2 March 2006The Anthropik NetworkJason Godesky
Yesterday's New York Times included an editorial by Robert Semple, Jr., associate editor of the Times Editorial Board, titled, "The End of Oil," in which the "Newspaper of Record" went on record with:
The concept of peak oil has not been widely written about. But people are talking about it now. It deserves a careful look -- largely because it is almost certainly correct.
While Semple's editorial uses EIA numbers to posit a peak in the timeframe around 2037 or 2047, the very fact that peak oil is being discussed in the editorial pages of the New York Times represents a major shift: the kind of change in awareness of our situation that I predicted would mark the overall "mood" of 2006.
It's hardly remarkable that people are starting to notice: the Times' editorial notwithstanding, we're at Hubbert's Peak right now. Stuart Staniford at the Oil Drum posted an excellent, and incredibly useful article titled, "Why peak oil is probably about now." Staniford lists many reasons, and presents a strong case that we have already reached the major tipping point. This point is only underscored by the very next article at the Oil Drum, "2005 Exploration Round-Up."
First of all, my reading of the data, plus my own personal experience leads me to discern the following themes: Deeper water, deeper reservoirs, smaller discoveries, more gas, less oil.
In other words, exploration is already on the downside of the peak, and every discovery is more and more likely to be smaller, deeper, and all around more expensive. In other words, the "EI" part is going up, while the "ER" remains the same--so the overall effect is a drop in EROEI.
This reminded me of a piece that Matt Savinar linked to in February, "True Pictures of Housing's Contribution to the U.S. Economy," which concluded that "the US economy sans Housing Bubble has been in a depression since 2001." When combined with thelatestnewsaboutsaid "bubble," I'm obviously reminded of the sequence of collapse: recession, depression, and finally, nothing we've ever seen before. Did we skip recession and go straight to depression without even noticing, all because a housing bubble obscured the trend?
We'll have to wait and see if that turns out, but it's definitely a development worth watching. It's important to remember that in the end, collapse is always a matter of confidence. Infrastructural crises like peak oil or environmental problems may push a society to that point, but if there's one thing complex societies are supposed to do, it's answering exactly those kinds of challenges. That's why we submit to complex societies: they promise to protect us from a lack of food (or other energy sources), and to manage our natural resources in a more responsible way. Once we've passed the point of diminishing returns, however, the ability of complex society to answer those challenges diminishes with it. There are few crises so destructive that some level of investment--however Herculean--cannot answer it.
In his post on the New York Times editorial, Steve Lagavulin wonders:
So here's the thing. In the world I know, if you hear Google say that "clearly our growth rates are slowing", then by the time you can snap your eyes back to the tickertape you find the market has already taken the stock down 15%. And yet here we are today with a veritable sea-change in our assumptions about whether the future of our civilization and species is even viable and the best we can show for it is a (thoroughly misconstrued) doubling in the price of gasoline and heating fuels.
Doesn't this seem very, very curious to you?
Frankly, no, not so much. Our investment in complexity is a very different thing than our investment in this or that part of a complex society. To cease our investments in complexity itself is the very meaning of collapse. In another excellent article for the Oil Drum, Staniford aptly summarized the importance of investment:
In our case, consider a potential investor in a company that is raising capital to open a lead mine to make batteries for anticipated future demand for plug-in hybrids. Let's say it takes five years to get the thing producing, and then the initial capital will take five more years to repay before it starts to really make money. So this investor has to believe society will hold together well enough over that time for his investment to really be worth it. Otherwise he's investing in gold instead (or vodka!).
Obviously, if our hypothetical investors do not feel enough confidence to make this investment, now society is in real trouble - the batteries needed to power the plugin hybrids are not going to be there when they are needed. And so on, across a thousand similar decisions across the economy.
Not only that, but the point at which wealthy investors are giving up hope about the future is also probably similar to the point at which the rest of society gives up hope too, and starts looking for alternative ways to survive. One of the leading effects of that is likely to be a loss of law-and-order. Things go downhill very rapidly from there as we have seen in the last week in New Orleans. We also know conflict was a major factor in the decline of Easter Island, Rome, and the Chaco Canyon Anasazi. Human beings can turn into bands of looters, and even cannibals (as at Chaco Canyon), with amazing speed once they lose faith in society.
Whether or not it is possible to develop alternative energy sources, repair environmental damage, develop AI or GM or any other possible technology, et cetera ad infinitum, is not what's relevant. What matters is whether or not people believe that it is a worthwhile investment.
Peggy Noonan says the elite has given up, and now an understanding of our situation is starting to go "mainstream." Once the people who make the investments in complexity begin to understand that collapse is inevitable, that is when collapse begins in earnest. Semple's editorial has brought us closer to collapse than all the insurgents in Iraq and Nigeria combined--much less the antics of ELF, ALF, and other "anarchists" running about playing "Rebel" with bombs.
