210 pp paper, $16.95 US, $22.95 Canadian
If petroleum has become the addiction of modernity, then we
postpetroleumologists also must confess to dragging
ourselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. We
are insatiably hungry for books, movies, websites and conferences about the
coming crash. We comb the Current Affairs shelves of local bookstores and pass
up dozens of titles on the foibles of George W. Bush to glom scanty pickings
about the gasoline crack of history.
Richard Heinberg has at last, after a year, graced us with a sequel to The Party's Over (reviewed in PCA 51) which he calls Powerdown. Like Party's Over, it is an easy read, 186 pages before the end notes, and written with his characteristic skill and humility.
Heinberg is not a geophysicist but an educator. He teaches ecological systems. If I were anywhere near New College in California I would try to get into one of his lectures, because the man has a gift for telling it straight and keeping it simple.
In Powerdown, as in Party's Over, Heinberg plays to his own strengths and draws upon biology, history and human ecology to lay foundations for solid - and what to the uninitiated may seem dire - predictions.
A lot has happened in postpetroleumology since Party debuted in 2003. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil held its Second International Conference in Berlin and has scheduled a third for Lisbon in May 2005. The natural gas industry has gone to the mountaintop and glimpsed the far slide. China, India and the USA are all busily adding Strategic Petroleum Reserves, despite historically unprecedented prices for crude, and at a moment when economic logic should dictate opening the reserves to bring prices back in line. It is outside the norm in any US Presidential election year when crude oil prices do not rise to favor a Bush challenger (1980, 2000) or fall to favor a Bush incumbent (1984, 1988), but in late August 2004, the price of crude briefly crossed $49/barrel and the smart money, exemplified by T. Boone Pickens, started snapping up oil futures 3 to 5 years out.
Powerdown reminds us, in graphic terms, that threatening and bullying is no solution. Heinberg calls that strategy 'Last One Standing' and spends a third of his new book taking it apart.
Take gas. The geopolitical blowback from Russia and Europe of Bushleague attempts to meet a catastrophic shortfall in natural gas by importing LNG piped across Afghanistan and Pakistan is matched only in breathtaking ignorance by the physical constraints. In 2003 the US had only four LNG offloading terminals. Tankers and terminals have to keep the gas at minus 160°C (-200°F) and the world's tanker fleet is already contracted to Japan, S. Korea, and China. Natural gas accounts for 24% of the total energy used in the USA. Domestic production peaked in 1970, Mexico's in 2002, Canada's in 2003. North American production is now in decline and the downslope resembles Top Thrill Dragster, a roller coaster in Ohio that accelerates to 120 mph in under 4 seconds. Some time in 2005, electric consumers in California should really feel the G's. Does anyone seriously think that China, Russia and Europe will go without their cooking and heating fuel in order to sell LNG to powerplants tasked with keeping champagne chilled in Silicon Valley? Or that we could force them to?
All this would be a real bummer if Heinberg didn't also show us a garden path. Two, actually. The first is Powerdown, the path of cooperation, conservation and sharing. Environmental, anti-war, anti-globalization and human rights organizations are migrating in this direction, but the pace is glacial and the cultural politics remain an obstacle. No one ever won an election or garnered large donations by promising less. On the other side, raising false hopes is an industry. Its called Advertising.
Building Lifeboats, Heinberg's favored path, urges community solidarity and preservation at the onset of the next Dark Ages. While logical, it relies on fatalism of the kind that makes these post-peak writings so scary. IF we assume the end is near - nearer than our politicians, Big Oil executives, and academics are telling us - and a return to something resembling the Nineteenth Century - agrarian, dependant on animal energy, localized - is inevitable, then we can and should start to prepare. Like the monasteries that rescued the libraries of Rome and Constantinople and tended them faithfully for centuries, we should be saving books, you know, the kind printed on wood pulp? We can also save seeds, learn to drive mules, and join with our neighbors to provide some community service worthy of mutual support and protection.
How soon? Heinberg doesn't say, but he hints that it may have already begun.