Peak oil – Nov 2

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

The Peak Oil Crisis: Virginia Writes a Plan
Tom Whipple, Falls Church News-Press
Last summer the Commonwealth of Virginia began work on a state Energy Plan in response to legislation adopted in the 2006 General Assembly session. Now it would be nice to think this plan was developed in response to the looming threat of peak oil, but sadly this is not the case.

The enabling legislation that will lead to the plan began life as a result of the Study of the Future of Manufacturing in Virginia. The bill’s sponsor was concerned about the high cost and constraints on natural gas supplies that are so important to the remaining manufacturing industry in the Commonwealth.

Once introduced, however, the energy bill of 2006 took on a life of its own so that it went well beyond the narrow issue of natural gas supplies.

…The state role in the coming peak oil crisis will be interesting. Most states can do little in the short-term to increase the supply of energy for a state but clearly have the powers to allocate and to restrict its use. Acquiescing in drilling off Virginia shores may be a very emotional issue, but is unlikely to provide any real benefits in the short term, if at all. Judging from the outline, the draft plan is not due until next summer, and this plan is intended to guide long-term changes to Virginia’s energy resources. It says nothing about what the state is going to do when 2 or 3 million barrels a day, suddenly or even over the course of a few years, disappears from America’s 13 million barrels a day imports. Even a cursory familiarity with discussions about peak oil make it virtually certain that cuts of this magnitude are coming before the plan’s end in 2017.

Governors are said to have vast emergency powers. They can commandeer fuel from soccer moms’ SUVs and allocate it to essential vehicles like police cars and food trucks; mandate closings, speed restrictions, carpools, and hundreds of other ways to save fuel. This may be fine for the next hurricane or snowstorm, but mitigating permanent worldwide oil depletion is not the same. Once oil depletion sets in, there will be no turning back. Uncontrolled prices will fluctuate wildly. State revenues will have nowhere to go but down. It will be a new world.

Although the plan under development is clearly a good first step in the right direction, Virginia might just be planning for a world that will never exist.
(2 Nov 2006)

Oil documentaries reviewed by Fourth International site
David Walsh, World Socialist Web Site
Two of the films in Vancouver dealt with the question of oil as a social phenomenon: The Epic of Black Gold and A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. The first is an often fascinating account of the history of oil as a source of conflict since 1859, when “Colonel” Edwin Drake established the first successful well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The French-made documentary briefly examines the origins of Standard Oil, founded by John D. Rockefeller, as well as the other majors, including Shell and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of British Petroleum), whose employees in 1908 made the first commercially significant find in the Middle East, in Iran.

…The final section, “Oil Depletion,” discusses the declining reserves of the non-renewable resource. It paints a picture of soaring Chinese demand in particular and the American population’s “careless consuming of energy” as central difficulties. In the film’s final note, a geologist suggests that, faced with the declining availability of oil, “we’re moving from the bronze age back to the stone age.”

This note is picked up and amplified in A Crude Awakening, a film dedicated to the issue of peak oil, i.e., the peak and eventual decline of the planet’s oil production.

…Whatever the scientific facts may be, and considerable controversy surrounds the theory, there is little question but that ‘peak oil’ inevitably becomes an element in various political agendas. For Simmons, who regularly speaks to George W. Bush, and the Republicans in Congress, the oil crisis means immediately opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. Beyond that, although this is not Simmons’s stated view, since oil is so vital to America’s “national interest,” doesn’t its threatened shortage require the US to establish more direct control (military or otherwise) of these soon to be depleted reserves?

The response of the makers of A Crude Awakening is positively Malthusian. One of their talking heads argues that automobiles and air travel will only be available in the future to the super-elite. “Will my grandchildren ever ride in an airplane?” The film essentially argues that the planet has too large a population, especially in the absence of easy access to oil. “How many people can the world support without fossil fuels? Perhaps 1 to 1.5 billion.” The horrifying implications of this startling remark are never worked out.

In their doomsday scenario, the filmmakers and their talking heads envision human society going back to a previous century. The present lifestyle is “impossible to maintain.” Once more, the population is blamed, for its “insatiable demands” and its addiction to “gas guzzlers.” They predict the end of “hydrocarbon man,” while suggesting that “homo sapiens will carry on living in some different, simpler way.”

Again, the film’s makers and their various experts (including extreme right-wing Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland) share one common assumption: that a world free from the domination of the oil conglomerates and their profit drive and the budget constraints of competing national capitalist states (for example, it is argued at one point that the chief barrier to solar energy is “cost”), in which human society might rationally work on and develop alternative energy supplies, is inconceivable.
(2 Nov 2006)
The wsws.org website is maintained by the International Committee of the Fourth International (that is, the Marxist followers of Leon Trotsky). The views here are an updated version of the long-time Marxist arguments against “neo-Malthusianism.”

Fortunately, independent thinkers on both the left and right are examining energy issues and have more enlightening things to say. Stan Goff is such a writer on the left (see next entry). -BA

New book “Energy War” by Stan Goff
Stan Goff, Feral Scholar
Excerpt from a new book “Energy War – Exterminism for the 21st Century”:

Politically determined patterns of energy production and consumption are bringing the increasingly destabilized trends of international political economy into collision with the inherent limitations of the planet’s energy substrates in extremely significant yet unpredictable and dangerous ways.

That relation between social power and the biosphere is not a one-way determination. The escalating disunion between the demands of world capitalist accumulation and the material availability of industrial energy is a recursive relation. Diminishing availability is factored directly and consciously into the decision-making processes of the world’s most influential political actors. So there is a powerful dialectical dynamic at work between social power and the material environment. That dynamic can metaphorically be described as a runaway train. Where that train might be headed is one of the speculations of this book. The other contention of this book is that this train has an engine, and that to stop the train, we will have to stop the engine and the people who are protecting and operating it.

The Energy War – which I argue has already started – will take many forms, strategically, but also many forms culturally and ideologically. It was the patron saint of of dying British imperial rule, Winston Churchill, who said that “In war every truth has to have an escort of lies.” That escort appears as the production of knowledge and culture – certain kind of knowledge, and a certain kind of culture, that together constitute an ideology. And I use the term perjoratively.
(30 Oct 2006)
The book is on sale as a PDF at the original website. Stan Goff has written about Peak Oil and related themes in articles like Capitalism is Against the Law (The 2nd Law of Thermdynamics) Part 1.
From Stan Goff’s About Me page:

My first career was in the Army. My second career is writing. I am married, with four children – one biological. I am a grandfather.

The central preoccupation in my life outside of family is politics.

My politics is heavily influenced by Marxism, feminism, ecology, and revolutionary Black nationalism, and I am opposed to dogma in any of these.

I am also strongly influenced by my military experience, where I learned a deep distrust of abstractions and a keen appreciation for the fact that social power is acted out on living human bodies.

-BA