Rearranging the Deck Chairs

Some musings for the beginning of meteorological summer:

It seems that one symptom of our tortured age is the fact that government--at all levels--has a hard time doing anything productive. Majoring in minors seems to be the current modus operandi for our legislative bodies. Legislative paralysis and ineffectiveness is a sign of the times.

From where I stand, this is where we are at the moment: poison continues pouring unabated into the Gulf of Mexico; the economic crisis in Europe threatens to bring the worldwide economic house of cards crashing down around us; here in Ohio, the rate of home foreclosures continues to rise while more and more commercial properties exhibit "available for rent" signs; Ohio's main manufacturing industry--automobiles--is largely on life support, which means we've seen lower tax revenues and looming cuts as the next biennial budget is slated for debate, beginning next month. The only positive news right now is that enrollment at the two schools where I teach is at record levels. This record student population provides us all with a bit of job security, though it's likely temporary as we are to a great extent state-funded. What happens if higher education tax support and government student loan support goes away?

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have a foreboding sense that we haven't seen anything in the way of economic dislocation yet. I get the feeling that the other shoe could drop at any time. Where this will all end is unknown. It's truly a scary time.

So what is our state legislature doing? Well, last week the Ohio Senate passed a bill that would allow concealed weapon permit holders to bring their guns into places that serve alcohol. That's right. In the face of imminent economic, ecological, and social collapse, this is clearly the hot issue of the year that they've decided they needed to focus their attention on. Of all the harebrained ideas...???!!! (Apologies to the hares--I really think they would be smarter than this.) Of course, according to this bill, the person who comes packing heat into Joe's Pub is required to abstain from imbibing. But how could that provision be enforced? After all, the excuse given for allowing concealed carry in the first place was to make sure others don't know who's packing. Presumably bartenders and maitre d's would be included among the ignorant. Leading law enforcement figures in Ohio have testified against this bill, stating the obvious: firearms and pints of ale are a potentially dangerous combination. If this provision becomes law, they testified, we'll see bar fights turn deadly. But never mind; the senators, in thrall as they clearly are to the gun worshipers, ignored both the officers' testimonies and other pleas for sanity.

Hopefully the Ohio House of Representatives, and/or Governor Strickland, will keep their heads screwed on when this bill shows up on their desks, and prevent(s) it from becoming law. But I don't think I'd wager any money on it.

Meanwhile, the toxic goo continues spilling out into the ocean, with no end in sight. Neither BP nor government officials, nor anyone else, seems to have a clue how to stop it. And hurricane season officially opened yesterday, with meteorologists predicting a "more active than average" season. This means we have a rather good chance of finding out what one gets when a Category 3 or 4 hurricane--or two or three or four of them--mates with a fountain of petroleum.

To top it off for now, the Columbus Dispatch reprinted a column from Charles Krauthammer in which he blames environmentalists for the Deepwater disaster. Yep, that's right. Krauthammer asserts that because tree-huggers have blocked drilling in ANWAR and shallower offshore waters, they're the reason folks like BP have been forced to drill in these increasingly treacherous locations.

Sorry, Charlie, but it ain't so. The reason BP and other oil companies are drilling in deep water and other hard-to-reach and hard-to-protect-from-spill sites is because we've already tapped out all the safer places to drill. All the easy-to-reach oil reserves have been exploited, and many of those reserves are in declining production. And another thing Krauthammer and other so-called conservatives (Drill, baby, drill? What is it they're "conserving" anyway?) don't understand: Expanded drilling isn't going to do more than temporarily slake our thirst for petroleum. Even if we allow drilling in these so-called "safer" places like ANWAR--which we probably will do, sooner or later--the amount produced won't offset the decline in production from the depleting wells in other places around the globe. The end of cheap petroleum is at hand; any newly developed sources are going to be increasingly costly--in monetary terms, in ease of access, and, potentially, in environmental harm.

Krauthammer and his ilk fail to understand a simple fact: our continued addiction to petroleum is to blame, not BP, not environmentalists, not the lack of effective regulation. We have painted ourselves into a corner by building a civilization on a finite resource--one that we knew from the beginning would eventually, someday, run short. And one that, so far at least, has no replacement in sight that can do everything that fossil fuels can do. As the US Joint Forces Command reported this past February (here, beginning on p. 24), like it or not, we're likely to begin experiencing petroleum withdrawal symptoms soon, as worldwide supplies begin to decline and demand picks up when the worldwide economy tries to recover. The Joint Forces Command predicts the end of surplus petroleum by 2012 and severe shortages--as much as ten million barrels a day--by 2015.

The scenario pictured by this prediction is not a pretty one. We need to be prepared for it, but nobody's talking about it, let alone making plans. Instead, our so-called leaders are stalemated or dealing with side issues like guns in bars. The only thing--the ONLY thing--that can put an end to this madness is for us to end our addiction to the stuff and to leave as much of it as possible in the ground. Energy writer Richard Heinberg's latest newsletter explains this all better than I can. I recommend reading it all the way through.

But as the inevitable oil crunch and the implosion of the global economy develops, and as legislative paralysis continues, we can surely expect more scapegoating from people like Krauthammer.

An ancient Chinese curse reads, "May you live in interesting times." I believe we're there. Interesting indeed.

Mining for Mithril

During the past two weeks, we have watched another environmental tragedy unfold. The sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform and the subsequent oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico gives those of us old enough to remember the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska and the oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, twenty years earlier a clear sense of déjà vu. It’s also a grim reminder that Congress had a reason, back in 1981, for banning offshore drilling.

But times have changed. We seem no longer able to afford the luxury of keeping oil wells out of our continental shelves. The Deepwater Horizon disaster comes on the heels of the president’s decision to open our shorelines to oil exploration and drilling. And despite the presidential moratorium on new drilling leases imposed since the spill, and despite renewed calls for a more permanent offshore drilling ban, it’s unlikely that any new ban will be nearly as long lasting as the 1981 restrictions. What has changed?

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy masterwork The Lord of the Rings, we learn about a precious metal called mithril. Found only in the dwarf mines of Moria, this metal had almost magical properties. It was stronger than tempered steel but very light in weight. It had the beauty and the sheen of ordinary silver, but it never tarnished. It was easy to work and could be made into many beautiful and useful objects. While it was still mined, it fetched ten times as much as its weight in gold. It was no wonder that the dwarves in Moria sought new sources for mithril ore. According to Gandalf, the dwarves dug deeper and further underground to seek for and to retrieve the ore, until one day they dug too deeply and unleashed a horrific evil from the dim, forgotten past: a fire-and-shadow, demon-like monster called a Balrog. This monster drove the dwarves out of their historic dwelling place, Moria; thus they paid a huge price for their mithril lust.

Petroleum, although it is not a metallic substance, has many qualities in common with mithril. We take it so much for granted that most of us have never contemplated what a wondrous material it really is. But like mithril, it too has almost magical properties. It can be burned, releasing almost unimaginable amounts of energy. It can be made into many useful (though perhaps not beautiful) substances: plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, medicines. It has become indispensable to our way of life. And in our seeking for it, and in our burning of it, we have released our own Balrogs. This and earlier oil spills are an example. Air and water pollution, chemical contamination, solid waste contamination, cancers, and climate instability are others.

It’s almost impossible to overstate our dependence on petroleum. It is behind almost everything we do, and it (along with other fossil fuels) has powered and sustained the industrial and technological revolutions that our civilization depends upon.

But the last and possibly the most fearful and powerful Balrog that will emerge is the one that was easiest to foresee; indeed it had been foreseen as early as the early twentieth century. This is the fact that petroleum is a finite resource found on a finite planet, and that eventually, someday, the petroleum party would end. And long before we actually run out of the stuff, we would run out of easily accessible sources. We would no longer be able to increase supply to meet any increased demand. But for most of the twentieth century, we put these thoughts out of our minds. We were having too much fun, after all.

In recent years, however, we’ve witnessed evidence that our lust for petroleum is beginning to butt heads with its finite nature. In every year since 1981, for example, geologists have found less petroleum in newly discovered deposits than we have burned. Since 2005, world production has not increased, despite higher prices that would earlier have encouraged producers to pump more out. And despite the lowering of demand caused by the current recession and the crash in oil prices in September 2008, prices have once again been creeping upward again.

During the last few months, a couple of reports have surfaced that should make all of us concerned. This past February, the United States Joint Forces Command issued its Joint Operating Environment 2010 report. This report, issued about every two years, deals with strategic and national security trends. As the nation’s guardians, the US military forces need to be prepared for all probable and possible future threats to the nation’s security. While this report is somewhat speculative and deals with possibilities and contingencies, and while it does not represent official government policy, it does discuss trends that the military believes needs to be taken into account as they plan for future defense needs. This February report contains some sobering information about near-term petroleum supply. It predicts a possible end to surplus production capacity in 2012 and a severe oil shortage of as much as 10 million barrels per day by 2015. (One can access the report here; the discussion of energy security begins on p. 24.)

This is very sobering news; indeed it truly is news in every sense of the word. An end to surplus petroleum capacity by 2012—that’s only 19 months away. The curious thing, then, is why this report, dealing with something that will directly affect all of us, and possibly soon, has been largely ignored by the domestic media. The United Kingdom’s Guardian reported it (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/11/peak-oil-production-supply), but that’s about it.

Another report surfaced recently. Near the end of March, a Department of Energy official named Glen Sweetnam, who advises the president on petroleum issues, gave an interview to a French journalist. This interview was published online, in French. Here’s a translation: http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/03/25/washington-considers-a-decline-of-world-oil-production-as-of-2011/. In the interview, Sweetnam predicts worldwide production declines, beginning next year, if investment in new production doesn’t materialize. Again, this report was not picked up by the domestic media. One wonders why.

Is the last Balrog, petroleum depletion, loose? We can’t know for sure until after it actually happens. But the Deepwater Horizon disaster indicates that access to the easy-to-get-to oil is disappearing. New drilling projects are going to be increasingly risky and increasingly expensive. This can only mean higher prices for all of us, and there may come a point of diminishing returns where attempting to pump out the petroleum might simply cost too much—both in dollars and in environmental threat—to be worth doing. Like the dwarves of Moria, we have painted ourselves into a corner by building a civilization that is so dependent on a finite, limited resource. Yes, there’s plenty of petroleum left out there. But it’s going to cost us more and more to retrieve it.

One final thought about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I don’t think it does us much good to blame British Petroleum, lax government regulation, or “Big Oil,” for this disaster. As President George W. Bush said in his 2006 State of the Union address, “America is addicted to oil.” The nation that contains six percent of the world’s population burns 25 percent of its petroleum production. And our addiction is complicated by our sense of entitlement. We’re all implicated in the fouling of the Gulf of Mexico. We contribute to the dead wildlife every time we get into our cars and drive when we could have walked, bicycled, or taken public transport. We help contaminate the Gulf’s beaches by buying and wearing clothing made from petroleum-based synthetic fibers. We add to the oil slick every time we buy bottled water, milk, or soda in plastic jugs. Our lifestyles are inextricably linked to this disaster. So long as this oil addiction continues, we can count on more disasters of this kind.

Fighting a real Balrog might have been easier than untangling ourselves from our oil fix.