Peak Everything Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Join the Conversation

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction

  ON TECHNOLOGY, AGRICULTURE, AND THE ARTS

  Chapter 1 - Tools with a Life of Their Own

  Classy Tools

  It’s the Energy, Silly

  Peak Oil and the Limits of Technology

  Staring at Techno-Collapse

  Chapter 2 - Fifty Million Farmers

  Intensifying Food Production

  The 21 Century: De-Industrialization

  Examples and Strategies

  The Key: More Farmers!

  If We Do This Well

  Chapter 3 - (post-) Hydrocarbon Aesthetics

  Designing for the Tragic Interlude of Cheap Abundance

  Hydrocarbon Style: Big, Fast, and Ugly

  Oh, To Be Hip Again

  Manifesto for a Post-Carbon Aesthetic

  ON NATURE’S LIMITS AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

  Chapter 4 - Five Axioms of Sustainability

  History and Background

  Five Axioms

  Evaluation

  Chapter 5 - Parrots and Peoples

  Chapter 6 - Population, Resources, and Human Idealism

  THE END OF ONE ERA, THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER

  Chapter 7 - The Psychology of Peak Oil and Climate Change

  Explaining Our Incomprehension

  Acceptance and Beyond: Peak Oil Grief

  Collective PTSD

  A Model for Explanation and Treatment: Addiction and Dependency

  Proactive Application: Social Marketing

  Chapter 8 - Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change Activism

  Differing Perspectives

  Differing Recommendations

  Supply Side, Demand Side

  Common Ground

  Chapter 9 - Boomers’ Last Chance?

  What Made the “Greatest Generation” Great

  The “Me” Generation

  The Boomers’ Defining Moments

  The Path Taken

  Another Fork in the Road

  Chapter 10 - A Letter From the Future

  Chapter 11 - Talking Ourselves to Extinction

  Language and Religion

  Grammar, Reason, Logic, and Evidence

  Language and the Ecological Dilemma

  Can Language Help Us Now?

  Resources for Action

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Praise for PEAK EVERYTHING

  Richard Heinberg brings important news that few will want to hear — the limits we’ve been hearing about for four decades are really upon us. He also brings a pretty good hint of the directions we might take to escape the tightening knot. An important book from an important thinker.

  — Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

  If humans survive the ongoing catastrophe that is this culture, it will be in great measure due to people like Richard Heinberg, who have the courage to directly face our predicament and the honesty to clearly yet gently describe our alternatives. Heinberg’s work is always both inspirational and educational, and Peak Everything is no exception. This book should be required reading at all high schools and colleges, for all activists, and for all policy-makers.

  — Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame

  There are few harder questions than the ones Richard Heinberg takes on in Peak Everything. Fortunately, he addresses them with his customary fearlessness, intellectual rigor and good sense. More than anyone else I’ve encountered, Heinberg has an answer to the most fundamental question of all; “How shall we go on from here.” Reading this, I can believe there is hope that we can.

  — Sharon Astyk, author of Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front and Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation

  Once again — and with eyes as peeled to the task as a Buddha’s — Richard Heinberg jumps into the cauldron of global resource de- cline. This is his most integrated report from the social, economic, and ecological contraction now unfolding, which he delivers with mindfulness, compassion, and a view to humanity’s strengths.

  — Chellis Glendinning, author of My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization

  Peak Oil is a great threat to our way of life, and Richard Heinberg is one of the world’s best-known writers and analysts of the subject. In Peak Everything, Heinberg gives us a series of provocative essays about the profound individual and global implications of Peak Oil.

  — Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder

  With Peak Everything, Richard Heinberg is once again on the cutting edge. We are all indebted to him for helping us understand our 21st cenury world.

  — Lester R. Brown, President, Earth Policy Institute, and author of Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

  Join the Conversation

  Visit our online book club at www.newsociety.com to share your thoughts about Peak Everything. Exchange ideas with other readers, post questions for the author, respond to one of the sample questions or start your own discussion topics.

  See you there!

  Acknowledgments

  It would be impossible to thank everyone who has helped with this book in some way. The chapters herein developed over many months, during which I was traveling a great deal and speaking to audiences large and small about the problem of oil depletion, its likely consequences, and what we can do to wean our societies from our collective addiction to fossil fuels. I met hundreds of people during these travels whose words and pioneering actions are reflected in these pages.

  Once again, I must acknowledge an enormous debt of gratitude to my wife Janet Barocco, who supports and balances me in so many ways as I pursue the rather lopsided life of a writer-lecturer.

  This is the fourth book project on which I have had the pleasure of working with Chris and Judith Plant of New Society Publishers. A note of appreciation must also go to Ingrid Witvoet, who shepherded the book through the production process, and Murray Reiss, who copy-edited the manuscript.

  My thanks to Jennifer Bresee for research assistance, and to Susan Williamson for general assistance.

  As in the past, my students and co-faculty at New College deserve mention for their ongoing support, as do the subscribers to my monthly MuseLetter.

  Finally, I would like to voice both appreciation and thanks to Julian Darley and Celine Rich-Darley — founders of Post Carbon Institute, and catalysts in the global response to the twin crises of fossil fuels (climate change and resource depletion).

  Foreword

  By James Howard Kunstler

  Back in 2005, Richard Heinberg and I both published books on peak oil and its implications for everyday life in technologically “advanced” societies. We saw the general situation very similarly but expressed our views of it differently. I hugely admired Richard’s version of the story, The Party’s Over, especially the trenchant title. He brought tremendous kinetic clarity to a set of terrifying issues that the best technical guys had previously only been able to present in mind-numbing charts and sludge-like prose. I think both of us set out to shock the general reading public with news that had left us both, personally, deeply shocked as the implications revealed themselves and we realized that the age of Cruisin’ for Burgers was coming to an end.

  Mostly since then, the public has proved to be unshockable by the news that we’re entering a historical period of hardship, that many of the familiar touchstones of daily life — from square meals to
daily commutes to the simple confidence that the lights will go on when you flick a switch — will not be with us much longer. I think there was an assumption by Richard and myself and lots of other people thoughtfully observing the scene by then, that our society would take the message, spread it virally (and rapidly!), and that our leaders in business, politics, science, and the media would marshal our people’s best efforts to meet these challenges — at least to formulate some kind of consensus for action.

  No such thing happened. Some people on the margins took note, but the general public got distracted and deluded. We all know how denial works at the macro level now. Not only was the peak oil predicament broadly misunderstood (as Richard points out, it was never just about running out of oil), but a mini-industry of delusion generators sprouted up to refute peak oil, folks like the espousers of so-called “abiotic oil” theory — the idea that the earth has a creamy nougat center of oil that continuously refills producing oil fields (for which there is no evidence whatsoever, by the way). Worse, the organs of legitimate governance, such as the US Department of Energy, refused to even acknowledge that a) we had a big problem with future oil supplies, and not too far out, either, and b) it had awful implications.

  For most of the first decade of this century, the federal government was run by the George W. Bush gang, and it was understood that they operated on a strange ethos of faith-based-Babbittry in which the highest-and-best version of civilization was thought to be credit-card consumerism accessorized by endless happy motoring (all lavishly garnished with Christian prayer). In other words, they had a deep vested interest in keeping all the usual rackets running: suburbia, derivatives-trading, highway-building, strip-mining…. Fittingly, this operating system foundered utterly at the climax of the 2008 presidential election. That’s when the Frankenstein monster of innovative finance keeled over on Wall Street from an infarction of its mutant heart (the engine of debt), taking down the Lehman Brothers investment bank, the AIG insurance company (insurers to the alternative universe of fraudulent bond derivatives), the two notorious government sponsored enterprises behind the housing bubble, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and threatening more generally to absolutely wreck the entire global financial system. What an autumn that was! Trillions of dollars were dropped by helicopters from the Federal Reserve (into the vaults of the foundering banks) and the financial system stayed on its feet — though it more and more resembled a lurching zombie than a healthy organism.

  One result, of course, was the election of Mr. Barack Obama, the appealing young change-agent (I voted for him), who seemed poised to beat an historic new path through these swamps of complacency, decadence, and sheer stupidity into a new era of reality-based, tightly focused collective effort. It hasn’t worked out. In fact, Mr. Obama has spent the first two years of his term mainly bailing out banks and the tattered remains of the suburban house “industry” — the car industry, the highway-builders… in short, propping up all the agents of the old status quo. He hasn’t so much as gotten a new choo-choo train running from Chicago to St. Louis.

  As Richard sagely observes, where the public is concerned, the ongoing banking fiasco that began in 2008 has been a mighty distraction from all the other resource-and-energy issues that pertain to running an “advanced” economy. Nobody with real influence in this society — in politics or business or in the New York Times Op-Ed section — seems to have considered the possibility that we may have to prepare to run something less than an advanced economy. It is my view that we had better get ready for that, in the form of a comprehensive downscaling and re-localizing of all our activities, along with a re-set of what these activities run on and how. And by “activities” I mean all the systems we rely on for daily life, which can be described with precision: food production (farming), commerce, transportation, et cetera. We’ll have to do all these things differently, whether we like it or not, if we want to remain in the realm above savagery.

  The name of the game is Managing Contraction. That’s what we’re in for, and we’d better play it with as much intelligence and compassion as we can summon up. This is one of the reasons I turned to fiction after publishing The Long Emergency, with the novel World Made By Hand and, in the fall of 2010, its sequel, The Witch of Hebron. I wanted to portray vividly a future America which was very different from the place we know, a society that had already gone through a compressive contraction and come out the other side with a heart and a brain.

  Richard Heinberg has remained in the trenches of current events, reporting wisely on the greatest story of our time in a series of powerful books, never losing sight of his aspiration to help his fellow citizens navigate through this most perilous historic passage. I’m grateful to be his colleague.

  — James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere, as well as novels World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron (fall 2010). He lives in Saratoga Springs, NY.

  Preface

  In titling this book Peak Everything, I was suggesting that humanity has achieved an unsustainable pinnacle of population size and consumption rates, and that the road ahead will be mostly downhill — at least for the next few decades, until humanity has learned to live within Earth’s resource limits. I argued that the industrial expansion of the past century or two was mainly due to our rapidly accelerating use of the concentrated energies of cheap fossil fuels; and that as oil, coal and natural gas cease to be cheap and abundant, economic growth will phase into contraction. I further pointed out that world oil production was at, or very nearly at, its peak, and that the imminent decline in extraction rates will be decisive, because global transport is nearly all oil dependent. Finally, I noted that the shift from growth to contraction will impact every aspect of human existence — financial systems, food systems, global trade — at both the macro and micro levels, threatening even our personal psychological coping mechanisms.

  Nothing has happened in the past three years to change that outlook — but much has transpired to confirm it.

  A good case can now be made that the year 2007, when this book originally appeared, was indeed the year, if not of “peak everything,” then at least of “peak many things.” Since then we have begun a scary descent from the giddy heights of consumption achieved in the early years of this century.

  • Worldwide economic activity began to decline in 2008 and does not appear set to return to 2007 levels any time soon.

  • Global energy consumption likewise achieved its zenith in the years 2005 through 2007; since then, consumption growth has been confined to the Asian economies and a few oil and gas exporting nations.

  • Worldwide shipping, a good index of global trade and manufacturing, peaked in 2007.

  Of course it is simplistic to argue that everything has peaked (though Peak Everything makes for a better book title than Some Things Peaking Now, Most Others Soon). Perhaps the most glaring exception is human population, which continues to grow and is virtually certain to pass the seven billion mark within the next couple of years.

  Here’s another non-peak: China’s economy is still growing rapidly, at the astonishing rate of 8 to 10 percent per year. That means it is more than doubling in size every ten years. Indeed, China consumes more than twice as much coal as it did a decade ago — the same with iron ore and oil. That nation now has four times as many highways as it did, and almost five times as many cars. How long this can go on is anyone’s guess. But surely not many more doublings in consumption rates can occur before China has used up its key resources.

  For what it’s worth, my forecast is for China’s continuing boom to be very short-lived. As I argued in my recent book, Blackout, there are hard limits to China’s coal supplies (the world as a whole will experience peak coal consumption within the next two decades, but China will get there sooner than most other countries because of its extraordinary consumption rate — currently three times that of the US). Since China has no viable short-term alternatives to coal to fuel its industrial ma
chine, by 2020 or so (and possibly much sooner), that country will have joined the rest of the world in a process of economic contraction that will continue until levels of consumption can be maintained by renewable resources harvested at sustainable rates.

  World population growth may likewise continue for a shorter period than is commonly believed, if global food production and economic activity peak soon in response to declining energy availability.

  In short, the world has changed in a fundamental way in the past three years, and the reverberations will continue for decades to come. Indeed, we have just seen the beginning of an overwhelming transformation of life as we’ve known it.

  Let’s look at a few specific factors driving this transformation, starting with limits to world supplies of petroleum.

  Oil Spike Triggers Economic Crisis

  It is still unclear whether world oil extraction rates have reached their absolute maximum level. As of this writing, the record year for world crude oil production was 2005, and the record month was July 2008. The 2005 to 2008 leveling off of extraction rates occurred in the context of steadily rising oil prices; indeed, in July 2008 oil prices spiked 50 percent higher than the previous inflation-adjusted record, set in the 1970s. As a result of that price spike, the global airline industry went into a tailspin, and the auto industry has been on life support ever since.

  The only serious argument that world oil production could theoretically continue to grow for more than a very few years is put forward by parties who explain away the evidence of declining discoveries, depleting oilfields and stagnating total production by claiming that it is demand for oil that has peaked, not supply — a distinction that hinges on the fact that oil prices these days are so high as to discourage demand. But since high prices for a commodity are usually a sign of scarcity, the “peak demand” argument really amounts to a distinction without a difference.