W:         Can you give us a rough idea what the term “Peak Oil” is referring to and why it is something that is relevant to everyone?

R:          Over the last 150 years we have built this society that is overwhelming dependent on oil and other fossil fuels. But especially for the last 75 years or so oil has emerged as the most important fuel for our economy. We use it for virtually 100% of our transportation, our agricultural system is based on oil, and chemicals and plastics have all become inexorable parts of our lives. Meanwhile oil is and has always been a non-renewable resource. From the very first barrel extracted from the ground we began “running out”, by definition.  

Now that didn’t pose much of a problem until recent times. In the 1970s the United States reached its peak in oil production. That didn’t mean that people weren’t looking for oil anymore.   They certainly were, but we had extracted so much of the easy oil, that with what was left we were not able to maintain the rate of extraction. We were the foremost oil-producing nation. Production began to decline and today we import about 70% of the oil and oil products that we use.

That has meant an enormous change in our economy.   We went from being a net lending nation to being a net borrower, and today we borrow about a billion dollars a day just to pay for oil. It has also changed our foreign policy because now we are dependent on nations in the Middle East, in Central Asia, in South America for the fuel to run our cars and trucks.   It’s in our national interest to control political affairs in those regions so that we retain access to affordable oil.

Just as US oil production peaked, many other countries have also peaked and gone into decline. There is considerable evidence to suggest that most of the Middle Eastern nations are close to their national peaks. This is a serious problem, but we are able to make up for it as long as there are still a few nations able to make up the difference and increase their rate of extraction. Inevitably at some point the world as a whole will peak in oil production and go into decline. There is growing evidence to suggest that that time may not be far off; in fact it may be as close as this year or next year or 2010 roughly. At that point we will have an enormous problem on our hands because we won’t be able to make up for the shortfall by just importing it from somewhere else. We will have run out of somewhere elses. So we will have to start making do with what we have.   That means transitioning from the kind of industrial growth economy we’ve had for the past 150 years to a steady state or a controllably contracting economy. Therefore this is a watershed economic event in human history and it represents probably the most challenging effort we will ever have had to undertake as a species--weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels in a way that’s cooperative, peaceful and survivable.

W:         Gas prices are going to rise. But besides larger expenses at the pump, how will this affect our daily lives and the global situation?

R:          Transportation is just one of the sectors that will be affected. We have to remember that transportation is more than people getting in their cars and going to work. It is also about transporting food from the farm to our plate; it’s also about the airline industry. This will be severely impacted. For instance in the airline industry we are not just talking about passenger traffic but also about air freight. As for agriculture, for every calorie of food energy that’s produced in the US, we expend 10 calories of fossil fuel energy using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; to fuel tractors and combines; to collect that food, store it, process it, and distribute it. Altogether our modern way of life is based on fossil fuels.   So when we look at the peaking of oil production, we are not just looking at a localized problem that we can solve with a single strategy.

W:         You mentioned in the film “Crude Impact” that an animal that expends more energy obtaining food than it receives from its food is doomed to failure and you said that seems to be our situation at the moment.

R:          That was always true of human beings too; we received an energy profit out of our foods. It only took us a certain percent of the energy that we were ultimately going to get from the food to grow the food. The net energy profit was what enabled us to survive biologically, to reproduce and to build civilizations. We extricated ourselves from that constraint with fossil fuels because suddenly we had an energy source that had been produced millions of years ago and was concentrated and stored over time, so that the amount of effort that was required from us – to access that resource, to drill oil wells to explore for oil, to pump the oil out of the ground – that energy was trivial in comparison to the energy that we got from oil.

Oil has been essentially free energy as compared to anything we have used in previous human history. So we could afford to solve social environmental and economic problems just by throwing more energy at them. Got a difficult job to do? Invent a machine to do it. In agriculture we replaced human labor and animal labor with machines. That meant that instead of having to have 80% of the population involved in food production in order to support a small middle class, now we could have 1% or 2 % of the population producing all the food and everyone else could move to the cities and get jobs flipping hamburgers or sitting behind cash registers. Temporarily we can afford to run a food system that is in energy deficit, a substantial deficit, just because of fossil fuels. But that is a unique situation in history. Ultimately when fossil fuels run out we will have to have an agricultural system that once again produces a net energy profit.

W:         So if we have reached peak oil now or will reach it in the next few years, how will it affect us? What do you see as a likely scenario?

R:         Well most likely we’ll see oil wars for control of the world’s remaining resources, because oil is a strategic material. We have had many oil wars before, even when oil was quite abundant. As it becomes scarcer, it is very likely that we will fight over what is left. Then we will see a collapse of the economy, because we won’t be able to sustain easy economic growth.   In fact, economies will begin to contract, because all economic activity is based on energy.   By definition, without energy nothing happens, so with less energy in the economy we’ll have less economic activity. We could see a collapse of currencies, especially the US dollar because the dollar has been based on oil ever since the 1970’s.  

Many industries would find it difficult to maintain themselves. Already the US auto industry is perched on the brink of bankruptcy because they have been building big SUVs instead of the fuel-efficient cars that people will need as oil becomes more expensive.   It’s going to be very difficult for them to make the transition. The airline industry and chemical industries will find it difficult to adapt and these again have knock-on impacts on the computer industry, among many others.   Across the board we will see economic contraction, which will translate into enormously increased rates of unemployment.

W:         In the 1970’s Paul Ehrilich wrote a book called Population Bomb which predicted mass starvation and chaos due to the exponential growth of the population. How do we know that “peak oil” isn’t another case of environmentalists “crying wolf?”

R:          It is interesting that you use the metaphor of the story of the boy who cries wolf. If you recall that fairy tale the wolf actually does come at the end of the tale and eats everyone--so it’s really a matter of timing. Are we talking about something that’s going to happen next year, or five, or ten years from now? That is really the essence of the discussion because the reality of peak oil production is itself not controversial. Every responsible expert agrees that this is something that is going to happen. Even the most optimistic analysts are saying it will happen within the next 20 years. Now that should give us no cause for complacency because it is going to take us 10 to 20 years of a crash- program scale of effort to mitigate the affects of oil production peak before it occurs. In other words the effort has to be expended before the event in order for us to prepare for it.

That’s not my conclusion, it’s the conclusion of a study prepared for the US Department of Energy released in 2005 called, “Peaking of World Oil Production and Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management.” The authors of the study ran three scenarios and came up with the conclusion that the US should spend 20 years at a crash program scale of effort to prepare for this event. Now we are not doing that, and probably we won’t have twenty years. My best guess is that we have maybe three or four years at this point. “The Hirsch Report” says that even if we initiate the program literally today it will take it will take four year before we see the first tiny impact. So we literally have no time to waste.

W:         Do you believe in the possibility of a gentle landing or do you think this is a plane coming in without its wheels?

R:          I think we waited so long to begin this necessary energy transition away from fossil fuels that there is probably not a path that we can take that could totally avoid considerable social and economic dislocation and human suffering, but some paths are definitely going to be much better than others. I think it’s important that those of us who recognize this problem not descend into despair and denial and cynicism, but engage the problem with the most effort we can.   The more we do, the better off we’ll be.   The range of impacts and suffering between the best-case scenario and worst-case scenario is quite substantial.

W:        What do you recommend that an individual do at the local, state and national levels?

R:          At all levels we need to be reducing the amount of fossil fuels we are using. It can’t get much simpler than that. Now…how we go about using less fossil fuel is going to boil down to some combination of substitution with renewable energy sources and conservation--which will include efficiency of energy use and also just curtailment of consumption. There are lots of strategies for these things and at each level of government, from the village up to the international level, we will have to sort through those strategies.

W:         Since big money and large corporations seem to be callingthe tunes when it comes to the US politics, and candidates with different opinions are quickly weeded out of the process early on, how can the necessary chances be actualized?

R:          That is a serious concern especially in this country. In many other nations the political structure is not quite as dysfunctional as is the case here in the US at the national level. Therefore, I think it’s important for people in the US to do as much as they can at the local, regional, and state levels because at those levels there usually is less corruption, and there are more opportunities for engaging officials and educating them, and more opportunities for proposing strategies and implementing them. On the local level there is also a better chance to achieve successes, and for people to get a sense of accomplishment and therefore not get burned out. I am not saying that efforts at the national level are not important; they certainly are, because there are lots of critical policies that can only be changed at the national level.  

However, if folks are working at policy change at the national level, chances are that they are having the experience of beating their heads against the wall. That is a discouraging experience to have. The people I know who are doing that suffer a pretty high rate of burnout. So operating at the local and regional levels offers more opportunities for gratifying successes. There are such efforts going on in dozens of town around the US. In little towns like Willits, California to cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Portland and Denver, members of city councils, mayors, and county boards of supervisors have taken the effort to understand the problem of Peak Oil.   They are grappling with challenges that will be facing societies and are strategically working to find and implement solutions. These range all the way from local production of food to rapid installation of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar to examining transportation systems and quickly funding electrified mass transit options.

W:         Throughout recorded history (and before it most likely), societies have collapsed. Does modern western technological society have immunity to this or do we just believe we do?

R:          I used to be a member of an academic organization called The International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. A lot of my interest in civilizations was to try and understand why they collapsed. Probably the best book on that topic is one by Joseph Tainter called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it he concludes that civilizations or complex societies are inherently unstable systems because they solve environmental/social problems by using increasing complexity…but increasing complexity in societies yields diminishing returns over time. So, for example, you try to solve the problem of feeding more people by growing food more intensively.   You have to increase the complexity of your system with more draft animals, more sophisticated irrigation systems, add layers to the food distribution systems. This would lead to a degrading of the soil, which adds to the requirement for even more complexity--a fertilization system. With every step of the way the system gets more complex and the costs of additional complexity increase, and the benefit to society from that increased complexity begins to fall off. At a certain point the investment in complexity becomes so great that it can’t be sustained by the society, and it collapses.

Now what actually sends society into collapse can be a variety of things. It could be environmental degradation. It could be a challenge from an outside society – a war or a takeover. It could be internal economic collapse. It could be almost anything. The point is that earlier in its history that society could have dealt with that problem very easily because that’s what complex societies do – they solve problems using complexity. At this stage that is no longer possible because the society is already so complex one more degree of complexity becomes unsustainable. That is basically the situation we are in right now.

W:         What is the relationship between energy and the maintenance of complex societies? Can a sudden scarcity of energy act as a catalyst to societal collapse?

R:          Social systems are all about energy. It takes energy to create social complexity. That’s why the only complex societies that exist are agricultural societies. Agricultural societies are the only ones that build up enough energy surplus through agriculture to actually fund the complexity of having a managerial class, a soldier class, a merchant class and so on – people who aren’t directly involved in food production, in hunting and gathering. If a society goes into energy deficit in any way, its whole superstructure of complexity becomes threatened.

W:         Do you think that our culture feels that it has reached a point where our technology is at such a level that we are no longer vulnerable to falling as previous cultures have?

R:          This is what we are encouraged to think. But everyone I know who has studied the situation doubts seriously that this is the case. It is easy to see how we have gotten to think this way.   After all, over the last 150 years every problem that has come our way has been easily solved just by throwing more energy at it and by developing more social complexity.   This was easy to develop because we had plenty of energy to fund it.

Running out of cheap oil is a different kind of problem than the ones we have been facing. You can’t, by definition, just throw more energy at it because lack of energy is the essence of the problem. So solving that problem will actually require reducing social complexity (while we’re increasing complexity in a very strange way.) In other words, we’ll have to go back to using more human labor in food production because we won’t be able to run the mechanized farm machinery as cheaply as we do today. We’ll need more people out in the fields working. That’s a lower degree of complexity. But managing the transition to that without social collapse will involve a lot of planning and organization, which is itself a form of complexity. We will need to develop complexity at the level of planning and organization while we are shedding complexity at the basic infrastructural level of society by encouraging local production for local consumption and by encouraging economic delocalization in every way.

W:         In the film Crude Impact, what really came home to me were the scenes from Ecuador and Nigeria. What are the hidden costs of oil production and use that people are sometimes unaware of or tend to forget?

R:          We in North America get the benefits of oil. We can use oil to do all sorts of things that make our lives easier. The energetic benefits of using oil are enormous. Just think of the human labor that is displaced by a single gallon of gasoline. If you’ve ever run out of gasoline in your car and had to push it ten feet you know what hard work that is. A single gallon of gasoline gets us twenty miles of travel in that same car, which is the equivalent of six or eight weeks of hard human labor. So we are getting the energy equivalent of six or eight weeks of hard human labor for $2.50 a gallon. Oil gives us enormous economic benefits, but the environmental, human and social cost of that we externalize to other countries where the oil is being produced.

In countries like Ecuador and Nigeria, oil is not produced in environmentally careful ways; as it is in the United States where it is also still being produced. It’s cheaper to ignore those environmental constraints. If local governments aren’t strong enough to stand up to oil companies, then it’s cheaper for the oil companies to just expel waste water into streams and rivers, or onto the land, rather than reinjecting it into the wells—which is what they have to do here in the U.S. It helps their bottom line. The result of that is the devastation of environments like the Amazon rainforest where drilling is going on--whether in Ecuador or in Nigeria. Wherever this is happening indigenous communities are also destroyed. The people there may be sitting on top of a gold mine in terms of energy resources, but they will not benefit from that oil. Typically within their country there will be a very small wealthy elite who will be paid off, in effect, by the oil companies and they will benefit, relatively speaking. Usually that profit ends up in Swiss banks accounts or somewhere else outside the country. But the people themselves don’t profit. Most major oil-producing counties are poor countries. Yet it is the US – the world’s foremost using and importing nation – that has one of the highest standards of living. How do you explain that?

 

W:         Global warming is starting to make an appearance even on hesitant Americans’ radar screens. Have any of the politicians who have recently been talking about global warming (for instance, Al Gore) started to mention the peak oil situation? Is there any awareness politically?

 

R:          I haven’t heard anything from Al Gore about peak oil. Bill Clinton has made some forceful statements about peak oil in the last few months. I’m happy to say that that may be because he read my book The Party’s Over. Some activists and scientists dealing with the problem of climate change are also aware of peak oil and aware of the relationship between the two crises. Most people who are concerned about the problem of peak oil are very much aware of the problem of global climate change.

At the fringes there are certainly people involved in one of these issues who have no interest in the other. There are people who are concerned about peak oil who would be happy to solve the problem by using lots more coal, which would be catastrophic for the global climate. There are also many climate change activists who really don’t get peak oil, who don’t understand the nature of the problem--the fact that it is a separate set of crises that need to be dealt with in a similar but not exactly the same fashion.

 

W:        Russia seems to have more oil than previously believed and now because of polar ice caps melting there will be expanded exploration in the artic. Will these things postpone peak oil?

 

R:          No, I don't think so. Russia is very near a secondary peak of production (its primary peak was in 1987) and the new discoveries will just make the decline gentler. Russia's production growth has slowed in the past couple of years and several Russian officials have openly stated that growth will cease over the next two or three years. Most of the polar hydrocarbon deposits appear to be gas rather than oil, and those are in very inhospitable environments. Production will be delayed by many years, perhaps decades, while the industry tries to figure out technological solutions to the problems posed by these environments.

 

W:        You have mentioned that if we solve this, if we jump this peak oil hurdle, but we don’t change our basic economic patterns, the next hurdle will be right there.   What do you mean by that?

 

R:          Because we have had cheap energy for the past couple of hundred years, we have created an economy that is an industrial growth economy. We have even created an economic and monetary system that assumes that growth is normal, inevitable and necessary, and so we can’t function in the absence of growth. If we don’t have 2-3% growth per year, we call that an economic catastrophe.  

At the same time, we have population growth that has a momentum of its own. Even if we reduce reproduction rates today, population will continue to grow for three or four decades to come. So even if we solve the energy problem, even if we were to find completely free energy to replace petroleum and other fossil fuels, if we don’t scale back the level of human economic activity on the planet, our consumption of resources, the chewing up of other species’ habitats, we would face a crisis of water, soil, minerals, and so on.   You can just go down the list.

I’m sure there are doctrinaire economists who would say that each and every one of those problems could be solved through substitution. Ultimately, that is unrealistic. The human economy exists within the earth’s biosphere and depends upon it. It is not the other way around. Unless we scale back the operation of human society so that it exists within the limits of the biosphere, we are destined to crash into those limits sooner or later.

W:         Could you briefly explain "The Oil Depletion Protocol"; its purpose, and particularly, how it could be put into effect by municipal and state governments? 

 

R:          The Oil Depletion Protocol is a simple draft agreement by which nations would pledge to reduce their oil production and imports by about 2.5 percent each year. This would have the effect of stabilizing prices at a high level and averting conflict over remaining supplies. The Protocol could be implemented also by companies, cities, and individuals--all that is necessary is to assess how much oil is currently being used, then plan to use 2.5 percent less each year. Oil will become more scarce and expensive as time goes on; if we don't wean ourselves from it proactively, the transition will be chaotic and destructive. If we plan for the transition and make it cooperatively and gradually, we will enjoy the best possible outcome. Therefore any country, company, city, or family that implements the Protocol will benefit from it. Readers can find out more about the Protocol by reading my book on the subject, or by going to our web site, www.oildepletionprotocol.org

W:         How do you feel about Al Gore championing of a "carbon tax"?  

 

R:          A carbon tax could be a good thing. However, I think an even better idea is to use quota rationing, as suggested by David Fleming of Great Britain, whose Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQS, www.teqs.net ) would use a market mechanism to seamlessly coordinate the energy-conserving behavior of businesses and individuals. In my book The Oil Depletion Protocol, I describe a scenario in which TEQS are used only for gasoline. At the beginning of each year, every adult would receive an equal gasoline quota for the year, free (the gasoline itself still has to be paid for, only the quota is free), knowing that next year's quota would be 2.5 percent smaller, and so on. So right off the bat there would be the incentive to start conserving. If the recipient did start bicycling to work instead of driving, she would have extra quotas left over and could sell those at any time. Meanwhile those who still insisted on driving a big vehicle long distances would run out of quotas and would have to buy more. The market would set the price. Wealth would be transferred from the energy guzzlers to the energy misers, reinforcing behavior that was in everyone's best interest.

 

 

Prepared by Science Applications International (SAIC) for the US Department of Energy.      

Crude Impact is a film about how energy use, particularly fossil fuels, has impacted the earth, mankind and other species. www.crudeimpact.com/index.html

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