‘California Living’ Can’t Be Sustained
In recent years, concerned voices in industry, academia and government have been raising fears that the world is “running out of oil.” While concern about limited supply is practically as old as the petroleum industry itself, there are many sound geological reasons to believe that the end indeed is in sight--not of oil itself, which will never be fully exhausted, but of the cheap oil on which so much of our new-millennium culture is based.
In 1956, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert forecast the peak in domestic American oil production, presupposing that crude oil output would begin falling about 30 years after the peak in volume of new discoveries. Thirty years was the “life span” for a typical oil field in 1956.
Despite intense criticism from the U.S. Geological Survey at the time, Hubbert’s forecast for the U.S. proved dead-on. Our domestic production peak arrived in 1970 and has been in decline ever since. Even development of Alaska’s precious Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, using the most optimistic federal estimates, would satisfy global oil thirst for less than half a year.
The oil discovery rate for the whole world began to decline in the late 1960s, suggesting that we should now be experiencing a production peak in global oil supply. That peak has not arrived yet, however, because of improving extraction techniques, OPEC and corporate oil politics and better fuel economies (the current SUV trend excepted).
Yet if current growth in global demand continues, the peak in global petroleum production will arrive in less than a decade, according to geoscientist Marie Minniear at the University of Toledo, whose recent article, “Forecasting the Permanent Decline in Global Petroleum Production,” appeared in the March issue of the Journal of Geoscience Education. More optimistic forecasts put the production peak off for another decade, but these assessments are not as current.
Passing a production peak means that the price of oil will erratically but permanently increase to a point beyond which it is no longer cost-efficient to pump the liquid out of the earth. And it is not only the price of a weekend fill-up for Las Vegas that is tied to this cheap energy supply. Pharmaceuticals, recording tape, plastics, personal computers, clothing, film, fertilizers, military weapons, even drinking water and corporate foods all require cheap oil for production. Alas, there are no known practical substitutes for oil in the manufacture of some of these items. Even the inflation index and employment rate are sensitively linked to its price.
As Minniear puts it, much in the face of consumer economic pressure: “Immediate conservation and improved efficiency of petroleum use . . . are necessary to extend the conventional supply long enough for alternatives to be developed.” These will likely take the form of bioengineering and of solar, natural gas and, perhaps, hydrogen-based energy schemes, probably on smaller economies of scale than most of us have ever experienced.
There are critical environmental reasons to wean ourselves off of this fuel source soon. The range of concern in the scientific community about global warming--largely unappreciated by the automotive public--goes from serious attention to fear. The few vocal doubters, many given extensive press play, are poorly qualified or misinformed judges.
How well-prepared is Los Angeles--a city wholly a creature of the Petroleum Age--for an energy transition that is apparently due within the lifetimes of most people reading these pages? Can fuel cell technologies soon painlessly replace the internal combustion engine on our freeways? Will the real costs of food, clothing, pumped water, entertainment and medical care all rise substantially before we can make adjustments, driving an even greater wedge of social unrest between our “haves” and “have-nots”?
It is time for us to give serious attention to sensible transportation alternatives, including more efficient public transit services; develop tax incentives for solar heating of homes and businesses; reconsider the effects on resources of long commutes and suburban sprawl (who really needs a 3,000-square-foot home 40 miles from work anyway?), then perhaps rethink “community” in ways that make our own Southern California cities more compact and user-friendly, as in much of Western Europe today.
We live in a hyper-driven, self-isolating fairyland of prosperity, trapped within a wasteful infrastructure of our own making. Yet the fact remains, by overwhelming consensus in the Earth science community, that our current form of California living is unsustainable--and that the need for change may come far sooner than we care to believe.
