Oil: A Bleak Vision

The critiques of my position on the current oil crisis at pandagon - positing that we have trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure dedicated to an oil-fueled civilization and so imagining essentially immediate and drastic change in our oil consumption patterns is both imprudent and unthinkable - while possibly correct, a point I would love to be able to concede (I desperately want my daughter to grow up in a world that is not a nightmare of privation and desperation), depend significantly on a basic assumption. I find that assumption inconsistent with a detailed understanding of the fundamental principles governing the systems we are discussing. First, I'll give you my punch line and then make the argument, so that if you decide you'd rather go get rickrolled on another website you don't have to continue reading this:

The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.

The assumption that the critiques make is that there are some capacities in our system that will allow us to undergo a slow transformation (slow being one or two generations) from the unsustainable oil-fueled culture we have built. For example, some of the capacities that have been referred to include rapid spin-up of alternative oil equivalent fuel sources, corporate self interest that controls oil supplies in a prudent fashion, and what I would characterize as moderate conservation efforts. And perhaps the more important point is that these capacities are very likely an inescapable requirement for a slow transformation. Evidence strongly suggests that the situation we are currently encountering is consistent with the peak oil model - the infamous Hubbert's peak. In this analysis an exponentially increasing demand for a limited resource produces an exponential decay - a crash - in the availability of the resource. Notably, this crash depends simply on an interaction between supply and demand - it doesn't for instance take into account potentially disastrous external events, for instance, conventional - or, God forbid - nuclear military conflagration in the Middle East. The only way to cushion the ruthless mathematics of such a crash is through capacities external to the resource such as those identified above.

Since slow transformation may ultimately depend on the external capacities, these should be critically examined.

1. There are currently no obvious technologies that can be used to produce alternative oil equivalent fuel sources. The unforgiving and unassailable principles of physics strongly suggest that developing them at a level sufficient for a slow transformation is unlikely, at best. We have a long history of imagining that pressing problems will yield to relatively quick technological fixes, only to be repeatedly disappointed: unmetered electrical power from nuclear plants? fusion? corn ethanol? Energy principles are extraordinarily well understood in the scientific and engineering communities and there just isn't a lot of low hanging fruit waiting to be picked.

2. Imagining that corporate self interest will play a significant role ignores that corporations are probably singularly incapable of addressing issues such as these. Our free-market model rewards corporations based on criteria that almost without exception do not include thoughtful long-term stewardship of resources. Is there any more evidence necessary than the fuel-efficiency obstructionist history of U.S. domestic automakers, now facing bankruptcy? The sub-prime mortgage debacle? Corporations are at least as likely as individuals to act in fundamentally irrational ways that prove their own destruction.

3. Conservation. Aye, that's the rub. Assuming my analyses above are correct (obviously, debatable), can conservation play a key role in a slow transformation? That becomes simply a question of whether the conservation rate is sufficient to offset the exponential crash associated with Hubbert's peak, and that is the heart of my argument. From what I understand about the mathematics of these principles the rate of conservation suggested by slow transformation (people being more careful about when and how they use their cars, people replacing 25 mpg vehicles with 50 mpg vehicles over the next decade, redesigning and rebuilding a less oil-dependent infrastructure) is insufficient to offset the rate of collapse predicted by Hubbert's peak.

The critics of my argument point out that because of deep infrastructure investments we cannot expect a drastic and immediate change from our current oil-dependence, that we need to approach this in a gentle and orderly fashion . The problem with this critique is that those prehistoric forests that produced the oil fields we are currently sucking dry just don't care that you live in a suburb 50 miles from your workplace, that your food supplies need to travel an average of 1500 miles to reach your plate. The solar constant of 1340 W/m^2 just doesn't care that our agriculture, our food supply, depends on climate conditions in the mid-west grain belt and the Asian rice belt, that much of agriculture depends on fresh water supplied by a slowly melting summer snow-pack. The second law of thermodynamics just doesn't care that you have to pay 5 dollars for a gallon of gas or 10 dollars, or 100 dollars, that you are wishing or praying as hard as you can for a miraculous new source of energy. And guess what? Those players win by default: they are inescapable principles and they JUST DON'T CARE.

I understand my vision is a very bleak one. I hope against hope that it is deeply flawed. But it is insufficient to argue against it simply because it would prove problematic for those who are now ensconced in an oil-dependent infrastructure. The models and principles underlying the vision are orthogonal to those considerations. The black plague that killed perhaps 75 million people simply didn't care that the civilizations of the 14th century were built on an infrastructure that fed the devastation, and oil simply doesn't care that our civilization is built on an infrastructure that has some potential to surpass that horrific history. The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.