy rivalries, if not energy wars. Vast wealth will be shifted, probably away from the U.S. For the last 20 years, U.S. policy has discouraged production and encouraged consumption. If we dither any more, we will pay a terrible price, the economic equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Katrina was Category 4."
Washington appears as helpless in preparing for this crisis as it did in anticipating Hurricane Katrina. As we have seen in recent weeks, Congress is still dithering over such silly proposals as a $100 rebate to gasoline customers. But Republican leaders are balking at sponsoring proposals that could really make a difference, like a new gasoline tax that would change U.S. consumption habits and a serious increase in CAFE (corporate average fuel-economy) standards, which require automakers to meet an average mileage requirement. With the GOP facing a bitter fight for control of the Congress later this year, such measures are considered too politically painful. There could be a lot more pain for Americans down the road, however, at the hands of Putin and his energy-rich allies.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
The rise of a new global energy elite means high oil and gas prices are here to stay.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 6:55 p.m. ET May 3, 2006
May 3, 2006 - It is a mantra of the globalization crowd. In today’s global economy, we are told, all that really matters is which country produces the best brains and skills. The world is flat, after all. The playing field is leveled. Wrong, wrong and wrong. What also matters, we are learning, is who controls the world's energy resources. Evo Morales's abrupt decision earlier this week to nationalize Bolivia's natural-gas industry was only the latest worrisome move in a long-term trend. Morales, a leftist elected president last December, was apparently influenced by a meeting he had in Havana last Saturday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who's rocketed to international prominence by doing much the same thing to his country's oil industry. President Chavez, sitting atop his growing pile of petrodollars, has gleefully thumbed his nose at Washington’s efforts to rein him in. Similarly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is defiantly enriching uranium and sneering at Western threats of sanctions. And he obviously thinks he can, perhaps because no one is threatening to cut off Iran's oil exports as part of the forthcoming sanctions plan.
The would-be czar of this new global energy elite is Vladimir Putin. Having spent the better part of his six years in office wresting control of his nation's vast oil and gas resources, the Russian president is now playing a brass-knuckle game of power politics. When Putin partially cut off gas supplies to Ukraine and therefore to Western Europe in the first three days of the year—mainly to bully Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko into taking a lower price—the European Union went into a state of near panic. According to the Energy Charter Secretariat in Brussels, by 2020 the Western Europeans are expected to get half their gas from Russia, which commands 28 percent of world gas reserves, more than any country in the world. Suddenly the Europeans realized there weren’t that many alternative suppliers. Putin’s Kremlin-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom, has hired German Chancellor Angela Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, as a consultant. Gazprom deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev admitted at an economic forum earlier this month that even Britain’s flagship utility, Centrica, should be considered a potential takeover target. "With our present financial strength, it is very difficult to find a company which is not on our watch list," he said.
What does all this geostrategic strutting have to do with soaring prices at the gas pump? For one thing, the uncertainty created by Iran, Iraq and Venezuela has added a $10-$20 risk premium to the price of oil per barrel, according to Wall Street analysts. The politics of energy also doesn't bode well for future prices, as U.S. Secretary of Energy Sam Bodman seemed to suggest last weekend when he said Americans might have to get used to paying $3-plus per gallon for gasoline.
Today, oil and gas experts around the world are growing alarmed not just at future scarcity—the idea that the world may have hit “peak oil” seems to be taking hold—but at who's in control of the precious stuff. As demand for energy explodes worldwide, there is less of it available and less exploration for it. That is partly because of a dropoff in investment created by the decline in oil prices in the '90s. But it is also because multinational corporations like ExxonMobil (despite its record profits) now own just 6 percent of supplies, versus a whopping 77 percent that's now owned by state-owned entities, according to the Petroleum Finance Corp., a Washington-based consulting group. State control guarantees less efficiency in the exploration for oil, and in the extraction and refinement of fuel. Further, these state-owned companies do not divulge how much they really own, or what the production and exploration numbers are. These have become the new state secrets.
Quietly an understanding of this power shift in the world is growing in Washington, as well. The price shock after Hurricane Katrina, especially—not to mention the plummeting poll numbers that followed for Bush—led administration officials to understand just how fragile U.S. economic security has become because of energy. Nothing quite like it has happened since the 1973 OPEC embargo. Administration sources say the Katrina effect, as well as concern over moves by Chavez, were mainly behind Bush's surprising call for an end to "America's oil addiction" in his State of the Union address last January. At the same time, U.S. officials have come to realize that there is deep anger and enmity in the Kremlin against the United States (particularly over U.S. efforts to win Ukraine and Georgia to the West), and that Putin has his own agenda. One example: even as Moscow has joined the Western effort to confront Tehran over its nuclear program, Russia and Iran are taking a unified stand in resisting a U.S. effort to build a trans-Caspian pipeline that would reroute gas out of the Russian system to Baku, Azerbaijan.
Putin has long been nursing ambitions of using Russia's vast oil and gas supplies as an instrument of power. In the mid '90s, after 15 years in the KGB, Putin went back to school, attending the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. He wrote a dissertation titled "Toward a Russian Transnational Energy Company." The topic: how to use energy resources for grand strategic planning. There is reason to believe that Putin's highly publicized confrontation with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the defunct Yukos—the last of the big private energy concerns in Russia—was about much more than wresting political power from the so-called oligarchs, former apparatchiks who gained control of Russia’s resources after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Putin is not known to be personally corrupt, or even particularly power-hungry. What he is hungry for—and indeed has been since he was elected in 2000—is a restoration of Russia's power and influence. Some observers believe that Putin's trumped-up arrest of Khodorkovsky—who will be spending the next few years in a Siberian labor camp—was mainly about taking control of the energy sector, rather than edging aside a political rival.
It is tempting to say that oil and gas have become the new strategic weapons of the 21st century. But in one crucial respect that is not true. As Putin discovered from his aborted effort to cut off Ukraine’s gas—and as even Ahmadinejad is learning—when you threaten to cut off your customers, you only cut off your own nose. You have to sell oil to someone; otherwise crude is just black muck. Where the control of energy counts is in accumulating wealth, and therefore power and influence. As former U.S. under secretary of State Marc Grossman says, "The question is what are they doing with the money."
The Bush administration may think it has one trump card in Iraq. U.S. interests obviously lie with the vast proven and potential Iraqi oil fields, said to be the world's largest. The Iraqi oil ministry has signed about 40 memorandums of understanding, many with U.S. companies, according to industry sources. Under them, the majors such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips are giving technical advice "free" to the ministry (a typical get-in-the-door strategy for the industry). Challenged at a congressional hearing in March, CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid was frank in suggesting that, while oil was not the reason America went to war, it may provide a critical reason for staying. "The United States and its allies have a vital interest in the oil-rich region," Abizaid said. "Ultimately it comes down to the free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our own nation and everybody else in the world depend."
But after three years of explosive anger against the U.S. occupation, it would be foolish to think that the Iraqi government, too, won’t catch the nationalist bug that’s spreading worldwide, in what appears to be an outgrowth of both antiglobalization sentiments and anti-Americanism. “I think the likelihood is high that American companies will have some significant position in Iraq,” says J. Robinson West, head of Petroleum Finance Corp. “On the other hand I think it’s highly unlikely that the petroleum sector will be dominated by American companies. We really didn't go to war over oil, and I think at this late date we don't want to make it look like we did.” ExxonMobil spokesman Russ Roberts adds, "The Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people. If the Iraqi people determine that they want the help of international oil companies in developing their resources, then ExxonMobil would certainly be interested in participating."
What does it all mean? "Welcome to the age of energy insecurity," says West, a former Reagan administration official (and friend of Dick Cheney's, the man who once dismissed energy conservation as a "personal virtue"). "Worldwide production will peak. The result will be skyrocketing prices, with a huge, sustained economic shock. Jobs will be lost. Without action, the crisis will certainly bring energy rivalries, if not energy wars. Vast wealth will be shifted, probably away from the U.S. For the last 20 years, U.S. policy has discouraged production and encouraged consumption. If we dither any more, we will pay a terrible price, the economic equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Katrina was Category 4."
Washington appears as helpless in preparing for this crisis as it did in anticipating Hurricane Katrina. As we have seen in recent weeks, Congress is still dithering over such silly proposals as a $100 rebate to gasoline customers. But Republican leaders are balking at sponsoring proposals that could really make a difference, like a new gasoline tax that would change U.S. consumption habits and a serious increase in CAFE (corporate average fuel-economy) standards, which require automakers to meet an average mileage requirement. With the GOP facing a bitter fight for control of the Congress later this year, such measures are considered too politically painful. There could be a lot more pain for Americans down the road, however, at the hands of Putin and his energy-rich allies.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth
by Ran Prieur
December 19, 2004
1. Abandon the world. The world is the enemy of the Earth. The "world as we know it" is a deadly parasite on the biosphere. Both cannot survive, nor can the world survive without the Earth. Do the logic: the world is doomed. If you stay on the parasite, you die with it. If you move to the Earth, and it survives in something like its recent form, you can survive with it.
Our little world is doomed because it's built on a foundation of taking from the wider world without giving back. For thousands of years we've been going into debt and calling it "progress," exterminating and calling it "development," stealing and calling it "wealth," shrinking into a world of our own design and calling it "evolution." We're just about done. We're not just running out of cheap oil -- which is used to make and move almost every product, and which gives the average American the energy equivalent of 200 slaves. We're also running out of topsoil, without which we need oil-derived fertilizers to grow food; and forests, which stabilize climate and create rain by transpiring water to refill the clouds; and ground water, such as the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains, which could go dry any time now. We're running out of room to dump stuff in the oceans without killing them, and to dump stuff in the atmosphere without wrecking the climate, and to manufacture carcinogens without all of us getting cancer. We're coming to the end of global food stockpiles, and antibiotics that still work, and our own physical health, and our own mental health, and our grip on reality, and our will to keep the whole game going. Why do you think so many Americans are looking forward to "armageddon" or the "rapture"? We hate this shitty world and we want to blow it up.
In the next five or ten years, the US military will be humiliated, the dollar will collapse, the housing bubble will burst, tens of millions of Americans will be destitute, food, fuel, and manufactured items will get really expensive, and most of us will begin withdrawal from the industrial lifestyle. SUV's will change their function from transportation to shelter. We will not be able to imagine how we ever thought calories were bad. Smart people will stop exterminating the dandelions in their yard and start eating them. Ornamental gardens will go the way of fruit hats and bloomers. In the cities, pigeon populations will decline.
This is not the "doom" scenario. I'm not saying anything about death camps, super-plagues, asteroid impacts, solar flares, nuclear war, an instant ice age, or a runaway greenhouse effect. This is the mildest realistic scenario, the slow crash: energy prices will rise, the middle class will fall into the lower class, economies will collapse, nations will fight desperate wars over resources, in the worst places people will starve, and climate disasters will get worse. Your area might resemble the botched conquest of Iraq, or the depression in Argentina, or the fall of Rome, or even a crusty Ecotopia. My young anarchist friends are already packing themselves into unheated houses and getting around by bicycle, and they're noticeably happier than my friends with full time jobs. We just have to make the mental adjustment. Those who don't, who cling to the world they grew up in, numbing themselves and waiting for it all to blow over, will have a miserable time, and if people die, they will be the first. Save some of them if you can, but don't let them drag you down. The first thing they teach lifeguards is how to break holds.
2. Abandon hope. I don't mean that we stop trying, or stop believing that a better world is possible, but that we stop believing that some factor is going to save us even if we do the wrong thing. A few examples:
Jesus is coming. If you believe the Bible, Jesus told us when he was coming back to save us. He said, "This generation shall not pass." That was 2000 years ago. Stop waiting for that bus and get walking.
The Mayan calendar is ending. Some people who scoff at Christian prophecies still manage to believe something equally religious and a lot less specific about what's going to happen. At least Jesus preached peace and enlightenment -- the Mayans were a warlike people who crashed their civilization by cutting down the forests of the Yucatan and exhausting their farmland. That's what we should be studying, not their calendar and its alleged message that a better world is coming very soon and with little effort on our part. Now the Mayan calendar gurus will say that it does take effort and we have a choice to go either way, but go back to 1988 and read what 2004 was supposed to look like, and it's obvious that we've already failed.
Technology will save us. If it does, it will be something we don't even recognize as "technology" -- permaculture or orgonomy or water vortices or forest gardening or quantum consciousness or the next generation of the tribe. It will not be a new germ killer or resource extractor or power generator or anything to give us what we want while exempting us from being aware and respectful of other life. Anything like that will just dig us deeper in the same hole.
The system can be reformed. Yes, and it's also not against the laws of physics for us to go back in time and prevent the industrial age from ever happening. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago the ecologists said "we have to turn it around now or it will be too late." They were right. And not only didn't we turn it around, we sped it up: more cars with worse efficiency, more toxins, more CO2, more deforestation, more pavement, more lawns, more materialism, more corporate rule, more weapons, more war and love of war, more secrets, more lies, more callousness and cynicism and short-sightedness. Now we're in so deep that politicians right of Nixon are called "liberal" and the Green Party platform is both totally inadequate and politically absurd. Our little system is not going to make it.
Also, there's a time lag between smokestacks and acid rain, between radioactivity and cancer, between industrial toxins and birth defects, between atmospheric imbalance and giant storms, between deforestation and drought, between soil depletion and starvation. The disasters we're getting now are from the relatively mild stuff we did years or decades ago, before SUV's and depleted uranium and aspartame and terminator seeds and the latest generation of factory farms. Even if we could turn it around tomorrow, what's coming is much worse.
We're not strong enough to destroy nature. Oddly, this argument almost always invokes the word "hubris," as in, "You are showing hubris, or excessive pride, in thinking that by lighting this forest on fire to roast a hot dog, I will burn the forest down. Don't you know humans aren't capable of burning down a forest? Shame on you for your pride."
In fact, we've already almost finished killing the Earth. The deserts of central and southwest Asia were once forests -- ancient empires cut down the trees and let the topsoil wash off into the Indian Ocean. In North America a squirrel could go tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and spawning salmon were so thick in rivers and streams that you couldn't row a boat through them, and the seashores were rich with seals, fishes, birds, clams, lobsters, whales. Now they're deserts populated only by seagulls eating human garbage, and nitrogen fertilizer runoff has made dead zones in the oceans, and atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing oceanic acidity, which may dissolve the shells of the plankton. If the plankton die, it's all over.
Maybe we can't kill absolutely everything, but we are on the path to cutting life on Earth down to nothing bigger than a cockroach, and we will do so, and all of us will die, unless something crashes our system sooner and only kills most of us.
3. Drop Out. (See my essay How To Drop Out.) Dropping out of the present dominant system has both a mental and an economic component that go together like your two legs walking. It's a lot of steps! Maybe you notice that you hate your job, and that you have to do it because you need money. So you reduce expenses, reduce your hours, and get more free time, in which you learn more techniques of self-sufficiency and establish a sense of identity not dependent on where you get your money. Then you switch to a low-status low-stress job that gives you even more room to get outside the system mentally. And so on, until you've changed your friends, your values, your whole life.
The point I have to make over and over about this process, and this movement, is that it's not about avoiding guilt, or reducing your ecological footprint, or being righteous. It's not a pissing contest to see who's doing more to save the Earth -- although some people will believe that's your motivation, to justify their own inertia. It's not even about reducing your participation in the system, just reducing your submission and dependence: getting free, being yourself, slipping out of a wrestling hold so you can throw an elbow at the Beast.
This world is full of people with the intelligence, knowledge, skills, and energy to make heaven on Earth, but they can't even begin because they would lose their jobs. We're always arguing to change each other's minds, but nobody will change if they think their survival depends on not changing. Every time you hear about a whistleblower or reporter getting fired for honesty and integrity, you can be sure that they already had a support network, or just a sense of their own value, outside of the system they defied. Dropping out is about fighting better. Gandalf has to get off Saruman's tower!
4. You are here to help. In the culture of Empire, we are trained to think of ourselves as here to "succeed," to build wealth and status and walls around ourselves, to get what we desire, to win in games where winning is given meaning by others losing. It is a simple and profound shift to think of ourselves instead as here to help -- to serve the greatest good that we can perceive in whatever way is right in front of us.
You don't have to sacrifice yourself for others, or put others "above" you. Why is it so hard to see each other as equals? And it's OK to have a good time. In fact, having a good time is what most helping comes down to -- the key is that you're focused on the good times of all life everywhere including your "self," instead of getting caught up in egocentric comparison games that aren't even that fun.
Defining yourself as here to help is a prerequisite for doing some of the other things on this list properly. If you're here to win you're not saving anything but your own wretched ass for a few additional years. If you're dropping out to win you're likely to be stepping on other outsiders, instead of throwing a rope to bring more people out alive. And as the system breaks down, people here to win will waste their energy fighting each other for scraps, while people here to help will build self-sufficient communities capable of generating what they need to survive.
In the real world, being here to help is easier and less stressful, because you will frequently be in a situation where you can't win, but you will almost never be in a situation where there's nothing you can do to help. Being here to win only makes sense in an artificial world rigged so you can win all the time. Thousands of years ago only kings were in that position, and they reacted by massacring all enemies and bathing in blood. Now, through a perfect conjunction of Empire and oil energy, we just put the entire American middle class in that position for 50 years. No one should be surprised that we're so stupid, selfish, cowardly, and irresponsible. But younger generations are already getting poorer and smarter.
5. Learn skills. Readers sometimes ask for my advice on surviving the crash -- should they buy guns, canned food, water purifiers, gold? I always tell them to learn skills. You know the saying: get a fish, eat for a day; learn to fish, eat for a lifetime. (Just don't take it too literally -- there might not be any fish left!)
The most obvious useful skills would include improvising shelter from materials at hand, identifying and preparing wild edibles, finding water, making fire, trapping animals, and so on. But I don't think we're going all the way to the stone age. There will also be a need for electrical work, medical diagnosis, surgery, optics, celestial navigation, composting, gardening, tree propagation, food preservation, diplomacy, practical chemistry, metalworking, all kinds of mechanical repair, and all kinds of teaching. As the 15th century had the Renaissance Man, we're going to have the Postapocalypse Man or Woman, someone who can fix a bicycle, tan a hide, set a broken bone, mediate an argument, and teach history.
Even more important are some things that are not normally called skills, but that make skill-learning and everything else easier: luck, intuition, adaptability, attentiveness, curiosity, physical health, mental health, the ability to surf the flow. Maybe the most fundamental is what they call "being yourself" or "waking up." Most human behavior is based neither on logic nor intuition nor emotion, but habit and conformity. We perceive, think, and act as we've always done, and as we see others do. This works well enough in a controlled environment, but in a chaotic environment it doesn't work at all. If you can just get 10% of yourself free of habit and conformity, people will call you "weird." 20% and they'll call you a genius, 30% and they'll call you a saint, 40% and they'll kill you.
6. Find your tribe. We minions of Empire think of ourselves as individualists, or as members of silly fake groups -- nations, religions, races, followers of political parties and sports teams, loyal inmates of some town that's the same as every other. In fact we're all members of a giant mad tribe, where the relationships are not cooperative and open, but coercive, exploitative, abusive, and invisible. If we could see even one percent of the whole picture, we would have a revolution.
You may feel like you want to do it alone, but you have never done it alone. To survive the breakdown of this world and build a better one, you will have to trade your sterile, insulated links of money and law for raw, messy links of friendship and conflict. The big lie of postapocalypse movies like Omegaman and Mad Max is that the survivors will be loners. In the real apocalypse, the survivors will be members of multi-skilled well-balanced cooperative groups.
I think future tribes are already forming, even on the internet, even among people thousands of miles apart. I think the crash will be slow enough that we'll have plenty of time to get together geographically.
7. Get on some land. This might seem more difficult than the others, yet most people who own land have not done any of the other things -- probably because buying land requires money which requires subservience to a system that makes you personally powerless. I suggest extreme frugality, which will give you valuable skills and also allow you to quickly save up money. You probably have a few more years.
If you don't make it, it's not the end of the world -- oh wait -- it is the end of the world! But you still might know someone with room on their land, or someone might take you in for your skills, or if you have a tribe one of you will probably come up with a place in the chaos. And if not, there will be a need for survivors and helpers in the cities and suburbs. So don't force it.
If you do get land, the most valuable thing it can have is clean surface water, a spring or stream you can drink from. Acceptable but less convenient would be a well that doesn't require electricity, or dirty surface water, which you can filter and clean through sand and reed beds. At the very least you need the rainfall and skills to catch and store enough rainwater to drink and grow food. (The ancient Nabateans did it on less than four inches of rain a year.) Then you'll need a few years to learn and adjust and get everything in order so that your tribe can live there year-round, even with no materials from outside. With luck, it won't come to that.
8. Save part of the Earth. When I say "the Earth," I mean the life on its surface, the biosphere, as many species and habitats as possible, connected in ways that maximize abundance and complexity -- and not just because humans think it's pretty or useful, but because all life is valuable on its own terms. We like to focus on saving trophy animals -- whales, condors, pandas, salmon, spotted owls -- but most of them aren't going to make it, and we could save a lot more species if we could put that attention into habitats and whole systems.
So how do you save habitats and whole systems? You can try working through governments, but at the moment they're ruled by corporations, which by definition are motivated purely by short term increase-in-exploitation, or "profit." You can try direct physical action against the destroyers, but it has yet to work well, and as the world plunges to the right I think we'll see more and more activists simply killed.
My focus is direct positive action for the biosphere: adopting some land, whether by owning or squatting or stealth, and building it into a strong habitat: slowing down the rainwater, composting, mulching, building the topsoil, no-till gardening, scattering seed balls, planting trees, making wetlands -- a little oasis where the tree frogs can hide and migrating birds can rest, where you and a few species can wait out the crash.
Tom Brown Jr. mentions in one of his books that the patch of woods where he conducts his wilderness classes, instead of being depleted by all the humans using it for survival, has turned into an Eden, because his students know how to tend it. Some rain forest environments, once thought to be random wilderness, have turned out to be more like the wild gardens of human tribes, orders of magnitude more complex than the soil-killing monoculture fields of our own primitive culture.
Humans have the ability to go beyond sustainability, to live in ways that increase the richness of life on Earth, and help Gaia in ways she cannot help herself. This and only this justifies human survival.
It requires a new set of skills. A good place to start is the permaculture movement. Sadly, in the present dark age the original books are rare, and classes are so expensive that the knowledge is languishing among the idle rich when it should be offered free to the world. But the idle poor can still find the books in libraries, and many of the techniques are simple. What it comes down to is seeing whole systems and paying attention and innovating, driven by the knowledge that sustainability is only the middle of the road, and there's no limit to how far we can go beyond it.
9. Save human knowledge. When people of this age think about knowledge worth saving, they usually think about belief in the Cartesian mechanical philosophy, that dead matter is the basis of reality, and about techniques for rebuilding and using machines that dominate and separate us from other life. I'd like that knowledge to die forever, but I don't think it works that way. Humans or any other hyper-malleable animal will always be tempted by the Black Arts, by techniques that trade subtle harm for flashy good and feed back into themselves, seducing us into power, corruption, and blindness.
Our descendants will need the intellectual artifacts to avoid this -- artifacts we have barely started to develop even as the Great Bad Example begins to fall. In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets with their fingers, and a stranger appears with a new threshing machine that will do the same thing with less time and effort, they will need to say something smarter than "the Gods forbid it" or "that is not our Way." They will need the knowledge to say something like:
"Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and burned to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall we be dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our food, which we now
by Ran Prieur
December 19, 2004
1. Abandon the world. The world is the enemy of the Earth. The "world as we know it" is a deadly parasite on the biosphere. Both cannot survive, nor can the world survive without the Earth. Do the logic: the world is doomed. If you stay on the parasite, you die with it. If you move to the Earth, and it survives in something like its recent form, you can survive with it.
Our little world is doomed because it's built on a foundation of taking from the wider world without giving back. For thousands of years we've been going into debt and calling it "progress," exterminating and calling it "development," stealing and calling it "wealth," shrinking into a world of our own design and calling it "evolution." We're just about done. We're not just running out of cheap oil -- which is used to make and move almost every product, and which gives the average American the energy equivalent of 200 slaves. We're also running out of topsoil, without which we need oil-derived fertilizers to grow food; and forests, which stabilize climate and create rain by transpiring water to refill the clouds; and ground water, such as the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains, which could go dry any time now. We're running out of room to dump stuff in the oceans without killing them, and to dump stuff in the atmosphere without wrecking the climate, and to manufacture carcinogens without all of us getting cancer. We're coming to the end of global food stockpiles, and antibiotics that still work, and our own physical health, and our own mental health, and our grip on reality, and our will to keep the whole game going. Why do you think so many Americans are looking forward to "armageddon" or the "rapture"? We hate this shitty world and we want to blow it up.
In the next five or ten years, the US military will be humiliated, the dollar will collapse, the housing bubble will burst, tens of millions of Americans will be destitute, food, fuel, and manufactured items will get really expensive, and most of us will begin withdrawal from the industrial lifestyle. SUV's will change their function from transportation to shelter. We will not be able to imagine how we ever thought calories were bad. Smart people will stop exterminating the dandelions in their yard and start eating them. Ornamental gardens will go the way of fruit hats and bloomers. In the cities, pigeon populations will decline.
This is not the "doom" scenario. I'm not saying anything about death camps, super-plagues, asteroid impacts, solar flares, nuclear war, an instant ice age, or a runaway greenhouse effect. This is the mildest realistic scenario, the slow crash: energy prices will rise, the middle class will fall into the lower class, economies will collapse, nations will fight desperate wars over resources, in the worst places people will starve, and climate disasters will get worse. Your area might resemble the botched conquest of Iraq, or the depression in Argentina, or the fall of Rome, or even a crusty Ecotopia. My young anarchist friends are already packing themselves into unheated houses and getting around by bicycle, and they're noticeably happier than my friends with full time jobs. We just have to make the mental adjustment. Those who don't, who cling to the world they grew up in, numbing themselves and waiting for it all to blow over, will have a miserable time, and if people die, they will be the first. Save some of them if you can, but don't let them drag you down. The first thing they teach lifeguards is how to break holds.
2. Abandon hope. I don't mean that we stop trying, or stop believing that a better world is possible, but that we stop believing that some factor is going to save us even if we do the wrong thing. A few examples:
Jesus is coming. If you believe the Bible, Jesus told us when he was coming back to save us. He said, "This generation shall not pass." That was 2000 years ago. Stop waiting for that bus and get walking.
The Mayan calendar is ending. Some people who scoff at Christian prophecies still manage to believe something equally religious and a lot less specific about what's going to happen. At least Jesus preached peace and enlightenment -- the Mayans were a warlike people who crashed their civilization by cutting down the forests of the Yucatan and exhausting their farmland. That's what we should be studying, not their calendar and its alleged message that a better world is coming very soon and with little effort on our part. Now the Mayan calendar gurus will say that it does take effort and we have a choice to go either way, but go back to 1988 and read what 2004 was supposed to look like, and it's obvious that we've already failed.
Technology will save us. If it does, it will be something we don't even recognize as "technology" -- permaculture or orgonomy or water vortices or forest gardening or quantum consciousness or the next generation of the tribe. It will not be a new germ killer or resource extractor or power generator or anything to give us what we want while exempting us from being aware and respectful of other life. Anything like that will just dig us deeper in the same hole.
The system can be reformed. Yes, and it's also not against the laws of physics for us to go back in time and prevent the industrial age from ever happening. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago the ecologists said "we have to turn it around now or it will be too late." They were right. And not only didn't we turn it around, we sped it up: more cars with worse efficiency, more toxins, more CO2, more deforestation, more pavement, more lawns, more materialism, more corporate rule, more weapons, more war and love of war, more secrets, more lies, more callousness and cynicism and short-sightedness. Now we're in so deep that politicians right of Nixon are called "liberal" and the Green Party platform is both totally inadequate and politically absurd. Our little system is not going to make it.
Also, there's a time lag between smokestacks and acid rain, between radioactivity and cancer, between industrial toxins and birth defects, between atmospheric imbalance and giant storms, between deforestation and drought, between soil depletion and starvation. The disasters we're getting now are from the relatively mild stuff we did years or decades ago, before SUV's and depleted uranium and aspartame and terminator seeds and the latest generation of factory farms. Even if we could turn it around tomorrow, what's coming is much worse.
We're not strong enough to destroy nature. Oddly, this argument almost always invokes the word "hubris," as in, "You are showing hubris, or excessive pride, in thinking that by lighting this forest on fire to roast a hot dog, I will burn the forest down. Don't you know humans aren't capable of burning down a forest? Shame on you for your pride."
In fact, we've already almost finished killing the Earth. The deserts of central and southwest Asia were once forests -- ancient empires cut down the trees and let the topsoil wash off into the Indian Ocean. In North America a squirrel could go tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and spawning salmon were so thick in rivers and streams that you couldn't row a boat through them, and the seashores were rich with seals, fishes, birds, clams, lobsters, whales. Now they're deserts populated only by seagulls eating human garbage, and nitrogen fertilizer runoff has made dead zones in the oceans, and atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing oceanic acidity, which may dissolve the shells of the plankton. If the plankton die, it's all over.
Maybe we can't kill absolutely everything, but we are on the path to cutting life on Earth down to nothing bigger than a cockroach, and we will do so, and all of us will die, unless something crashes our system sooner and only kills most of us.
3. Drop Out. (See my essay How To Drop Out.) Dropping out of the present dominant system has both a mental and an economic component that go together like your two legs walking. It's a lot of steps! Maybe you notice that you hate your job, and that you have to do it because you need money. So you reduce expenses, reduce your hours, and get more free time, in which you learn more techniques of self-sufficiency and establish a sense of identity not dependent on where you get your money. Then you switch to a low-status low-stress job that gives you even more room to get outside the system mentally. And so on, until you've changed your friends, your values, your whole life.
The point I have to make over and over about this process, and this movement, is that it's not about avoiding guilt, or reducing your ecological footprint, or being righteous. It's not a pissing contest to see who's doing more to save the Earth -- although some people will believe that's your motivation, to justify their own inertia. It's not even about reducing your participation in the system, just reducing your submission and dependence: getting free, being yourself, slipping out of a wrestling hold so you can throw an elbow at the Beast.
This world is full of people with the intelligence, knowledge, skills, and energy to make heaven on Earth, but they can't even begin because they would lose their jobs. We're always arguing to change each other's minds, but nobody will change if they think their survival depends on not changing. Every time you hear about a whistleblower or reporter getting fired for honesty and integrity, you can be sure that they already had a support network, or just a sense of their own value, outside of the system they defied. Dropping out is about fighting better. Gandalf has to get off Saruman's tower!
4. You are here to help. In the culture of Empire, we are trained to think of ourselves as here to "succeed," to build wealth and status and walls around ourselves, to get what we desire, to win in games where winning is given meaning by others losing. It is a simple and profound shift to think of ourselves instead as here to help -- to serve the greatest good that we can perceive in whatever way is right in front of us.
You don't have to sacrifice yourself for others, or put others "above" you. Why is it so hard to see each other as equals? And it's OK to have a good time. In fact, having a good time is what most helping comes down to -- the key is that you're focused on the good times of all life everywhere including your "self," instead of getting caught up in egocentric comparison games that aren't even that fun.
Defining yourself as here to help is a prerequisite for doing some of the other things on this list properly. If you're here to win you're not saving anything but your own wretched ass for a few additional years. If you're dropping out to win you're likely to be stepping on other outsiders, instead of throwing a rope to bring more people out alive. And as the system breaks down, people here to win will waste their energy fighting each other for scraps, while people here to help will build self-sufficient communities capable of generating what they need to survive.
In the real world, being here to help is easier and less stressful, because you will frequently be in a situation where you can't win, but you will almost never be in a situation where there's nothing you can do to help. Being here to win only makes sense in an artificial world rigged so you can win all the time. Thousands of years ago only kings were in that position, and they reacted by massacring all enemies and bathing in blood. Now, through a perfect conjunction of Empire and oil energy, we just put the entire American middle class in that position for 50 years. No one should be surprised that we're so stupid, selfish, cowardly, and irresponsible. But younger generations are already getting poorer and smarter.
5. Learn skills. Readers sometimes ask for my advice on surviving the crash -- should they buy guns, canned food, water purifiers, gold? I always tell them to learn skills. You know the saying: get a fish, eat for a day; learn to fish, eat for a lifetime. (Just don't take it too literally -- there might not be any fish left!)
The most obvious useful skills would include improvising shelter from materials at hand, identifying and preparing wild edibles, finding water, making fire, trapping animals, and so on. But I don't think we're going all the way to the stone age. There will also be a need for electrical work, medical diagnosis, surgery, optics, celestial navigation, composting, gardening, tree propagation, food preservation, diplomacy, practical chemistry, metalworking, all kinds of mechanical repair, and all kinds of teaching. As the 15th century had the Renaissance Man, we're going to have the Postapocalypse Man or Woman, someone who can fix a bicycle, tan a hide, set a broken bone, mediate an argument, and teach history.
Even more important are some things that are not normally called skills, but that make skill-learning and everything else easier: luck, intuition, adaptability, attentiveness, curiosity, physical health, mental health, the ability to surf the flow. Maybe the most fundamental is what they call "being yourself" or "waking up." Most human behavior is based neither on logic nor intuition nor emotion, but habit and conformity. We perceive, think, and act as we've always done, and as we see others do. This works well enough in a controlled environment, but in a chaotic environment it doesn't work at all. If you can just get 10% of yourself free of habit and conformity, people will call you "weird." 20% and they'll call you a genius, 30% and they'll call you a saint, 40% and they'll kill you.
6. Find your tribe. We minions of Empire think of ourselves as individualists, or as members of silly fake groups -- nations, religions, races, followers of political parties and sports teams, loyal inmates of some town that's the same as every other. In fact we're all members of a giant mad tribe, where the relationships are not cooperative and open, but coercive, exploitative, abusive, and invisible. If we could see even one percent of the whole picture, we would have a revolution.
You may feel like you want to do it alone, but you have never done it alone. To survive the breakdown of this world and build a better one, you will have to trade your sterile, insulated links of money and law for raw, messy links of friendship and conflict. The big lie of postapocalypse movies like Omegaman and Mad Max is that the survivors will be loners. In the real apocalypse, the survivors will be members of multi-skilled well-balanced cooperative groups.
I think future tribes are already forming, even on the internet, even among people thousands of miles apart. I think the crash will be slow enough that we'll have plenty of time to get together geographically.
7. Get on some land. This might seem more difficult than the others, yet most people who own land have not done any of the other things -- probably because buying land requires money which requires subservience to a system that makes you personally powerless. I suggest extreme frugality, which will give you valuable skills and also allow you to quickly save up money. You probably have a few more years.
If you don't make it, it's not the end of the world -- oh wait -- it is the end of the world! But you still might know someone with room on their land, or someone might take you in for your skills, or if you have a tribe one of you will probably come up with a place in the chaos. And if not, there will be a need for survivors and helpers in the cities and suburbs. So don't force it.
If you do get land, the most valuable thing it can have is clean surface water, a spring or stream you can drink from. Acceptable but less convenient would be a well that doesn't require electricity, or dirty surface water, which you can filter and clean through sand and reed beds. At the very least you need the rainfall and skills to catch and store enough rainwater to drink and grow food. (The ancient Nabateans did it on less than four inches of rain a year.) Then you'll need a few years to learn and adjust and get everything in order so that your tribe can live there year-round, even with no materials from outside. With luck, it won't come to that.
8. Save part of the Earth. When I say "the Earth," I mean the life on its surface, the biosphere, as many species and habitats as possible, connected in ways that maximize abundance and complexity -- and not just because humans think it's pretty or useful, but because all life is valuable on its own terms. We like to focus on saving trophy animals -- whales, condors, pandas, salmon, spotted owls -- but most of them aren't going to make it, and we could save a lot more species if we could put that attention into habitats and whole systems.
So how do you save habitats and whole systems? You can try working through governments, but at the moment they're ruled by corporations, which by definition are motivated purely by short term increase-in-exploitation, or "profit." You can try direct physical action against the destroyers, but it has yet to work well, and as the world plunges to the right I think we'll see more and more activists simply killed.
My focus is direct positive action for the biosphere: adopting some land, whether by owning or squatting or stealth, and building it into a strong habitat: slowing down the rainwater, composting, mulching, building the topsoil, no-till gardening, scattering seed balls, planting trees, making wetlands -- a little oasis where the tree frogs can hide and migrating birds can rest, where you and a few species can wait out the crash.
Tom Brown Jr. mentions in one of his books that the patch of woods where he conducts his wilderness classes, instead of being depleted by all the humans using it for survival, has turned into an Eden, because his students know how to tend it. Some rain forest environments, once thought to be random wilderness, have turned out to be more like the wild gardens of human tribes, orders of magnitude more complex than the soil-killing monoculture fields of our own primitive culture.
Humans have the ability to go beyond sustainability, to live in ways that increase the richness of life on Earth, and help Gaia in ways she cannot help herself. This and only this justifies human survival.
It requires a new set of skills. A good place to start is the permaculture movement. Sadly, in the present dark age the original books are rare, and classes are so expensive that the knowledge is languishing among the idle rich when it should be offered free to the world. But the idle poor can still find the books in libraries, and many of the techniques are simple. What it comes down to is seeing whole systems and paying attention and innovating, driven by the knowledge that sustainability is only the middle of the road, and there's no limit to how far we can go beyond it.
9. Save human knowledge. When people of this age think about knowledge worth saving, they usually think about belief in the Cartesian mechanical philosophy, that dead matter is the basis of reality, and about techniques for rebuilding and using machines that dominate and separate us from other life. I'd like that knowledge to die forever, but I don't think it works that way. Humans or any other hyper-malleable animal will always be tempted by the Black Arts, by techniques that trade subtle harm for flashy good and feed back into themselves, seducing us into power, corruption, and blindness.
Our descendants will need the intellectual artifacts to avoid this -- artifacts we have barely started to develop even as the Great Bad Example begins to fall. In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets with their fingers, and a stranger appears with a new threshing machine that will do the same thing with less time and effort, they will need to say something smarter than "the Gods forbid it" or "that is not our Way." They will need the knowledge to say something like:
"Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and burned to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall we be dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our food, which we now
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Published on 28 Apr 2006 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 2 May 2006.
Public health and the precautionary principle: the case of peak oil
by Dan Bednarz, Ph.D.
Seminar at The Ohio State University School of Public Health April 28, 2006
Good morning; it’s a pleasure to be among public health colleagues. I wish to briefly discuss and integrate:
1. The Precautionary Principle (PP) in public health
2. Peak oil as a multi-faceted public health threat
3. Why public health has not paid appropriate attention to peak oil.
What Is The Precautionary Principle (PP)?
If we tell an audience, “Public health’s core concepts are assessment, policy development and assurance,” we will get puzzled looks. But if we say, “Public health is about protecting the community from injury, sickness and death,” heads will nod in agreement. From its formal inception 100 years ago public health has functioned in the spirit of the PP, which the 1998 Wingspread Statement formalized this way: When an activity raises threat of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.
There are other definitions of this principle, whose nuances as they apply to public health have been reviewed by Goldstein (2001), and Goldstein and Carruth (2003) and others (Tickner, 1997; Kurland, 2002; WHO, 2004).
In our risk conscious society suspected threats to health regularly undergo scrutiny: cell phones, saccharine, diets, exercise, genetically modified foods, the latest suspected carcinogen, to name a few. The PP codifies our collective apprehensions about health and safety –this is especially so regarding children and other vulnerable, innocent cohorts.
However, there is a cultural and psychological significance of the PP. To illustrate this, note that the Bush administration officially opposes the PP in many regulatory areas, especially in environmentalism and sometimes in public health issues. This stance is personified through the career of John Graham, formerly of Harvard’s school of public health and now Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.
Graham (2003) argues that the PP encourages indifference to the cost-benefits ratio of intervention versus non-intervention; as a result, he claims, we often go on obsessive, wasteful wild goose chases. But if we consider the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, we see that precaution and prevention are the premises of all its explanations for the invasion of Iraq –without cost-benefit analysis or anything more than an untested ordinal level of data conjecture that we’re safer now than if the invasion had not occurred.
This shows, I surmise, that the public intuitively endorses an expansive interpretation of the PP; however, given our differing political, economic, ethical, moral and group allegiances, our actual disagreements are about when and how to invoke it.
In this vein, Judith Kurland has pointed out that in the health and environment arenas, the PP is better received and more consistently implemented in Europe, where it was formalized into environmental policy in the 1970s, than it is in the U.S. In our country the manufacturers of tobacco, lead paint, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, asbestos, among others, have at times sought to withhold, stall, or doctor vital epidemiological and biostatistical information while simultaneously arguing that “all the data are not in” (Kurland, 2002: 499).
Kurland rightly contends that action in the face of “informed” uncertainty is the cornerstone of the PP - and I add of good-faith –(as opposed to faith-based) public health. We are touching upon the fault line of a narrow versus a broad conception of the public health mission – just think of our current debate in this country about climate change, also known as global warming. Is it a public health issue?
With this conception of the PP as a strategic tool/resource of stakeholders in the policy-making process – because that is, I contend, its real function - it is enlightening to ask why public health has been slow to respond to the emerging worldwide petroleum crisis colloquially known as “Peak Oil.” Is this indifference justified? After all, we cannot attend to every potential risk. Or is it symptomatic of a failure of public health to engage in “assessment, policy development and assurance” – that is, a failure to act in accordance with the PP.
Peak Oil as a Public Health Threat
Some background on how I identified peak oil as a public health threat is helpful. I will summarize a great deal of information, so if you desire further details on anything I say I will be happy afterwards to offer you sources.
At first I was skeptical of the dire and gloomy warnings of “Life as we know it” coming to an end. I had concluded during the oil crises of the seventies, when I was a college student, that when push came to shove technology would save us. In 2004 I realized that this sanguine outlook on energy was naïve. At that point I had an “of course!” experience: It’s about systems theory; stress/disturb the political-economic system with an exogenous change (peak oil) and it will reverberate through the sub-system of public health. For example, there is a good deal of discussion in the peak oil literature on the possibility of food rationing and food riots, but what about healthcare riots? This is merely one example of the repercussions for public health.
Finding only a few documents dating back to the seventies energy crises in the public health literature - I branched out for perspective: economics, environmentalism, earth sciences, geology, and so on. I was intrigued by the writings of economist Nicholas Goregescu-Roegen (1971; 1975). During the 1970s he wrote how traditional economics literally defies the laws of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. His exegesis on this simplistic thinking, exhibited even among Nobel Laureates, exposes the power of the taken-for-granted assumption of perpetual growth. He likewise critiques the belief that a Steady-State economy is a solution to growth based-economics. His thesis is uncomplicated: if you come to terms with thermodynamics –and therefore energy and entropy-- you realize its formidable long-term constraints upon economic activity.
Also, I was impressed by Reg Morrison’s (1999) encyclopedic book Spirit in the Gene, one of whose themes, the unavoidable ecological costs of extracting resources from the planet, parallels Goergescu-Roegen’s analysis and is indispensable to grasping the enormity of our energy-intensive and dependent lifestyle.
I should add a definition of peak oil, which in shorthand form means the point at which half of all the recoverable conventional oil in the world has been pumped from the ground. This is momentous because of the universal role petroleum plays in society. Given our time limitations, I will not stray into examples; suffice it to say that we are ensconced in what some have labeled the petroleum era.
As alluded to earlier, “catastrophists” argue that peak oil signals the end of technologically complex society –a return to muscle-powered times awaits us, they claim. I understand fully why a first time or casual reader could dismiss their arguments as the latest Cassandra narrative –although we should remember that Cassandra’s “curse” was to tell the unvarnished truth all the time. Indeed, there is an element of identification or rejection one feels compelled to make when reading this (sometimes) fervent literature. All I can say here is that as scientists we have to keep these deep-seated feelings in mind and separate, as best we can, fact from value, wish and fantasy.
The three benchmarks I pay attention to are empirical: the price of crude, daily worldwide production, and the supply-demand ratio. Prices approximately are at an all time high and expected to rise, and demand is beginning to surpass supply. At this time, those who claim we are at or near peak oil are, in my estimation, supported by data trends. The flatness of daily extraction – it’s hovering around 85 million barrels per day - for the past two years may indicate we are at peak oil; we will not know until production falls and cannot recover. I suggest that this plateau in production alone is a classic case for invoking the PP: we do not have all the data, but the consequences of waiting to have full information are potentially damaging or irreversible.
Therefore, dismissing peak oil as humbuggery is unjustified because running out of oil is not a fantasy for revenge or the science fiction of unhappy recluses or cargo cultists; it is a geological fact.
At this point some of you may be thinking, “What about substitutes? Sugar cane, tar sands, shale oil, solar wind, chicken fat, palm oil, hydrogen, and so on. If these can offset the decline in oil, won’t public health be utterly unaffected by peak oil?”
Well, I’m glad you asked since this brings us directly to the mission of public health and how to deal with uncertainty and risk. Let me categorically assert, and I will be happy to provide evidence, that we do not have scalable, fully appropriate alternatives and substitutes available at present to face what a decline in world oil production will wreak. In addition, even if we are not geologically a peak, we would need, according to The Hirsch Report which is described below, 20 years lead time to make a soft landing. Therefore, I believe we should create risk management scenarios for a variety of disruptive to worst case outcomes.
Note I’m advocating risk assessment; this is an analytic process, not a call for immediate system change. Our default “do-nothing” position is to hope all goes well – and right now our old friend “Mr. Free Market” is pretty confused about oil. For public health to stand pat is irrational, even as it is the natural response from the point of view of what we know about the social-psychology of risk - I will return to this in my summary.
Consider that “The Hirsch Report” to the Department of Energy, released in February of 2005 to virtually no media attention,(2005: 64) states: “The world has never faced a problem like this…Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary [emphasis added].” I hope that this brief review has made the minimal point that public health should, in accordance with the PP, react to peak oil through the framework of risk assessment. Now we may ask why public health is not paying due attention to peak oil. Let me offer some admittedly preliminary classes of explanation.
The Unprecedented Nature of the Problem
Peak oil is not a virus, carcinogen, or a pool of fetid standing water. It is a unique problem of exogenous change: a geologically imposed end to the fossil fuel era, whose first manifestation is the peaking of petroleum extraction, to be followed later by natural gas and then coal.
Ideally our government and the market should solve the energy problem. Thirty years ago Jimmy Carter took steps toward a national energy policy that was subsequently ridiculed by Ronald Reagan, as was symbolized by the first act of his administration: dismantling the solar panels Carter has installed on the White House roof. In addition, there is no guarantee that government can alone solve this problem without substantial guidance from the public and interested institutions –like public health.
Turning specifically to public health, most textbooks acknowledge the importance of energy but only in the contexts of its environmental pollution challenges and its necessity to spur economic development and growth. There is scant literature on its scarcity or depletion; overall, it is taken for granted that fossil fuel energy will always be available and cheap. Historically, this is a pardonable but nonetheless an immense oversight or misconception that now must be rectified; and let me emphasize that many students are reading in their public health textbooks that we have a 50 year supply of petroleum remaining, and 300 years of coal.
Our discipline must revise its understanding of energy in its generic sense and petroleum in its uniqueness as more than a source of energy. For example, petroleum is integral to the cultivation, processing and distribution of food; and it is an ingredient of a vast array of products, from toothbrushes to pharmaceuticals to computer cases. Also it is associated with population growth and lifestyle comforts.
I only mention transportation. Problem Identification How would public health recognize the problem of peak oil? This is not a frivolous question; a theme of inquiry in the area of social studies of science is, “Where do research questions come from?” Do they come from theory and the internal dynamics of the field? Or from external political, social and economic forces? We can stipulate that ideally it’s an interaction of both because public health is an applied, problem-driven field. Still, I suggest that most public health problems reflect de facto government and foundation agendas – that’s where the positive incentives are.
Finally, public health suffers from the “Silo effect,” or to be charitable, the “Invisible College” phenomenon, where one’s research colleagues are few and spread across the globe. This is to say the discipline lacks overarching communication and integration and has, as do most scientific disciplines, small semi-insular groups working on esoteric problems. This is a widespread yet often benign pattern in some scientific disciplines, but it is vexing in public health.
The Media
Reviewing sociologist Herbert J. Gans book, Deciding What’s News, Frank Mankiewicz, characterized television and newspaper reporters: “[O]ur colleagues who set much of the nation’s agenda have solid, bourgeois, mildly reformist views, respect authority, want to be liked and probably see the unfamiliar as vaguely threatening. The result is that tomorrow’s news is going to look very much like today’s, even if the world does not.”
This orientation is not conducive to reporting that we face an energy predicament that may precipitate an economic and social crisis, let alone lead to extrapolating as to how this could affect public health. To indicate how little “mainstream” attention has been paid to the topic, on March 1st of this year, Robert Semple, Jr., wrote in the New York Times: “The Age of Oil … could be ending without our really being aware of it.” Semple never uses the term “peak oil” in his article; it is still a virtually taboo concept in mainstream media, and he takes the most optimistic position that peak is thirty years away.
Reviewing the literature on risk identification, Fischoff (1989) informs us that we tend to hold on to pre-existing beliefs in the face of conflicting evidence and are unlikely to change our minds exclusively on the basis of logic and appeals to evidence –they rely heavily on their social context for definition. Furthermore, people typically disagree more about whether a risk exists than what to do about an acknowledged risk - in other words, the question of when to invoke the PP is paramount.
There is hope as little-by-little the energy crisis enters the mainstream news discussion. A week ago Jane Bryant Quinn wrote soberly in Newsweek of her alarm over the oil situation, but she did not use the term “peak oil.” Three weeks ago, Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine, published and article titled, "Wie lange noch?" (“How much time is left?”), that dealt with the concept of Peak Oil by name. This has yet to happen in a major American media source, but, as the Germans say, “Wir wollen mal sehen” –We’ll see.
The Government
In the first three chapters of Kevin Phillips’ new book, American Theocracy, he indicts the federal government for failing to forthrightly inform the public about our energy situation. Philips writes, “The political establishment’s reluctance to acquaint the American electorate with this dilemma involves three particularly glaring problems:
(1) unwillingness to speak of the present oil crisis in the full context of geological, economic, and military history;
(2) failure to understand the past vulnerability of great but idiosyncratic national energy cultures [like England relying on coal] losing their familiar footing; and
(3) refusal to discuss the evidence of oil-field depletions and insufficient new discoveries that shows petroleum production moving toward an inflammatory worldwide shortage…”
I believe he is right to draw these conclusions. But governments, especially large ones, are not unitary rational actors. As some of you here know, I attend the Defense Department’s monthly “Conversation about Energy” series in Washington.
Let me interject an example you’ll appreciate on the ambivalent nature of government. While the Defense Department is planning for peak oil, the DoE in essence “buried” the Hirsch Report. It was not available on its website until October of last year - in response to citizen complaints about its unavailability. Hirsch spoke at this past Monday’s Conversation meeting, smiled and said “No comment” when asked if he felt the DoE had hidden his report.
In a conversation I had with a colleague last month, he advises the Federal government on environmental risk analysis and science policy, he told me I was overreacting to think energy was a major threat to our healthcare system. “It’s third or forth in importance, Dan, not first.” I was dumbfounded and asked, “What about the Hirsch Report?” and he replied, “I’ve never heard of it.” I like and respect this man, so I bit my tongue and did not retort, “Okay, now I know where you’re not coming from.”
Daniel Yergin, energy consultant and peak oil denier, had the same “never heard of it” response during an interview last fall. These gentlemen are not my uncle Joe; and I’m sure we all have “expertise” stories we could share.
Also, a few weeks ago The Corps of Engineers released a study on peak oil. It reported, “The doubling of oil prices in the past couple of years is not an anomaly, but a picture of the future. Peak oil is at hand…” It also predicted the possibility of resource wars and recommended that the Army think strategically about energy.
And for those who appreciate irony, in 1995 the Congressional Research Service released a report titled, “World Oil Production after Year 2000: Business As Usual or Crises?” Further, at this past Monday’s “Conversation on Energy” both Hirsch and Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, R-MD, agreed that if the president would openly discuss peak oil the financial markets would fall prey to panic and instability.
Finally and most important, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control are – institutionally — oblivious to peak oil’s implications for the nation’s health.
I’m neither an alarmist nor moral entrepreneur by inclination, but let me observe that this is utterly astonishing.
Summary
The PP is a strategic resource in policy debates because it allows advocates and stakeholders to - properly I believe - take a broad view of public health’s mission and to act on informed suspicion of deleterious threats to health and the environment.
The PP is not an alarm system or an oracle. We need to understand the filters, bureaucratic and more generally economic, political and cultural, that both lead us to and away from the identification of health hazards. Why study this and not this? is not a navel-gazing question.
Given that resources always are scarce, we cannot avoid what Harold Lasswell termed the heart of policy analysis: “Who gets what, when and why?” This question will become immensely important if peak oil turns out to be the fracturing beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. If it is, public health has an opportunity to help lead our society through several decades of difficult to catastrophic socio-economic times. By this I suggest that public health will no longer be able to avoid debating the limits to growth issue, for this may be the ultimate meaning of peak oil.
Finally, and here I am speculating with a tinge of grandiosity, if peak oil ushers in an era of resource scarcity and economic instability – perhaps in a way similar to what Steven Jay Gould has called “punctuated equilibrium”— public health will have an opportunity to turn its training and educational expertise to the task of – for want of a better way of putting it — providing a truthful narrative that explains the great transformation underway.
I will stop here for questions.
Thank you for your attention.
Public health and the precautionary principle: the case of peak oil
by Dan Bednarz, Ph.D.
Seminar at The Ohio State University School of Public Health April 28, 2006
Good morning; it’s a pleasure to be among public health colleagues. I wish to briefly discuss and integrate:
1. The Precautionary Principle (PP) in public health
2. Peak oil as a multi-faceted public health threat
3. Why public health has not paid appropriate attention to peak oil.
What Is The Precautionary Principle (PP)?
If we tell an audience, “Public health’s core concepts are assessment, policy development and assurance,” we will get puzzled looks. But if we say, “Public health is about protecting the community from injury, sickness and death,” heads will nod in agreement. From its formal inception 100 years ago public health has functioned in the spirit of the PP, which the 1998 Wingspread Statement formalized this way: When an activity raises threat of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.
There are other definitions of this principle, whose nuances as they apply to public health have been reviewed by Goldstein (2001), and Goldstein and Carruth (2003) and others (Tickner, 1997; Kurland, 2002; WHO, 2004).
In our risk conscious society suspected threats to health regularly undergo scrutiny: cell phones, saccharine, diets, exercise, genetically modified foods, the latest suspected carcinogen, to name a few. The PP codifies our collective apprehensions about health and safety –this is especially so regarding children and other vulnerable, innocent cohorts.
However, there is a cultural and psychological significance of the PP. To illustrate this, note that the Bush administration officially opposes the PP in many regulatory areas, especially in environmentalism and sometimes in public health issues. This stance is personified through the career of John Graham, formerly of Harvard’s school of public health and now Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.
Graham (2003) argues that the PP encourages indifference to the cost-benefits ratio of intervention versus non-intervention; as a result, he claims, we often go on obsessive, wasteful wild goose chases. But if we consider the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, we see that precaution and prevention are the premises of all its explanations for the invasion of Iraq –without cost-benefit analysis or anything more than an untested ordinal level of data conjecture that we’re safer now than if the invasion had not occurred.
This shows, I surmise, that the public intuitively endorses an expansive interpretation of the PP; however, given our differing political, economic, ethical, moral and group allegiances, our actual disagreements are about when and how to invoke it.
In this vein, Judith Kurland has pointed out that in the health and environment arenas, the PP is better received and more consistently implemented in Europe, where it was formalized into environmental policy in the 1970s, than it is in the U.S. In our country the manufacturers of tobacco, lead paint, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, asbestos, among others, have at times sought to withhold, stall, or doctor vital epidemiological and biostatistical information while simultaneously arguing that “all the data are not in” (Kurland, 2002: 499).
Kurland rightly contends that action in the face of “informed” uncertainty is the cornerstone of the PP - and I add of good-faith –(as opposed to faith-based) public health. We are touching upon the fault line of a narrow versus a broad conception of the public health mission – just think of our current debate in this country about climate change, also known as global warming. Is it a public health issue?
With this conception of the PP as a strategic tool/resource of stakeholders in the policy-making process – because that is, I contend, its real function - it is enlightening to ask why public health has been slow to respond to the emerging worldwide petroleum crisis colloquially known as “Peak Oil.” Is this indifference justified? After all, we cannot attend to every potential risk. Or is it symptomatic of a failure of public health to engage in “assessment, policy development and assurance” – that is, a failure to act in accordance with the PP.
Peak Oil as a Public Health Threat
Some background on how I identified peak oil as a public health threat is helpful. I will summarize a great deal of information, so if you desire further details on anything I say I will be happy afterwards to offer you sources.
At first I was skeptical of the dire and gloomy warnings of “Life as we know it” coming to an end. I had concluded during the oil crises of the seventies, when I was a college student, that when push came to shove technology would save us. In 2004 I realized that this sanguine outlook on energy was naïve. At that point I had an “of course!” experience: It’s about systems theory; stress/disturb the political-economic system with an exogenous change (peak oil) and it will reverberate through the sub-system of public health. For example, there is a good deal of discussion in the peak oil literature on the possibility of food rationing and food riots, but what about healthcare riots? This is merely one example of the repercussions for public health.
Finding only a few documents dating back to the seventies energy crises in the public health literature - I branched out for perspective: economics, environmentalism, earth sciences, geology, and so on. I was intrigued by the writings of economist Nicholas Goregescu-Roegen (1971; 1975). During the 1970s he wrote how traditional economics literally defies the laws of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. His exegesis on this simplistic thinking, exhibited even among Nobel Laureates, exposes the power of the taken-for-granted assumption of perpetual growth. He likewise critiques the belief that a Steady-State economy is a solution to growth based-economics. His thesis is uncomplicated: if you come to terms with thermodynamics –and therefore energy and entropy-- you realize its formidable long-term constraints upon economic activity.
Also, I was impressed by Reg Morrison’s (1999) encyclopedic book Spirit in the Gene, one of whose themes, the unavoidable ecological costs of extracting resources from the planet, parallels Goergescu-Roegen’s analysis and is indispensable to grasping the enormity of our energy-intensive and dependent lifestyle.
I should add a definition of peak oil, which in shorthand form means the point at which half of all the recoverable conventional oil in the world has been pumped from the ground. This is momentous because of the universal role petroleum plays in society. Given our time limitations, I will not stray into examples; suffice it to say that we are ensconced in what some have labeled the petroleum era.
As alluded to earlier, “catastrophists” argue that peak oil signals the end of technologically complex society –a return to muscle-powered times awaits us, they claim. I understand fully why a first time or casual reader could dismiss their arguments as the latest Cassandra narrative –although we should remember that Cassandra’s “curse” was to tell the unvarnished truth all the time. Indeed, there is an element of identification or rejection one feels compelled to make when reading this (sometimes) fervent literature. All I can say here is that as scientists we have to keep these deep-seated feelings in mind and separate, as best we can, fact from value, wish and fantasy.
The three benchmarks I pay attention to are empirical: the price of crude, daily worldwide production, and the supply-demand ratio. Prices approximately are at an all time high and expected to rise, and demand is beginning to surpass supply. At this time, those who claim we are at or near peak oil are, in my estimation, supported by data trends. The flatness of daily extraction – it’s hovering around 85 million barrels per day - for the past two years may indicate we are at peak oil; we will not know until production falls and cannot recover. I suggest that this plateau in production alone is a classic case for invoking the PP: we do not have all the data, but the consequences of waiting to have full information are potentially damaging or irreversible.
Therefore, dismissing peak oil as humbuggery is unjustified because running out of oil is not a fantasy for revenge or the science fiction of unhappy recluses or cargo cultists; it is a geological fact.
At this point some of you may be thinking, “What about substitutes? Sugar cane, tar sands, shale oil, solar wind, chicken fat, palm oil, hydrogen, and so on. If these can offset the decline in oil, won’t public health be utterly unaffected by peak oil?”
Well, I’m glad you asked since this brings us directly to the mission of public health and how to deal with uncertainty and risk. Let me categorically assert, and I will be happy to provide evidence, that we do not have scalable, fully appropriate alternatives and substitutes available at present to face what a decline in world oil production will wreak. In addition, even if we are not geologically a peak, we would need, according to The Hirsch Report which is described below, 20 years lead time to make a soft landing. Therefore, I believe we should create risk management scenarios for a variety of disruptive to worst case outcomes.
Note I’m advocating risk assessment; this is an analytic process, not a call for immediate system change. Our default “do-nothing” position is to hope all goes well – and right now our old friend “Mr. Free Market” is pretty confused about oil. For public health to stand pat is irrational, even as it is the natural response from the point of view of what we know about the social-psychology of risk - I will return to this in my summary.
Consider that “The Hirsch Report” to the Department of Energy, released in February of 2005 to virtually no media attention,(2005: 64) states: “The world has never faced a problem like this…Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary [emphasis added].” I hope that this brief review has made the minimal point that public health should, in accordance with the PP, react to peak oil through the framework of risk assessment. Now we may ask why public health is not paying due attention to peak oil. Let me offer some admittedly preliminary classes of explanation.
The Unprecedented Nature of the Problem
Peak oil is not a virus, carcinogen, or a pool of fetid standing water. It is a unique problem of exogenous change: a geologically imposed end to the fossil fuel era, whose first manifestation is the peaking of petroleum extraction, to be followed later by natural gas and then coal.
Ideally our government and the market should solve the energy problem. Thirty years ago Jimmy Carter took steps toward a national energy policy that was subsequently ridiculed by Ronald Reagan, as was symbolized by the first act of his administration: dismantling the solar panels Carter has installed on the White House roof. In addition, there is no guarantee that government can alone solve this problem without substantial guidance from the public and interested institutions –like public health.
Turning specifically to public health, most textbooks acknowledge the importance of energy but only in the contexts of its environmental pollution challenges and its necessity to spur economic development and growth. There is scant literature on its scarcity or depletion; overall, it is taken for granted that fossil fuel energy will always be available and cheap. Historically, this is a pardonable but nonetheless an immense oversight or misconception that now must be rectified; and let me emphasize that many students are reading in their public health textbooks that we have a 50 year supply of petroleum remaining, and 300 years of coal.
Our discipline must revise its understanding of energy in its generic sense and petroleum in its uniqueness as more than a source of energy. For example, petroleum is integral to the cultivation, processing and distribution of food; and it is an ingredient of a vast array of products, from toothbrushes to pharmaceuticals to computer cases. Also it is associated with population growth and lifestyle comforts.
I only mention transportation. Problem Identification How would public health recognize the problem of peak oil? This is not a frivolous question; a theme of inquiry in the area of social studies of science is, “Where do research questions come from?” Do they come from theory and the internal dynamics of the field? Or from external political, social and economic forces? We can stipulate that ideally it’s an interaction of both because public health is an applied, problem-driven field. Still, I suggest that most public health problems reflect de facto government and foundation agendas – that’s where the positive incentives are.
Finally, public health suffers from the “Silo effect,” or to be charitable, the “Invisible College” phenomenon, where one’s research colleagues are few and spread across the globe. This is to say the discipline lacks overarching communication and integration and has, as do most scientific disciplines, small semi-insular groups working on esoteric problems. This is a widespread yet often benign pattern in some scientific disciplines, but it is vexing in public health.
The Media
Reviewing sociologist Herbert J. Gans book, Deciding What’s News, Frank Mankiewicz, characterized television and newspaper reporters: “[O]ur colleagues who set much of the nation’s agenda have solid, bourgeois, mildly reformist views, respect authority, want to be liked and probably see the unfamiliar as vaguely threatening. The result is that tomorrow’s news is going to look very much like today’s, even if the world does not.”
This orientation is not conducive to reporting that we face an energy predicament that may precipitate an economic and social crisis, let alone lead to extrapolating as to how this could affect public health. To indicate how little “mainstream” attention has been paid to the topic, on March 1st of this year, Robert Semple, Jr., wrote in the New York Times: “The Age of Oil … could be ending without our really being aware of it.” Semple never uses the term “peak oil” in his article; it is still a virtually taboo concept in mainstream media, and he takes the most optimistic position that peak is thirty years away.
Reviewing the literature on risk identification, Fischoff (1989) informs us that we tend to hold on to pre-existing beliefs in the face of conflicting evidence and are unlikely to change our minds exclusively on the basis of logic and appeals to evidence –they rely heavily on their social context for definition. Furthermore, people typically disagree more about whether a risk exists than what to do about an acknowledged risk - in other words, the question of when to invoke the PP is paramount.
There is hope as little-by-little the energy crisis enters the mainstream news discussion. A week ago Jane Bryant Quinn wrote soberly in Newsweek of her alarm over the oil situation, but she did not use the term “peak oil.” Three weeks ago, Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine, published and article titled, "Wie lange noch?" (“How much time is left?”), that dealt with the concept of Peak Oil by name. This has yet to happen in a major American media source, but, as the Germans say, “Wir wollen mal sehen” –We’ll see.
The Government
In the first three chapters of Kevin Phillips’ new book, American Theocracy, he indicts the federal government for failing to forthrightly inform the public about our energy situation. Philips writes, “The political establishment’s reluctance to acquaint the American electorate with this dilemma involves three particularly glaring problems:
(1) unwillingness to speak of the present oil crisis in the full context of geological, economic, and military history;
(2) failure to understand the past vulnerability of great but idiosyncratic national energy cultures [like England relying on coal] losing their familiar footing; and
(3) refusal to discuss the evidence of oil-field depletions and insufficient new discoveries that shows petroleum production moving toward an inflammatory worldwide shortage…”
I believe he is right to draw these conclusions. But governments, especially large ones, are not unitary rational actors. As some of you here know, I attend the Defense Department’s monthly “Conversation about Energy” series in Washington.
Let me interject an example you’ll appreciate on the ambivalent nature of government. While the Defense Department is planning for peak oil, the DoE in essence “buried” the Hirsch Report. It was not available on its website until October of last year - in response to citizen complaints about its unavailability. Hirsch spoke at this past Monday’s Conversation meeting, smiled and said “No comment” when asked if he felt the DoE had hidden his report.
In a conversation I had with a colleague last month, he advises the Federal government on environmental risk analysis and science policy, he told me I was overreacting to think energy was a major threat to our healthcare system. “It’s third or forth in importance, Dan, not first.” I was dumbfounded and asked, “What about the Hirsch Report?” and he replied, “I’ve never heard of it.” I like and respect this man, so I bit my tongue and did not retort, “Okay, now I know where you’re not coming from.”
Daniel Yergin, energy consultant and peak oil denier, had the same “never heard of it” response during an interview last fall. These gentlemen are not my uncle Joe; and I’m sure we all have “expertise” stories we could share.
Also, a few weeks ago The Corps of Engineers released a study on peak oil. It reported, “The doubling of oil prices in the past couple of years is not an anomaly, but a picture of the future. Peak oil is at hand…” It also predicted the possibility of resource wars and recommended that the Army think strategically about energy.
And for those who appreciate irony, in 1995 the Congressional Research Service released a report titled, “World Oil Production after Year 2000: Business As Usual or Crises?” Further, at this past Monday’s “Conversation on Energy” both Hirsch and Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, R-MD, agreed that if the president would openly discuss peak oil the financial markets would fall prey to panic and instability.
Finally and most important, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control are – institutionally — oblivious to peak oil’s implications for the nation’s health.
I’m neither an alarmist nor moral entrepreneur by inclination, but let me observe that this is utterly astonishing.
Summary
The PP is a strategic resource in policy debates because it allows advocates and stakeholders to - properly I believe - take a broad view of public health’s mission and to act on informed suspicion of deleterious threats to health and the environment.
The PP is not an alarm system or an oracle. We need to understand the filters, bureaucratic and more generally economic, political and cultural, that both lead us to and away from the identification of health hazards. Why study this and not this? is not a navel-gazing question.
Given that resources always are scarce, we cannot avoid what Harold Lasswell termed the heart of policy analysis: “Who gets what, when and why?” This question will become immensely important if peak oil turns out to be the fracturing beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. If it is, public health has an opportunity to help lead our society through several decades of difficult to catastrophic socio-economic times. By this I suggest that public health will no longer be able to avoid debating the limits to growth issue, for this may be the ultimate meaning of peak oil.
Finally, and here I am speculating with a tinge of grandiosity, if peak oil ushers in an era of resource scarcity and economic instability – perhaps in a way similar to what Steven Jay Gould has called “punctuated equilibrium”— public health will have an opportunity to turn its training and educational expertise to the task of – for want of a better way of putting it — providing a truthful narrative that explains the great transformation underway.
I will stop here for questions.
Thank you for your attention.
On the Verge of Collapse
By Bernhard Zand
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,413981,00.html
The British and the Americans are guarding Iraq's Persian Gulf oil platforms -- the troubled country's only real sources of revenue -- like crown jewels. But Iraqi oil is flowing sluggishly at best, while hoped-for investments haven't materialized and the Iraqi oil industry is on the verge of collapse -- both technical and political.
The HMS Bulwark, Her Majesty Elizabeth II's most state-of-the-art warship, has been bobbing at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab River for days. With its crew of more than 600 men, the amphibious ship, outfitted with landing craft and the latest technology, has a mission in fragile spots in the Persian Gulf -- but nothing happens. The coasts of Kuwait, Iraq and Iran are dimly visible on the horizon. The sea is calm as a dozen fishing boats crisscross the waters around the ship. Sometimes the calm lasts for days.
And then, suddenly, after weeks of monotony, something does happen. Four Iranian patrol boats traveling at high speeds -- 45 knots, or about 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph) -- approach the Bulwark from the East. They're manned by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards -- not regular navy personnel. It's considered an ominous sign.
Captain Clive Johnstone sprints from his cabin to the command deck, and for a moment he loses his typically British cool. "All men without orders leave the bridge immediately!" he barks. Johnstone anxiously has his crew establish radio contact with the Iranians. It takes a few minutes to make the connection, but by then the Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, have already stopped their boats -- at a point they believe marks the nautical border between Iran and Iraq.
The enemy that's making officers of the Royal Navy on the Bulwark so nervous consists of bearded men piloting small, agile, high-speed boats. Even the mightiest warship is vulnerable, as the suicide attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port city of Aden in October 2000 illustrates. In that incident, explosives hidden on a fishing boat manned by al-Qaida terrorists ripped an enormous hole -- six by 12 meters (19 by 39 feet) -- into the hull of the American destroyer, killing 17 American sailors.
Far more would be at stake if the same kind of attack were to occur here in the northern Gulf. The Bulwark lies at anchor between two giant oil platforms, the Basra and the Khawr al Amaya terminals. Two pipelines running along the ocean floor connect the platforms with the mainland 20 kilometers (12 miles) away. When both platforms operate at full capacity, they can load about 2 million barrels of oil onto waiting tankers -- about as much oil as France consumes in a day, or more than 2 percent of daily global demand. "A successful attack on one of these terminals would raise the world market price by several dollars within hours," says Commodore Bruce Williams, commander of the multinational fleet that monitors the waters off the Iraqi coast from its base on the Bulwark.
The world's most vulnerable economy
Because its northern pipeline into Turkey has been out of commission for months as a result of ongoing terrorist attacks, Iraq currently processes all its oil exports through the two terminals on the Gulf, where it earns about 80 percent of its revenues. No other country or economy in the world is quite as vulnerable at a single point.
That's because oil revenues represent the only leverage remaining to the government in Baghdad. This became abundantly clear last week when Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari withdrew his bid for reelection and, in doing so, eased a months-long stalemate and reopened the wrangling for the government's 32 unoccupied ministerial positions. The Kurds promptly made it clear that they were interested in the oil ministry. According to Kurdish member of parliament Mahmoud Osman, the Kurds would even be willing to part with the post of foreign minister, which they currently hold, in exchange for the oil or finance ministry.
To this day, many Iraqis see the West's interest in Iraqi oil as the real reason behind the 2003 US-led invasion. However, a look at the actual state of the oil sector three years after coalition forces marched into the country calls this view into question.
It isn't as though the occupying powers haven't tried to secure control over Iraqi oil. Heavy new security nets hang down into the sea from the rusty frame of the Basra platform, which dates from the 1970s. Heavy gun emplacements have been set up, and about 100 American and Iraqi soldiers are permanently stationed on the platform. "Welcome to the Basra Terminal Hotel -- nice view -- huge swimming pool" the Americans have written on a steel girder in front of the containers that serve as their sleeping quarters. Posters of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani hang on the walls in the stifling section of the platform where the Iraqi oil workers are housed.
A US destroyer and several coast guard vessels patrol a two-kilometer perimeter around each of the terminals, while ships operated by the fledgling Iraqi navy are stationed farther out. Their mission is to escort the incoming supertankers operated by international shipping companies to their berths where, depending on their size, they spend up to two or three days being tanked. It's a dangerous amount of time, but the platform crews take as many precautions as possible -- the result of previous attacks.
On April 24, 2004, three fishing boats approached the two loading stations. Two exploded prematurely, putting the terminals out of commission for a short time. But it was still long enough to cause $28 million in lost revenues and a jump in the global oil price from $33 to almost $40 a barrel. Terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attack.
Although it's difficult to imagine a comparable attack succeeding today, Commodore Williams admits that other threats exist instead. "I'm really an ecologist," says the British fleet commander. "That could come into good use here one day." According to Williams, the condition of the two terminals, especially the Khawr al Amaya platform, which was heavily damaged in the Iran-Iraq war, is deplorable and the pipelines haven't been properly serviced in years. "Much of the infrastructure needs improvement," he adds.
A disaster waiting to happen
It's a diplomatic way of describing a potentially devastating problem. Before the Iraq war, Mohammed Said, then manager of the Subeir pumping station 250 kilometers (155 miles) inland, warned against an environmental catastrophe in the Persian Gulf. He claimed that the pipelines, installed in the 1960s and 1970s, were full of holes and had defective valves, and that a reserve basin for emergencies was nonexistent. "Whenever a tanker docks at the offshore terminal and I start up the pump, I pray to God that nothing happens," he says.
At the time Iraqi oil engineer Said, toeing the government's propaganda line, blamed the problems on damage from the first Gulf war in 1991 and sanctions the United Nations subsequently imposed on the Saddam Hussein regime. Baghdad, he said, simply didn't have the means to repair its oil facilities.
But to this day, three years after the invasion and the lifting of UN sanctions against Iraq, there has been no significant improvement in the condition of these facilities. The Southern Oil Company's (SOC) ailing equipment continues to operate on the verge of collapse. The safety valves on the Fao Peninsula, the last sluice before the giant 48-inch pipelines drop to the ocean floor, are permanently open. "They're so heavily corroded," says a British engineer on board the "Bulwark," "that they probably can't even be closed completely anymore."
Even today, there would hardly be any reserve tanks available in the event of a leak in the underwater pipelines or an accident on the platform. After the war, the US government awarded repair contracts worth more than $10 billion to companies like oil multinational Halliburton -- and yet the central Subeir pumping station is still marked by deep craters once occupied by tanks with holding capacities of up to 33,000 cubic meters (about 1.2 million cubic feet). The Hamden Junction south of Basra, formerly the point of control for the flow of oil to the two terminals, is out of order. To this day, the remark "all storage destroyed" is written next to the locations of the Rumeila 1 and Fao storage tanks on British technical maps.
Experts describe the condition of the oil wells themselves in even more dramatic terms. Saddam began a policy of overexploitation of Iraq's oil resources in the 1980s that included neglecting to replace depleted oil with gas or water to maintain the necessary pressure in the wells. Many of the approximately 850 oil wells in southern Iraq are now "dead" and, with the exception of the West Kurna reservoir, all so-called super-giant fields are exhausted, writes oil engineer Abd al-Jabbar al-Halfi. "We milked them like cows -- but without giving them anything to eat."
After the fall of the Saddam regime, Iraq's oil technocrats hoped for a turnaround -- but in vain. "The new government is also constantly demanding that we step up oil production, even though our equipment is outdated and primitive, the situation at the oil wells is deteriorating and the pipelines are corroding," says Halfi.
Whereas the insurgency has hampered reconstruction in central Iraq, the southern part of the country has been relatively secure until now, and yet little has been achieved. On the eve of the war, Iraq was pumping about 2.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. In the first three months of this year, the rate of export was just over 1.7 billion barrels -- a far cry from the predictions the Americans had given the Iraqis after the invasion, when US officials were talking about production levels of more than 6 million barrels a day by 2010.
A political tug o' war
The failure of the Southern Oil Company is politically explosive material in Iraq's ethnically and religiously heated climate. In February, the company's 15,000 workers and engineers sent an urgent letter to Baghdad, in which they accused the government of "deliberately" neglecting their company. "Our company," the letter read, "has the world's largest oil reserves -- but we have yet to find someone who will listen to us." The regime in Baghdad, the oil company employees wrote, even spent months blocking the decision to lease a pair of new, more powerful tugboats so that large oil tankers could be safely guided into the terminals in rough weather.
The solution the SOC employees have proposed -- that the company be made independent of Baghdad -- is part of a political trend. "What we want is an energy council operating directly within the provincial government in Basra," says oil engineer Halfi. "This council could then find ways to attract foreign investors to the region, as is already being done in Kurdistan."
In fact, the Kurds are already pursuing a largely independent oil policy with almost no regard for the central government in Baghdad. Some of the Turkish, Canadian and Norwegian companies drilling for oil in Kurdish northern Iraq have signed contracts directly with the regional administration in Arbil, bypassing the oil minister in Baghdad -- a model the Shiites in southern Iraq apparently wish to emulate.
Baghdad appears to have accepted the change as inevitable. "According to the constitution, the central government retains authority over oil wells that are already producing," says the former and possibly future Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum. "But the provinces have control over newly developed resources."
That's one way of reading the Iraqi constitution, and it's the interpretation favored by the Shiites and Kurds. But Iraq's Sunnis have a different view. They see it as unconstitutional when regional parliaments negotiate oil controls directly, circumventing the central government.
There is a simple reason behind the Sunnis' opposition. Iraq's oil reserves are estimated to be at least 115 billion barrels, and the most productive fields lie in the country's Kurdish north and Shiite south. The Sunni-dominated center, on the other hand, is dry.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
By Bernhard Zand
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,413981,00.html
The British and the Americans are guarding Iraq's Persian Gulf oil platforms -- the troubled country's only real sources of revenue -- like crown jewels. But Iraqi oil is flowing sluggishly at best, while hoped-for investments haven't materialized and the Iraqi oil industry is on the verge of collapse -- both technical and political.
The HMS Bulwark, Her Majesty Elizabeth II's most state-of-the-art warship, has been bobbing at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab River for days. With its crew of more than 600 men, the amphibious ship, outfitted with landing craft and the latest technology, has a mission in fragile spots in the Persian Gulf -- but nothing happens. The coasts of Kuwait, Iraq and Iran are dimly visible on the horizon. The sea is calm as a dozen fishing boats crisscross the waters around the ship. Sometimes the calm lasts for days.
And then, suddenly, after weeks of monotony, something does happen. Four Iranian patrol boats traveling at high speeds -- 45 knots, or about 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph) -- approach the Bulwark from the East. They're manned by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards -- not regular navy personnel. It's considered an ominous sign.
Captain Clive Johnstone sprints from his cabin to the command deck, and for a moment he loses his typically British cool. "All men without orders leave the bridge immediately!" he barks. Johnstone anxiously has his crew establish radio contact with the Iranians. It takes a few minutes to make the connection, but by then the Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, have already stopped their boats -- at a point they believe marks the nautical border between Iran and Iraq.
The enemy that's making officers of the Royal Navy on the Bulwark so nervous consists of bearded men piloting small, agile, high-speed boats. Even the mightiest warship is vulnerable, as the suicide attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port city of Aden in October 2000 illustrates. In that incident, explosives hidden on a fishing boat manned by al-Qaida terrorists ripped an enormous hole -- six by 12 meters (19 by 39 feet) -- into the hull of the American destroyer, killing 17 American sailors.
Far more would be at stake if the same kind of attack were to occur here in the northern Gulf. The Bulwark lies at anchor between two giant oil platforms, the Basra and the Khawr al Amaya terminals. Two pipelines running along the ocean floor connect the platforms with the mainland 20 kilometers (12 miles) away. When both platforms operate at full capacity, they can load about 2 million barrels of oil onto waiting tankers -- about as much oil as France consumes in a day, or more than 2 percent of daily global demand. "A successful attack on one of these terminals would raise the world market price by several dollars within hours," says Commodore Bruce Williams, commander of the multinational fleet that monitors the waters off the Iraqi coast from its base on the Bulwark.
The world's most vulnerable economy
Because its northern pipeline into Turkey has been out of commission for months as a result of ongoing terrorist attacks, Iraq currently processes all its oil exports through the two terminals on the Gulf, where it earns about 80 percent of its revenues. No other country or economy in the world is quite as vulnerable at a single point.
That's because oil revenues represent the only leverage remaining to the government in Baghdad. This became abundantly clear last week when Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari withdrew his bid for reelection and, in doing so, eased a months-long stalemate and reopened the wrangling for the government's 32 unoccupied ministerial positions. The Kurds promptly made it clear that they were interested in the oil ministry. According to Kurdish member of parliament Mahmoud Osman, the Kurds would even be willing to part with the post of foreign minister, which they currently hold, in exchange for the oil or finance ministry.
To this day, many Iraqis see the West's interest in Iraqi oil as the real reason behind the 2003 US-led invasion. However, a look at the actual state of the oil sector three years after coalition forces marched into the country calls this view into question.
It isn't as though the occupying powers haven't tried to secure control over Iraqi oil. Heavy new security nets hang down into the sea from the rusty frame of the Basra platform, which dates from the 1970s. Heavy gun emplacements have been set up, and about 100 American and Iraqi soldiers are permanently stationed on the platform. "Welcome to the Basra Terminal Hotel -- nice view -- huge swimming pool" the Americans have written on a steel girder in front of the containers that serve as their sleeping quarters. Posters of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani hang on the walls in the stifling section of the platform where the Iraqi oil workers are housed.
A US destroyer and several coast guard vessels patrol a two-kilometer perimeter around each of the terminals, while ships operated by the fledgling Iraqi navy are stationed farther out. Their mission is to escort the incoming supertankers operated by international shipping companies to their berths where, depending on their size, they spend up to two or three days being tanked. It's a dangerous amount of time, but the platform crews take as many precautions as possible -- the result of previous attacks.
On April 24, 2004, three fishing boats approached the two loading stations. Two exploded prematurely, putting the terminals out of commission for a short time. But it was still long enough to cause $28 million in lost revenues and a jump in the global oil price from $33 to almost $40 a barrel. Terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attack.
Although it's difficult to imagine a comparable attack succeeding today, Commodore Williams admits that other threats exist instead. "I'm really an ecologist," says the British fleet commander. "That could come into good use here one day." According to Williams, the condition of the two terminals, especially the Khawr al Amaya platform, which was heavily damaged in the Iran-Iraq war, is deplorable and the pipelines haven't been properly serviced in years. "Much of the infrastructure needs improvement," he adds.
A disaster waiting to happen
It's a diplomatic way of describing a potentially devastating problem. Before the Iraq war, Mohammed Said, then manager of the Subeir pumping station 250 kilometers (155 miles) inland, warned against an environmental catastrophe in the Persian Gulf. He claimed that the pipelines, installed in the 1960s and 1970s, were full of holes and had defective valves, and that a reserve basin for emergencies was nonexistent. "Whenever a tanker docks at the offshore terminal and I start up the pump, I pray to God that nothing happens," he says.
At the time Iraqi oil engineer Said, toeing the government's propaganda line, blamed the problems on damage from the first Gulf war in 1991 and sanctions the United Nations subsequently imposed on the Saddam Hussein regime. Baghdad, he said, simply didn't have the means to repair its oil facilities.
But to this day, three years after the invasion and the lifting of UN sanctions against Iraq, there has been no significant improvement in the condition of these facilities. The Southern Oil Company's (SOC) ailing equipment continues to operate on the verge of collapse. The safety valves on the Fao Peninsula, the last sluice before the giant 48-inch pipelines drop to the ocean floor, are permanently open. "They're so heavily corroded," says a British engineer on board the "Bulwark," "that they probably can't even be closed completely anymore."
Even today, there would hardly be any reserve tanks available in the event of a leak in the underwater pipelines or an accident on the platform. After the war, the US government awarded repair contracts worth more than $10 billion to companies like oil multinational Halliburton -- and yet the central Subeir pumping station is still marked by deep craters once occupied by tanks with holding capacities of up to 33,000 cubic meters (about 1.2 million cubic feet). The Hamden Junction south of Basra, formerly the point of control for the flow of oil to the two terminals, is out of order. To this day, the remark "all storage destroyed" is written next to the locations of the Rumeila 1 and Fao storage tanks on British technical maps.
Experts describe the condition of the oil wells themselves in even more dramatic terms. Saddam began a policy of overexploitation of Iraq's oil resources in the 1980s that included neglecting to replace depleted oil with gas or water to maintain the necessary pressure in the wells. Many of the approximately 850 oil wells in southern Iraq are now "dead" and, with the exception of the West Kurna reservoir, all so-called super-giant fields are exhausted, writes oil engineer Abd al-Jabbar al-Halfi. "We milked them like cows -- but without giving them anything to eat."
After the fall of the Saddam regime, Iraq's oil technocrats hoped for a turnaround -- but in vain. "The new government is also constantly demanding that we step up oil production, even though our equipment is outdated and primitive, the situation at the oil wells is deteriorating and the pipelines are corroding," says Halfi.
Whereas the insurgency has hampered reconstruction in central Iraq, the southern part of the country has been relatively secure until now, and yet little has been achieved. On the eve of the war, Iraq was pumping about 2.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. In the first three months of this year, the rate of export was just over 1.7 billion barrels -- a far cry from the predictions the Americans had given the Iraqis after the invasion, when US officials were talking about production levels of more than 6 million barrels a day by 2010.
A political tug o' war
The failure of the Southern Oil Company is politically explosive material in Iraq's ethnically and religiously heated climate. In February, the company's 15,000 workers and engineers sent an urgent letter to Baghdad, in which they accused the government of "deliberately" neglecting their company. "Our company," the letter read, "has the world's largest oil reserves -- but we have yet to find someone who will listen to us." The regime in Baghdad, the oil company employees wrote, even spent months blocking the decision to lease a pair of new, more powerful tugboats so that large oil tankers could be safely guided into the terminals in rough weather.
The solution the SOC employees have proposed -- that the company be made independent of Baghdad -- is part of a political trend. "What we want is an energy council operating directly within the provincial government in Basra," says oil engineer Halfi. "This council could then find ways to attract foreign investors to the region, as is already being done in Kurdistan."
In fact, the Kurds are already pursuing a largely independent oil policy with almost no regard for the central government in Baghdad. Some of the Turkish, Canadian and Norwegian companies drilling for oil in Kurdish northern Iraq have signed contracts directly with the regional administration in Arbil, bypassing the oil minister in Baghdad -- a model the Shiites in southern Iraq apparently wish to emulate.
Baghdad appears to have accepted the change as inevitable. "According to the constitution, the central government retains authority over oil wells that are already producing," says the former and possibly future Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum. "But the provinces have control over newly developed resources."
That's one way of reading the Iraqi constitution, and it's the interpretation favored by the Shiites and Kurds. But Iraq's Sunnis have a different view. They see it as unconstitutional when regional parliaments negotiate oil controls directly, circumventing the central government.
There is a simple reason behind the Sunnis' opposition. Iraq's oil reserves are estimated to be at least 115 billion barrels, and the most productive fields lie in the country's Kurdish north and Shiite south. The Sunni-dominated center, on the other hand, is dry.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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