Banks and offices are the buzz-kill of downtowns. Know why? Urban documentary filmmaker Kirk Westphal, founder of Westphal Associates, gives his view on this and other reasons why folks will do a hard stop and head no further down the block.
Post 3: Why Peak Oil is the most important thing you'll never hear
Posted By: Kirk Westphal
Posted: 3/4/2011
In 2005, energy researcher Robert L. Hirsch produced a report at the request of the US Department of Energy (he wrote a great 9-page summary of it here). In this report, a couple of sentences particularly grabbed my attention: "Failure to initiate timely mitigation with an appropriate lead-time is certain to result in very severe economic consequences... The world has never confronted a problem like this."
Soon after, Hirsch received instructions never to talk about this subject again.
What did he and other countries let out of the bag? Here's the gist: We're entering an era of decreased oil availability, we'll need to find a way to live with a lot less of it, and the likely consequences of inaction aren't pretty.
The desire for self reliance and weaning ourselves off foreign oil makes for good speeches. But policies to achieve this have never actually been attempted in this country with any degree of sincerity, as evidenced by this excellent segment:
The part that's not funny about this situation is that it looks like we're running out of time to do something meaningful about it. And while we dither, much of the roughly $500 billion dollars that U.S. drivers spend on gasoline every year not only leaves the country, but goes to people who arguably don't have our best interests at heart.
My goal in this final post is to 1) give you a glimpse of the global energy dynamics that will ultimately impact each of our day-to-day lives, and 2) look at some things we can do to shape these changes and emerge a more successful, resilient community.
Here are the basics: Oil (and its products like gasoline, diesel and jet fuel) powers the global economy, directly or indirectly, more than any other fuel, from manufacturing products to growing food to transporting people and goods (by cars, boats, trains and planes). And demand for oil is increasing. The world population is growing, and a growing proportion of those people are acquiring an oil-intensive Western lifestyle: driving cars, getting new homes and filling them with things, eating less local food.
On the supply side, oil production is plateauing. Companies haven't been finding new oil fields (the worldwide supply curve has "peaked" or will soon, which is where the term Peak Oil comes from). And it's getting more expensive to get more oil out of the ground, whether it's because it's in deep water, in the arctic, or mixed in with a bunch of rock, gone are the days of the Beverly Hillbillies "gushers" where you poke a hole in the ground and out it comes.
So it's not that the Earth is literally "running out" of oil, it just now requires an increasing amount of energy to get to it or process it. At some point, when the amount of the energy it takes to get oil approaches the amount of energy you get from burning it, extraction logically comes to a halt because your net "energy return" is zero. Along the way, following the laws of supply and demand, oil and everything that depends on oil becomes more expensive. (Not in a gradual way, either -- smooth supply curves don't apply when you're dealing with a finite resource. What you end up with are price increases punctuated by a series of spikes and shortages.) Again, no matter how much more efficient our products or way of life becomes, oil extraction will cease when net energy return is zero.
There's not a lot of argument about what I've laid out so far. Nor is there disagreement that even a "crash course" in retrofitting will take a long time to replace the most critical parts of the world's oil-powered infrastructure to run on potential temporary substitutes like natural gas and coal-fired electricity. (While there is debate about when exactly Peak Oil will occur, even the rosier projections of when we'd need to start preparing have passed us by.) And I say "temporary substitutes" because natural gas and coal are also finite, and will increase in price as demand shifts to them.
It's also acknowledged that it is physically impossible for any combination of fully-ramped-up renewable sources (solar, wind, hydroelectric) to pick up enough of the slack to avoid severe economic consequences when oil availability slows. And while they'll certainly help, the fraction of today's energy use that these renewable resources could replace is quite small -- there just isn't nearly the reliability or energy "density" in these resources to match the energy we're accustomed to from oil.
What can we do? At risk of being unfashionable, I'll say that we could learn a thing or two from our peers around the world. Pretty much every wealthy Western country has done something about their relationship with oil, except the US. The use of taxes is one area we've been particularly skittish about: here's what gas prices look like among this group: