I recently attended, for the first time, the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, although I have been paying close attention to the issue for many years.
The conference was actually valuable, more so that I expected. There were two constituencies present, or perhaps three:
First are the investment bankers who know things will change, don’t care what the overall impact is, and are concerned with how to preserve their relative position. These folks do not repudiate the dominant American exceptionalist narrative of continuous growth, linear progress, and technical solution, even if they cannot explain how it will become reestablished as normal as fossil fuels deplete. Their magical thinking consists in thinking that peak will result in an orderly decline in which the power relations of society remain basically the same. Often they are not concerned about climate change, assuming that the collapse of the fossil fuel economy will reduce emissions while the new technology germinates.
Dr. Roger Bezdek (President of MISI and co-author of “The Impending World Energy Mess“) and Dr. Robert Hirsch (also from MISI and also co-author of “The Impending World Energy Mess”) are part of the establishment defense analysts/consultants. They produced the Hirsch report for DOE a few years back which said decline is soon and unavoidable. To a lesser extent Jeff Rubin (former Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets), Charles Maxwell (Senior Energy Analyst with Weeden & Co) and Chris Martenson share this view of Peak Oil. Martenson talks about a different narrative, but his website, where he charges for financial advice on how to beat the peak, falls in this camp.
Second are those whose denial of the crisis is even more complete; those drunk on the Koolaid of renewable energy technical solutions. They are concerned about climate change, and they can reconcile this cognitive dissonance only by postulating development of renewable technology which is not only physically but politically impossible. Their magical thinking includes conflating energy and electricity, (the latter being only 40% of the total), and ignoring net energy and physical material limits. They are, perhaps, even more engrossed in the standard narrative than the market fundamentalists, refusing to entertain the notion that we can and should have less stuff. Chief representatives of this camp were Guy Dauncey, (President of the British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association), and Angelina Galiteva (Board Member of the California Independent System Operators and CEO of NEOptions), Charlie Hall, “the dean of net energy“ (Distinguished Professor at State University of New York in the College of Environmental Science & Forestry) called Ms. Galiteva out very sharply after her address to the plenary, for her complete failure to understand or acknowledge the problems which a low return on energy invested in renewables causes for her model of the future.
Finally, and I think this may have been a plurality of those in attendance, are people who know that a major, world changing crash is coming, who know that we don’t have even a majority of the answers, who are scared stiff, but who are not too scared to actually think about ways of adapting. While some are looking for a silver bullet, others recognize that there is no single answer. Some who have done real work to understand what may be coming, like Charlie Hall and Rich Heinberg, can’t help but display that fear and frustration in their tone, something which is missing from the curiously flat or manic tones of folks like Guy Dauncey or Nicole Foss (Co-Editor of “The Automatic Earth“)
These are the people who give me hope because they are willing to accept discomfort and work hard to understand the changes coming without embracing some, arrogant, anesthetic, simple solution, or believing they can predict the future or have all the answers. Some of them are long time activists, but many are people with no particular political background or history of activism, for whom this issue has somehow become central.
In addition to Heinberg the inspiring presenters were William Catton, author of “Overshoot”, at 85 a legend in his own time and intellect unimpaired. He provided me with two key take-away concepts:
First: we have regressed to foragers in our dependence on fossil fuels, from the period in which, through agriculture we were able to control by our own labor and intellect our food security, while now, having interposed fossil fuel between ourselves and our food, and having lost the ability to actually grow the food, we have less ability to manage our environment than ever. (There are some conflicts in this metaphor with the Ishmael narrative for those familiar with that), but it is still very useful.
Second, he insisted that we talk about the extraction of fossil fuels rather than production, and the depletion of our reserves. They cannot be replenished, because they are finite, regardless of our knowledge of them.
Other noteworthy speakers:
Wes Jackson founder of The Land Institute is on the point of making perennial wheat, which he has spent 40 years developing, a practical crop for large scale planting. This creates the possibility of having a cereal grain agriculture which builds and replenishes soil as it provides a crucial yield for us, enabling the reversal of the destruction of soil which has characterized agriculture since its beginnings.
Jackson is a close friend of Wendell Berry, perhaps the most articulate critic of the moral bankruptcy of American culture writing today, as well as the foremost voice for living in community on and with the land which sustains us.
His affinity for Berry was very clear in talking about how we need to recognize how ignorant we are, and that a “culture of ignorance” is key to our success in adapting to life. Ignorance, in this context, is contrasted to arrogance, hubris, and conceit, rather than to wisdom, because wisdom requires recognition of our limits and humility in the face of what we don’t know. His calendar of human impact on the soil, which sustains all terrestrial life is a moving and fascinating chart. He notes the beginning of agriculture, but also points out the beginning of metal smelting, which came later, for millennia relied on trees to fuel the fires, making metallurgy also a gift of the soil. He sketched the model of US ag development based on the homestead, land grant, experiment stations and county agents as serving the needs of a poor people coming to a rich, empty land, a model now grossly inadequate to the present, when we are a rich people on a crowded, impoverishing land. He had some harsh words for Francis Bacon and and the reductionist scientific method which he is generally credited with originating, and sees our dilemma as the just desserts of our believing we could conquer the land and completely control and manipulate it.
His discussion of the reduced carbon content of the world’s soils as a result of overuse by humanity over 10K years also showed a non-sentimental picture of agriculture. Although he doesn’t use the word permaculture, his slide showing agriculture merging with the ecology points to the same issue. His theme that our motto should be “soil, not oil” that soil is our greatest resource and at risk of disappearing from abuse even though it is technically renewable is one with which I heartily agree.
Naomi Davis, from Blacks in Green, the ONLY African American and one of three women presenting at the event was also inspirational, with her lyrical back- cast on the relocalization, and revitalization of a Chicago neighborhood. Her presentation should be on the ASPO website soon, and I highly recommend it.
An interesting sidelight on net energy was in the discussion by Ken Zweibel from the George Washington University Solar Institute, a less manic proponent of renewables, addressed the fact that EROEI (i.e.: Energy Returned on Energy Invested) is a ratio, not a unit, and the importance of viewing it over time. Renewable electricity technology has the bulk of its lifetime energy investment up front, while fossil fuels have a trivial amount, hence the payback period is much longer, but total EROEI may be acceptable. The high upfront costs are an impediment to introducing the technology, and especially to getting it to a volume where it actually replicates itself.
Another point was the log scale of the loss of energy as a percentage of the useful energy. A fairly convincing argument was made that until EROEI drops under 8-10, the loss of useful work is negligible. This is important both for evaluating the potential of renewables, and in explaining why the decline from 100 to 30 to 20 in slightly higher hanging fossil fuels has not had such an impact, while the next changes down, to tar sands and frack gas, will make such a difference in price.
My biggest disappointment were the hippies: John Michael Greer (Bloger @The Archdruid Report), Dmitry Orlov (Bloger @ClubOrlov.com) and Sharon Astyk (Writer, Farmer, Bloger@The Chatelaine’s Keys and @http://scienceblogs.com/). They are creatures of the blogosphere; viewed as leaders or authorities because the have the time and inclination to write, persistently get it distributed, and get on the speakers’ list – even if their work consists of nothing but that, and talking to people about it, being witty, cute, etc., but unable to entertain a discussion because they have not put anything of their theories into practice, telling us what we should do, but not actually showing us how to do it by their own organizing experience. They don’t talk outside the choir. A bit of wizard of Oz here. I started in the workshop with them on adapting to peak oil, and wound up going to the messaging workshop, which included more “non-political” people but generated a much more earnest, sincere productive discussion.
Art Berman from Labyrinth Consulting Services, who was only present at the first half of the conference, was also very useful – a petroleum geologist and consultant, he has the blend of technical knowledge and financial knowledge to understand and expose the emperors new clothes of the movement. While he is in the first constituency identified above, and thinks fracking should go forward with some more restrictions, his explanation of the economic bubble of the industry is profound and gives some hope that it can be pushed into a crash much more quickly than it otherwise might. Briefly, he describes all of the independents, up to and including Chesapeake, as cowboy companies spending money twice as fast as they are earning it, and sustained only by overseas venture capital—borrowing and stock reissue capacity long since burned through. Price would have to at least double to be profitable, while a market collapse would deprive them of operating funds. This also explains why they do such shoddy dangerous work — their cash flow is too strapped even to consider safety measures. They are mostly angling to be bought out, but such buyouts would bring reduced drilling activity based on a change in corporate approach by super giants who can afford to sit on resources until they become profitable.
He and others commented on the protest on the Keystone XL pipeline, by presenting it in stark dollars and cents as a massive boondoggle — the market is in China and the east, a pipeline will go west from Alberta, and the southbound one, if built, will languish. Similarly, he pointed out that exporting natural gas from the US to Europe or the far east will never be profitable, given that Russia and Qatar are by far better endowed and with much lower production and transport costs. He believes that export terminals will also be massively underused and push companies toward failure.
