Is Cheap Oil Dead?
Richard Heinberg addresses "The End of Oil"
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Earlier this summer, author Richard Heinberg spoke near Stevens Point, Wisconsin at the annual Midwest Renewable Energy Fair. Heinberg talked about Peak Oil extraction and the resulting decline of industrial societies. Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network was one of few media in attendance to report.
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Heinberg speaks passionately at the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair
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Richard Heinberg calls himself a prophet of doom. He thinks after the world reaches peak oil extraction and prices rise industrial civilization will soon collapse.
As crude oil prices soar, some analysts think we may have reached peak production. Richard Heinberg is a prophet of doom. He’s written a book, “The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies.” Following the research of oil geologists, M King Hubbert and Colin Campbell, Heinberg thinks world oil extraction has or is about to peak, leading towards permanent higher energy costs. The June 2004 National Geographic Magazine confirms this view in an article entitled “The End of Cheap Oil.” Heinberg concludes we must plan for a very different energy future and we must start today. Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network talked with Heinberg about Peak Oil, earlier this summer, after he gave a speech, near Stevens Point, at the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair.
Almost everybody agrees the world has about a trillion barrels of oil left in the ground. Which is a heck of a lot of oil. The world burns about eighty million barrels of oil a day, about thirty billion barrels a year.
So the Wall Street Journal, doing the math, assures us, loudly and confidently, often on the front pages, that we have more than forty years of oil left.
Other Establishment voices chime in don’t worry about oil. We’re dead in the long run, anyway, they say. And besides, there’s plenty of oil left in the Middle East or Venezuela or Canada. As prices rise we’ll use oil more efficiently. And there’ll be more exploration and discovery. And, we’ll find substitutes, right?
During the past century our industrial civilization has created a culture based almost exclusively on mining and consuming vast quantities of gas, oil, and coal. Our food and transportation systems are utterly dependent upon these reserves. This despite information, like in the 1972 book “Limits to Growth,” that the reserves will someday run out.
A cultural critic Richard Heinberg says from an economic standpoint, when the world runs out of oil isn’t the right question to ask.
“Oil is not like the gas in the tank of your car, where you can run the car just fine until it absolutely runs out until you hit those last drops the car can go twenty miles an hour or sixty miles an hour. It doesn’t matter until it actually runs out.”
Heinberg says we’ve extracted the easy oil. The stuff you just stick a straw in the ground, pump up, refine, and barrel. The rest of the oil is harder to get.
So, what matters really is when production begins to taper off. After that point prices rise, unless demand drops, and that doesn’t appear likely with China industrializing.
The real question Heinberg says is, when is the big rollover?
The big rollover is when the demand for oil outstrips the capacity to produce it. On a smaller scale the United States rollover occurred in 1970.
And do you remember 1973 the lines at the gas stations?
The big rollover is global, not local. A former Texaco geologist, Colin Campbell, has studied declining oil fields around the world. Campbell says the big rollover will happen by 2010. Campbell supports Heinberg’s arguments about Peak Oil. After the big rollover, oil prices rise as it’ll take as much energy to explore and extract oil as the wells themselves produce.
“So what that means is global oil production is going to peak within the next few years, and go downhill regardless of what we do, regardless of how much money we spend on exploration, or new technology, and we’re just going to have to get used to that.”
Oil may cost a hundred dollars a barrel before we know.
As the petroleum age winds down there may be slow change from our wastefulness. But especially with rising population, and no adequate substitutes on the horizon for oil, there is the possibility of a chaotic breakdown of society.
Heinberg says it may become like the Bible, the bad parts, that is.
“The kind of automatic response of industrial societies I’m afraid is seeking to keep the status quo even if it requires wars of horrific consequences, that seems to be where we’re headed right now in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, I don’t think there’s leadership in this country right now to use a different strategy. I don’t think they’ll back off, unless the people demand it.
But other paths are possible. We’d have to block the blazing highway to globalization. More emphasis instead on renewable energy, simpler lives, smaller families, sharing, intelligence and compassion.
“Well, you know industrial production has been an utter disaster for traditional cultures, for common people, and for nature. And so the end of industrial society from a long term perspective a really good thing. If we can survive it. A hundred years from now we could be living very satisfying lives compared to what we’re living right now. We could be living in secure, more locally based communities, knowing the people who supply our food, saying hello to the people who make our shoes, as we’re walking to work. You know, maybe everybody doesn’t have that as an ideal, but to me that’s a very satisfying life. I think we can get there. And once we get there we may see this era, this era of industrialism as hell on earth. And thank our lucky stars that we got through it. So yeah, the party may just be beginning, but we’re not going to get there automatically. It’s not going to happen without hard work and sacrifice.”
John Howe wrote a book about Peak Oil: The End of Fossil Energy and a Plan for Sustainability
The book lays out a plan to "save some" for the coming generations.
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A full recording of Heinberg’s Peak Oil speech, broken into easily downloadable segments, produced by Nick Vander Puy for the Superior Broadcast Network follows.
*Use the same directions listed above for downloading the separate parts
of this speech.*
1. - "Oil exhaustion isn't like an empty gas tank." (12 minutes)
2. - "1970 Rollover in America..." (4 minutes)
3. - "When will oil run out?" (7 minutes)
4. - "Word is leaking out about the situation." (4 minutes)
5 . - "Are we smarter than yeast?" (23 minutes)
If you would prefer your own copy of Heinberg's speech (running time: ~1:00 hour) please send an email to nick@superiorbroadcast.org. Fully mastered CD's cost $15.00 each.
More information about Richard Heinberg can be found at his web site MUSELETTER.
The National Geographic article that Richard is holding at his speech is "The End Of Cheap Oil".
Click Here to download an interview by Nick Vander Puy with Richard Heinberg (mp3 five minutes )
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