IT'S OIL RIGHT, FOLKS!
There's Good Times Ahead

TOM BENDER
Solar '96 - Solar Energy Association of Oregon Conference
5 October 1996

Sustainability is important in its own right for us to understand and attain individually and as communities. But there are overwhelming signs that we've now reached the point in time where the relative costs and benefits of growth vs. sustainability diverge radically. It is time, and becoming urgent, to actively transform our entire society from one of growth, greed, and violence to one of sustainability - for our own survival and well-being and that of the entire planet.

Until we understand the positive alternatives1 that lie before us, it may sound like doomsday talk to even list some of these signs that the end of an era and the beginning of a new one is being reached in the next few years. The changes ahead are momentous, and can be disastrous or incredibly fortunate, depending on the choices we make. But changes of one type or the other are going to be there.

Understanding some of the ignored present and future costs of our present patterns, and the unexpected and often profound benefits of some of the options we have available, can be vital to us. It can help us to happily let go of growth - which has perhaps served us well, but can't any longer. It can also assist us to embrace radically different values and patterns that can permit vast new opportunities in our lives. Without these opportunities, our quality of life would otherwise be degraded and depleted far more rapidly than our resources are reaching exhaustion.

* * *

THE GOOD NEWS, AND IT IS VERY GOOD NEWS, IS THAT IMMENSE ECONOMIC SAVINGS ARE POSSIBLE WHEN WE DO SHIFT FROM GROWTH TO SUSTAINABILITY. What we've forgotten is the incredible costs we pay now to support our growth and greed:


1. INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS - Stabilizing growth totally avoids our current expenditure of 33% to 40% of our time and resources spent on creating the infrastructure to accommodate more people and things.2 A population doubling means duplicating our entire stock of houses, water systems, power plants, cities, roads - as well as prematurely demolishing existing ones. It also means spending more on feeding and educating those additional people to adulthood.


2. COSTS OF INEQUITY - Growth has been claimed as necessary "to help the poor" - as if growth over the last twenty years hasn't dramatically worsened the condition of the poor and concentration of our wealth among the rich.3 It is conscious government policy that has resulted in concentration of wealth to the point where one percent of the population now owns 50% of all our wealth. The median US household income for wage-earners is currently $31,000, with more than 13% of households under the monetary poverty level of $15,000. A fully equitable distribution of personal income would amount to $59,000 per household.4

An equitable society could totally eliminate poverty and support EVERYONE at the current median income level of $31,000 per household. Because of the immense current imbalance in wealth, to do so would surprisingly need 47% less work, and equivalently fewer resources than our current society uses to maintain poverty and inequality!


3. DEBT FINANCING COSTS - To achieve growth, we have also developed the habit of paying for personal expenditures, corporate expansion, and governmental infrastructure alike consistently through debt purchasing (credit cards, government bonds and bank loans). That debt purchasing has resulted in an across-the-board 20% surcharge on our cost of living, without any substantive benefit.5

Together, stabilizing growth and dealing directly with the inequality in our society can permanently release us from almost 75% of our present energy, material, financial and human costs of living, without lowering our material living standard, and without need for any "technical fixes".6

* More than 40% of the entire terrestrial net photosynthesis is already being used directly to support humans, only one of the millions of species whose complex interaction is essential to the stability of our supporting ecosystems. Within the next 25 years, population growth would push that to over 80%, a figure no scientists believe possible without ecological collapse.15

* The "ecological footprint" of the land area necessary to supply our urban areas with food, forestry products, and energy already exceeds what can sustainably be maintained. The Netherlands, for example, requires 14 times the nation's entire land area to provide and import produce to meet their consumption, while the U.S. consumes 80% more than could possibly be produced by converting all ecologically productive land to human use.16

Others indicate U.S. resource demands would have to be reduced 80% to achieve sustainability.17 Meanwhile, the ecologically productive land area available per capita is dramatically decreasing. Human population thus already exceeds what can be supported at our present standard of living as oil depletes.

* Continuation of present growth patterns is expected to exhaust worldwide oil reserves in an estimated 25-50 years.18

* Food experts indicate that world grain production has peaked and is already declining, while population is continuing to increase exponentially.19

* Similar limits are be being reached in ore-grade metals, water, and other resources.20

* Increased virulence, resistance, and mutability of human disease vectors is being reported at the same time that population density, mobility and potential susceptibility are increasing. 21

* Extreme weather fluctuations and consequent damage to crops and buildings are already occuring, corresponding with predictions of early impacts of global warming trends. Larger impact of these trends is expected over the next decades. Last year, for the first time, all five of the most respected global climate warming models - both public and private - agreed.

* * *

Let's look in more detail at one of these signs. Petroleum economists and geophysicists now solidly project that worldwide petroleum production will peak in the next five to ten years and be virtually exhausted in the next 50 years. When we finally run out of oil - that final last drop - turns out not to be an important issue. What is important is what happens when and after oil production peaks, which is happening right now.

"Peaking" is the point where population and demand for oil continue to increase exponentially, while oil production can no longer be increased for technical and political reasons. It is where a permanent and dramatic shift occurs from the buyer's market we have enjoyed (cheap as you can pump it) to a seller's market (as expensive as you can push it). It brings a permanent skyrocketing of oil prices. It is the point where the oil available per capita (the energy slaves that have constituted much of our wealth) begins a rapid shift from a flood to a trickle as population soars and production dwindles. Actual "exhaustion" of our oil reserves, in contrast, occurs long after the trickle becomes so small that the timing of that "last drop" is irrelevant.

We are already into an initial phase of this change, and within the energy industry changes are already beginning to occur. Some months ago the papers reported riots in one of the Arabian oil-producing Emirates because of already decreasing oil and oil revenues. Last week the industry reported a major Pacific NW natural gas supplier abrogating 30-year supply contracts that had no penalty clause - knowing that oil prices are soon to soar and that they would profit more by re-negotiating contracts after the oil price increases. The primary issue is no longer one of "will we run out of oil". It is no longer "when", but "what are we going to do about it and its underlying growth/sustainability issues".

The timing of our action relative to this change is vital. Actions taken before awareness of these changes becomes widespread will avoid the inevitable delays in obtaining crucial efficiency-related equipment which will follow from oil price increases. Actions taken before oil price jumps actually occur can be achieved at a fraction of their subsequent cost.

The impacts of this change are immediate, long-term, and immense. Every year, for example, we invest about a quarter of our wealth in transportation systems - systems that are almost entirely fueled by petroleum. We make those investments based upon twenty-year projections of our transportation needs. The infrastructure we build has life cycles of up to a hundred years, and generates land-use patterns with life cycles of up to perhaps a thousand years. Yet the oil people themselves are now acknowledging that we will probably be almost out of oil, worldwide, within the current twenty-year period for which we are now making investments. Attention to these issues can no longer be put off.

Many people's first response to the issue of oil depletion is belief that some "technical fix" will make everything okay. "They'll have electric cars on the road soon", or "there's natural gas, or fuel cells, or hydrogen, or..." With a 100 year history of substitution of one after another less-expensive fossil fuel, ending with petroleum, this may at first sound sensible. But things don't work the same coming down as going up, and there are many issues that make alternatives less than an easy flip of a switch. The magnitudes of energy use involved, and the interaction of population growth, resource depletion, and shifting economics create a very different picture.

Plugging in one electric car, for example, hasn't much impact. But in the U.S. economy, transportation consumes one and one-half times as much energy as the entire electrical sector produces. And a not-insignificant percent of our electricity is generated from petroleum. A broad change from gas to electric cars would require at least doubling of our entire electric generating and distributing system, to say nothing of finding a suitable and affordable fuel for generating that electricity, and mitigating the environmental impacts of its use.

Hybrid-fueled "hyper-cars" with fuel efficiencies of up to 200 mpg are expected to be on the market in the next ten years. It would seem that a 10-fold decrease in per-mile US oil consumption, or 5-fold decrease world-wide would virtually solve the problem. But in the 20 years it would take for full implementation of "hypercars", the world's population would have doubled, resulting in a 50% net increase rather than a 25% net decrease in petroleum use.

Any increase in third-world "mobility" would add further to the demand. A planet with U.S. mobility, even with hypercars, would at the end of 20 years be using THREE TIMES our current rate of oil - except that by then oil would be virtually exhausted and the cost raised to where almost noone could afford it.

Financially, population increase coupled with exhaustion of US oil reserves would by itself cause a 50% increase in the U.S. international debt/balance of payments. However, the shift from a buyer's to a seller's market in that period would result in a likely four-fold increase in oil prices, resulting in a six-fold increase in US debt. Globally, the same population and consumption increases create a 50% (no mobility increase) to 66% shortfall in oil production related to demand.

Our global oil use is now so immense that ten years consumption is equal to more than three times all the remaining US petroleum reserves, plus the entire reserves of the UK, the former Soviet Union, Canada, China, Norway and Mexico.

Energy-efficiency, or substitution of other traditional energy sources such as natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy cannot alone solve the problem. The size and growth rate of population, energy, and resource use must be dealt with before any solution is possible. The rate of action and capital requirements are immense and cannot absorb repeated "re-do" as we find further reductions necessary. Ecological constraints require that we simply forget many expected conventional alternatives such as coal.

Continuation of our present values would result, as history has so amply shown, only in the problems resurfacing elsewhere in greater degree. The amount of work now done by fossil fuel "energy-slaves", the decreasing net energy of remaining reserves, the lower (and currently subsidized) net energy of renewables, the disregard of energy quality issues, and the declining returns on energy efficiency measures all have heavy impact on the real potentials of conventionally posed alternatives.

A combination of growth stabilization, value changes, suspending investments in growth-related infrastructure, dealing with equity, high-factor systems efficiency improvements, reduction of material demands, rapid implementation of positive net energy renewable energy sources, and strategic use of remaining fossil fuels to construct transition and sustainable infrastructure (such as gravity agricultural irrigation) are now essential to achieve a smooth transition to sustainability.

* * *

It is time - NOW - to stop accepting the assumption that growth is inevitable, necessary, or good. "Growth" has its value, and is wise in a certain moment of time in the life of any living system. But more stable, life-nurturing, and enduring values, actions and ways of life are now the only reasonable way to go. Continuing growth now is harmful, an impediment to well-being, and increasingly impossible. The present and future costs of growth compared to sustainability show it is time NOW to take action to stabilize our numbers, lower our material demands to sustainable levels, and change our values and actions to nurturing, life-sustaining ones.

We need, over the next twenty years, to:

* Stabilize our population.

* Achieve a virtually total transition to renewable energy sources.

* Reduce our resource demands four-fold to sustainable levels.

* Attain meaningful economic, social and political equity within our country and worldwide.

* Take major steps to restore the ecological health and well-being of our planet.

This is a rather large order in itself, but doable. The task will be more difficult the longer we wait and the slower we move, as we will have more people and fewer resources to accomplish the transition.

In this process there are several ignored issues that need to be quickly grasped:

* The real costs of business-as-usual growth and greed vs. sustainability.

* The boundary of what other people on the planet and in our own country will continue to allow in regards to inequity of wealth and resource consumption. There are some basic power shifts that are likely to occur in this regard in the next few years.22

* Our planet's capability to sustain short and long-term resource use, pollution, and ecosystem disruption.

* The likely and unlikely prospects and impacts of alternate paths over the next 20/100/1000 years.

* The benefits of sustainability which lie in far different dimensions from our familiar material and economic ones.

TOM BENDER
38755 Reed Rd.
Nehalem OR 97131 USA
503-368-6294
© October 1996
tbender@nehalemtel.net