"The Peak Oil debate is over: the 'peakists' have won the intellectual argument."
-Dr James Schlesinger, former U.S Sec. of Defense and Sec. of Energy
I have to confess a guilty pleasure. On Monday nights my ten year old daughter and I like to sit and watch Revolution on NBC. It is a silly adventure show based on a serious premise, the failure of the worldwide power-grid. Fifteen years in the past, a cabal of unknown conspirators, disabled the power grid which led to a global collapse. Our heroine Charlie Matheson is on a quest to save her brother Danny from the depredations of the tyrannical Monroe Militia. Following her dying father Ben’s last words, she has reunited with her uncle, the former General Miles Matheson, a defector from the Militia. Aaron Pittman, the ex-Google geek was bequeathed a "techno-magic pendant" that is mysteriously related to the blackout and at Ben’s direction is accompanying her on the quest. Along the way, they pick up Nora Clayton, the stalwart rebel and IED expert, and we are off to the races. Now it is not just about saving Charlie’s wayward brother Danny, but they must discover the secret of the pendant, turn the power back on, restore the good ole’ US of A, and perhaps save humanity in the process. There are plenty of sword fights, homemade pipe-bombs, and swashbuckling archery. It’s like Errol Flynn meets MacGyver in the post-industrial era, with a nod to Katniss Everdeen in the heroine.
Yes there are lots of background and plot details that are easy to pick apart. My teenage daughters and occasionally my wife enjoy pointing out the silly flaws, like why are all their clothes in such fine, fine condition? Or when the global grid failed, what happened when the earth’s 400 nuclear power-plants all went China Syndrome simultaneously as the power was cut to their cooling systems? (think: universal Fukushima) Just how could an internal combustion engine fire up after sitting dormant for fifteen years while the fuel degraded and the cylinders rusted and seized up? And what in the world is up with the heart-shaped pendants that swish-flick magically turn the power back on? But if you can ignore the incessant commercials (thank God the election is over, now all I have to worry about is eTrading, iPhoning, and the latest sloppy Thickburger) and suspend disbelief, it’s just good fun.
But as I reflect on the show, I think it has some pernicious flaws, and they play right into our collective national delusion. In the show, the blackout was intentional, it is reversible, and industrial civilization as exemplified by America is a good thing. As a society, we believe technology will always save us and that America is exceptional and blessed with abundance (growth) in perpetuity. Our cup runneth over because we are such good little capitalists in a free (enterprise) country. Think about this, the power was lost because they turned it off. The main goal, the great hope of the protagonists is to figure out the technology of those magic little pendants and turn the power back on. The creators of the show are unable, or choose not to, believe in a future where technology is unable to fulfill our needs, where when we flip the switch, nothing happens. They are incapable of envisioning a lower-energy future that doesn’t involve dictators or bands of dystopian marauders preying on the populace. They fail to imagine a scenario where circumstance and the demands of reality propel us off the de-industrial cliff, not a cabal of evildoers.
And make no mistake, we are heading off that cliff, although the date of the fall and the speed of our headlong rush are a matter of some debate. You see, although the show is about the loss of the global grid, electricity is not the root of the problem. Oh yes, we are utterly dependent on electricity here at the zenith of industrial civilization, but electric power is generated. It is a derivative of something else, be it wind, solar, flowing water, geo-thermal, uranium, natural gas, coal, and that most magic of substances, crude oil. If fact, I will go so far as to say that all the above forms of industrial energy are in fact derived from oil in some way, shape, or form. It takes oil to power the big earth-movers to build a dam, or mine coal. It takes oil to fire up the frac trucks or construct the wind-farm.
Most of the products we use on a daily basis, in the typical American middle class household are steeped in oil. Think plastic: the children's toys, the housing on the flat screen, the smart phone, the computer, childrens toys, the handles on the bathroom cabinets, the little plug we use to child-proof the electrical outlets, pharmaceuticals, the saran wrap, foam platter, and meat diaper that entombs your nightly dinner. Heck, the ground beef itself is soaked in oil, from the giant CAFO barn where your beef was "grown", to the gigantized GPS equipped combine that harvested the genetically modified feed, all of it is dependent on cheap, abundant oil. The next time you smooch your sweetheart, remember, even the elastic and fake satin in her Victoria’s Secret negligee are made from oil.
Even with the greenest of intentions, our industrial economy is so oil soaked as to make it as black as midnight. We use about 28 billion barrels of oil a year at the global level. That’s about 75 million barrels a day, if you do the math. Think about that for a moment. In order to maintain a lifestyle in which perhaps a quarter of the world’s have a decent standard of living, a tiny minority lives lives of leisure, and the rest live on a few dollars a day, we must consume 75 million barrels of oil a day, each and every day.
Contrary to what the fossil fuel propagandists tell you on their snazzy TV commercials (remember a commercial is designed to sell you something) the stuff is not limitless.
History will vindicate M. King Hubbert who forecast both the US peak and the worldwide peak decades in advance. This is the famous Peak Oil theory, it is the second horse in the running for our Trifecta. The internet abounds with information on the subject, but I would recommend the Post Carbon Institute as a good place to start.
It’s not even running out that is the main issue. Geologists believe we have about 1 trillion of barrels of oil left in the ground. It is the fact that we burned the easiest to extract, highest quality stuff first. They no longer discover giant elephant fields where the oil gushes from the ground, we now must drill in miles of ocean water and squeeze it from fractured shale formations. We must eradicate every trace of the living Earth in the Athabasca Tar Sands to procure that precious sludge. The cheap, easy stuff is gone. Despite all the good news of those snazzy commercials, world oil production has been flat since ’05. But that’s okay, because growth has either been negative or only sluggishly positive since ’08.
And should all the plans of the White House, Congress, and the Fed fall right into place, and economic growth takes off to four or five percent a year, chances are the price of oil will spike once again and kill off our nascent recovery. This sort of instability was exactly what was predicted in the wake of peaking. But surely, you argue, if it were true, they would know, and would implement policy to fix this. They do know, and have known since at least 1972 (the Limits to Growth). Unfortunately, as Guy McPherson puts it, there are no politically viable solutions. The Hirsch Report to Congress concluded peak oil is a reality and we would need to implement adaptive strategies two decades before hitting peak in order to have a smooth transition. But the tactics of corporate America generally, and the fossil fuel companies in particular, are to divide and delay as long as possible in order to maximize the short term return to themselves and their shareholders.
As we continue our bumpy ride down the back side of Hubbert’s peak, more and more of the systems we take for granted will destabilize and fall apart. Just in time delivery, agribusiness, the daily commute to work, all these and more are at risk, and will surely fail. I know, dear reader, you are saying bring in alternatives, technology. Again, alternatives are in fact derived in part from oil. You have to mine the neodymium for the wind turbines, for example. Also, alternatives don’t pack the same punch as good old crude oil (EROEI), and they are mostly about generating electricity. They are not well suited to transport. At the end of the day, it is about the math. You simply cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
The longer we buy into the memes that are fed to us, oil is limitless, growth is always good, technology can overcome any obstacle; the longer we fail to have an adult conversation about our predicaments. We will fail to put in decentralized mitigation strategies that might allow us to cope. Local public transit, community gardening based in permaculture, passive solar and small scale active solar and small wind turbines are some examples. The Transition Town movement is another template that might be used. But we should have started yesterday. And unfortunately that means rather than being the masters of our destiny, we will be at the mercy of events.
So, if you fancy it, watch Revolution. Like I said it is good clean fun. Just watch it with clear eyes, and understand that no Google-Fairy will deliver a Techno-Magic pendant to make everything run. Understand that we already have a magic pendant, it is just black and gooey and it’s running down.
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