No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn

Media pundits like to discuss "the economy" and "the environment"--especially during an election campaign--as if there is some difference between them. The economy is the subset of the environment which is most useful to man. Only the most brainless dilettante could discuss economic or environmental changes without some knowledge of their interaction. The term "environment" itself is misleading; it implies that human society is somehow separate from the air, water, earth, and life that surround us. On the contrary, every molecule in our bodies comes from our daily food, drink, and air. That's not new-age religion, that's science. Our bodies are also an ecosystem unto themselves, containing thousands of symbiotic microbes, as are our food and drinking water. Changing "the environment" means literally changing ourselves.


As an environmentalist, I'm a bit unusual. I have no particular affection for fuzzy animals, stately trees, and pristine rivers. I find them beautiful, of course, but like most people, I don't stir myself to protect them. My concern is the health and happiness of humanity, and we've reached a point where ecological damage is our biggest threat. To put it bluntly, we've been shitting where we eat for a long time, and it's starting to pile up. I have no doubt that the myriad toxins, pharmaceuticals, and pathogens we put into our water, air, and food are making us more stupid and sickly. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, and resource depletion are already reducing our standard of living, with potential catastrophe on the horizon. I want my grandchildren to eat cotton candy, dance to the Beatles, make snowmen, not scratch out a stunted living east of Eden.

In this post, I won't talk about the dangers of deforestation, persistent pollution, or other traditional environmental issues. Those already get decent media attention. Instead, I'll discuss the set of problems called "peak oil."

A non-technical explanation of peak oil can be found here. For a technical explanation, refer to eg. Beyond Oil by Kenneth Deffeyes. The short version is that, for geological reasons, the rate of oil production follows a bell curve. Technical, political, and economic factors make the curve noisy. The US has the world's most intensively explored oil reserves, so it shows the trend the most clearly:
No matter how much money the US spends, it can never raise its production above the 1970 peak, so it imports oil from countries whose production hasn't yet peaked (currently only Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia). However, total global oil production will peak in the next 5-10 years, if it hasn't already. Experts such as Dick Cheney (!) estimate a 3% per year decline from then on.

Why is that a problem? For the past 100 years, our society has used more and more oil every year. That oil is used for agriculture, transportation, electricity, and manufacturing to supply our growing population and our growing sophistication. The earth is very bountiful, but we've been living beyond our means. So the first problem is that we need to accept a 3% per year drop in food, transport, power, and consumer goods. The second problem is that free-market pricing will mean a large increase in the price of those things, which means many will struggle to obtain food and fuel. The price has already gone up considerably the past few years even though no oil peak has been announced. A sudden crisis could lead to disruption of supplies or hoarding, which would exacerbate a price spike.

It's true that oil is not our only energy source. Natural gas, coal, nuclear power, and alternative energy also exist. But with our current infrastructure, none of those can be used for transportation, large-scale agriculture, or manufacturing. That is, if gasoline jumps to $10 a litre or pumps run dry entirely, individuals have no way to switch to alternative energy to get to work. It'll work itself out in the long term, but many people could suffer. With proper planning, we could break our fossil fuel addiction and find a way to travel, grow food, manufacture, etc. without oil. If we wait too long, we'll one day find ourselves in a permanent 1973-style energy crisis, and it'll be that much harder to restructure. (The Internet, of course, has plenty of imaginative worst-case scenarios.)

Despite the potential for a humanitarian catastrophe, peak oil doesn't concern me much. I only mention it because it may help to explain upcoming events. The fact is, if we burn all the world's oil in the next few decades, we will cause uncontrollable climate change, which will have far more serious consequences. So we need to reduce global fossil fuel use with or without peak oil.

And Stephen Harper just got re-elected. I need a drink.

Update: I heard an interesting metaphor the other day. The transition from industrial capitalism to a sustainable society is like the metamorphosis of a hungry, single-minded caterpillar to a beautiful, low-impact butterfly. Even though both stages are necessary and inevitable, the first butterfly cells that form within a caterpillar are always attacked by the caterpillar's immune system as foreign cells; it's only the weight of numbers that allows the butterfly cells to finally take over, not through any conscious organization but simply because they have the same purpose.