Afterburn

Society Beyond Fossil Fuels

Richard Heinberg

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780865717886
• eBook ISBN: 9781550925845
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Essential, visionary essays about our post-carbon future

Climate change, along with the depletion of oil, coal, and gas dictate that we will inevitably move away from our profound societal reliance on fossil fuels; but just how big a transformation will this be? While many policy-makers assume that renewable energy sources will provide an easy "plug-and-play" solution, author Richard Heinberg suggests instead that we are in for a wild ride; a "civilization reboot" on a scale similar to the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

Afterburn consists of 15 essays exploring various aspects of the 21st century migration away from fossil fuels including:

• Short-term political and economic factors that impede broad-scale, organized efforts to adapt
• The origin of longer-term trends (such as consumerism), that have created a way of life that seems "normal" to most Americans, but is actually unprecedented, highly fragile, and unsustainable
• Potential opportunities and sources of conflict that are likely to emerge.

From the inevitability and desirability of more locally organized economies, to the urgent need to preserve our recent cultural achievements and the futility of pursuing economic growth above all, Afterburn offers cutting-edge perspectives and insights that challenge conventional thinking about our present, our future, and the choices in our hands.

1

TEN YEARS AFTER

IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN TEN YEARS SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF my book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, which has seen two editions and many printings, translations into eight languages, and sales of roughly fifty thousand copies in North America. The beginning of The Party’s Over’s second decade has coincided with a widespread reevaluation of what has come to be known as peak oil theory (which the book helped popularize). So it’s a good time to take stock of both. The following is part memoir, part reassessment, and part reflection.

Memoir: What a Party It Was

Prior to the publication of The Party’s Over I was a writer on environmental topics and a teacher in an innovative college program on “Culture, Ecology, and Sustainable Community.” In 1998, I happened to read an article in Scientific American titled “The End of Cheap Oil?” by two veteran petroleum geologists, Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère.¹ At that time, oil was trading for roughly ten dollars a barrel—about the cheapest it has ever been in real terms. The article made the case that “When the world runs completely out of oil is . . . not directly relevant; what matters is when production begins to taper off.” The commencement of that tapering, the authors said, could happen disturbingly soon: “Using several different techniques to estimate the current reserves of conventional oil and the amount still left to be discovered, we conclude that the decline will begin before 2010.” History had already shown (in the 1970s) that a significant constraint to the availability of oil could have dramatic and widespread economic, financial, and political repercussions.

Around the same time, I began receiving an occasional series of emailed essays titled “Brain Food” by a retired software engineer named Jay Hanson, which discussed energy’s importance in world events. I also joined an email list called EnergyResources. Hanson and others were discussing books like William Catton’s Overshoot and Walter Youngquist’s GeoDestinies, which I quickly devoured. As I began to recognize the central role of energy in human society, big questions I’d had about economic history—especially ones concerning the origins and significance of the Industrial Revolution—began to find answers. “The End of Cheap Oil” also led me to realize that, because humanity was on the cusp of a decline in available, cheap transport fuel, a contraction in trade and economic activity in general was fairly inevitable.

I waited for someone to write the peak oil book that would tell the story of energy, portray the politics and economics of petroleum, and lay out the world’s prospects in the coming post-peak era. Surely a petroleum geologist or energy expert would step up to the plate. But none did (with the exception of Kenneth Deffeyes, whose 2001 book Hubbert’s Peak was a bit technical and did not explain petroleum’s extraordinary role in recent economic and political history). After a couple of years, I started researching the subject in earnest and put together a book proposal, which I sent to Chris and Judith Plant at New Society Publishers. They replied favorably. New Society would go on to become the foremost publisher of non-technical books in the peak oil genre, with titles by John Michael Greer, Dmitry Orlov, Sharon Astyk, and others.

The timing of the publication of The Party’s Over proved to be pivotal: it came out in the same year the United States invaded Iraq. In the spring of 2003, millions of Americans thronged streets in dozens of cities to protest the Bush–Cheney administration’s stupid, horrific, and illegal war. Since Iraq had large, relatively untapped oil reserves, there was widespread speculation that the invasion was an exercise in trading “blood for oil.” My book offered some support for this line of thought, so most of my early speaking invitations came from antiwar groups. All I had to do was remind audiences of Dick Cheney’s words in a 1999 speech to the London Institute of Petroleum:

Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you’ve got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. . . . By some estimates there will be an average of two percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?. . . [T]he Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”²

In late 2003, I received a speaking invitation from Julian Darley and Celine Rich in Vancouver, Canada. They were in the process of organizing a local peak oil conference, and had just started a new nonprofit organization called Post Carbon Institute. They soon invited me to become a board member (and later, Senior Fellow).

The next year saw the first of several “Peak Oil and Community Solutions” conferences in Yellow Springs, Ohio (the second one was reported on at length in Harper’s).³ In 2004 I also attended the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) international conference in Berlin,⁴ where I met Campbell and Laherrère, Matt Simmons, and other oil experts.

The year 2005 saw speaking tours in South Africa and Britain, along with dozens more appearances in the United States. Especially memorable was a conference in Kinsale, Ireland, organized by Rob Hopkins—who immediately impressed me as someone capable of doing great things (he started the Transition Towns initiatives just a year later). That summer the New York Times Magazine published a long profile article about Bill Clinton, mentioning that The Party’s Over was on his current reading list and that he had underlined many passages and scribbled comments throughout. Also that year, James Howard Kunstler published The Long Emergency, which introduced an even wider audience to the dilemma of oil depletion.

By 2006 it was possible to speak of a peak oil “movement”: Totnes in the UK had become the world’s first Transition Town; both ASPO International and ASPO USA were holding annual conferences to highlight relevant technical issues; the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions was hosting annual peak oil gatherings in Ohio for the activist crowd; several peak oil websites, including TheOilDrum.com and EnergyBulletin.net, reported brisk traffic; the list of peak oil books and peer-reviewed papers was lengthening; and a growing roster of public speakers was lecturing on the dim prospects of the oil industry and the dimmer prospects of the world’s oil-dependent economies.

My personal career morphed in tandem: I moved from teaching to a full-time position with Post Carbon Institute. When I wasn’t on the road speaking, I was writing more books—Powerdown (2004), The Oil Depletion Protocol (2006), Peak Everything (2007), Blackout (2009), The End of Growth (2011), and Snake Oil (2013)—as well as blogs, articles, essays, reports, and forewords to, or endorsements of, other authors’ books.

Post Carbon Institute meanwhile recruited 28 fellows; compiled a Post Carbon Reader that is now on college curricula around the nation; published other books (including Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth and the Community Resilience Guides series); produced award-winning video animations;⁵ and commissioned several important papers and reports, including David Hughes’s influential critique of US shale resources, “Drill, Baby, Drill.”⁶

A thrilling decade it was. And here we are now. . .with press articles appearing almost daily featuring some variation of the title, “Peak Oil Is Dead.” What the hell happened?

Reassessment: Was (or Is) the Party Really Over?

The central claim of many recent “Peak Oil Is Dead” articles is that peak oil theorists were simply wrong.⁷ Were we? Well, let’s use The Party’s Over as a representative example of peak oil literature and see. I reread the book (for the first time in several years) as preparation for writing this essay, and the following are a few critical notes.

Chapters 1 and 2, which tell the tale of energy’s role in ecology, history, and the economy, are the book’s foundation. Leaving aside the question of how skillfully it’s presented, it still impresses me as a story that deserves to be known and understood by everybody. There’s very little that needs revision here.

Chapter 3, which explains peak oil, is pivotal to the book’s overall argument. By current standards, much of this material is simplistic and dated. I fixed some problems in the revised 2005 edition, but that version itself is now stale. The Party’s Over doesn’t offer an original analysis of oil reserves or production data; instead it surveys the forecasts of “peakists” who were active at the time, many of whom are now less active or deceased.

The most obvious criticism that could be leveled at the book today is the simple observation that, as of 2014, world oil production is increasing, not declining. However, the following passage from page 118 of the 2003 edition points to just how accurate the leading peakists were in forecasting trends: “Colin Campbell estimates that extraction of conventional oil will peak before 2010; however, because more unconventional oil—including oil sands, heavy oil, and oil shale—will be produced during the coming decade, the total production of fossil-fuel liquids (conventional plus unconventional) will peak several years later. According to Jean Laherrère, that may happen as late as 2015.” On page 121 of the book I explicitly endorsed the forecast of a peak sometime in the period between 2006 and 2015.

From today’s perspective that’s still an entirely defensible assessment of global oil supply prospects. Worldwide production of regular, conventional oil (excluding deepwater oil, tar sands, tight oil, biofuels, and natural gas liquids such as propane) did indeed begin a gentle, continuing decline around 2006, and a peak for all petroleum liquids by 2015 is still likely though by no means certain. True, no peak oil theorist in 2003 was forecasting that US petroleum production would take off in 2011 due to the hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling of tight (low-permeability) oil-bearing rock formations in North Dakota and Texas. But tight oil (and tar sands, and deepwater oil) are substantially different from the conventional resources that drillers targeted in previous decades: they offer a low energy return on the energy invested in production (EROEI), require high rates of up-front investment, and imply increased environmental costs and risks. Tight-oil wells show such steep production decline rates that a peak followed by a sharp drop in output from the Bakken and Eagle Ford plays—which have driven the recent boom in US production—is probable in just the next few years.⁸ Meanwhile, the ongoing erosion of global extraction rates of regular, conventional crude means that an ever-larger proportion of total supplies must come from unconventional sources. Conventional oil, with its high EROEI and low production cost, fueled unprecedented levels of economic growth during the twentieth century. That party is indeed over.

On page 117, I summarized Colin Campbell’s view that “the next decade will be a ‘plateau’ period, in which recurring economic recessions will result in lowered energy demand, which will in turn temporarily mask the underlying depletion trend.” That forecast appears to have been spot on. Meanwhile, Daniel Yergin (of energy consultants IHS CERA) and other petroleum industry-friendly energy commentators now tell us that peak oil is nothing to worry about because, instead of a peaking of crude supply, we are instead seeing peak demand, as consumption of oil in the United States, Europe, and Japan has fallen.⁹ Why? Yergin and company cite improvements in vehicle fuel efficiency, but in reality most of the reduction in oil consumption in the older industrial countries has come about simply because fuel prices are so high that people are driving less: they can’t afford to fill the tank as often.¹⁰ And prices are high because the only ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Ten Years After
• 2. The Gross Society
• 3. Visualize Gasoline
• 4. The Climate PR Puzzle
• 5. The Purposely Confusing World of Energy Politics
• 6. The Brief, Tragic Reign of Consumerism—and the Birth of a Happy Alternative
• 7. Fingers in the Dike
• 8. Your Post-Petroleum Future (a commencement address)
• 9. The Fight of the Century
• 10. The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us
• 11. Conflict in the Era of Economic Decline
• 12. All Roads Lead Local
• 13. Our Evanescent Culture—and the Awesome Duty of Librarians
• 14. Our Cooperative Darwinian Moment
• 15. Want to Change the World? Read This First
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author