Caltech physicist David Goodstein contemplates the fragile nature of civilization during a recent visit to Rome.
Caltech’s vice provost David Goodstein remembers very well when he got the idea for Out of Gas because the date was June 11, 2001, exactly three months before an event that would further crystallize his thinking about America’s dependence on oil. What caught his eye that June morning was an illustration in the Los Angeles Times. The graphic depicted a type of bell curve that had originally been plotted out in the 1950s by a contrarian-minded Shell Oil geophysicist, Marion King Hubbert. Hubbert had predicted that oil production in the continental United States would peak within 20 years, and, although he had plenty of detractors at the time, he turned out to be right. The Hubbert’s Peak bell curve pictured in the newspaper cast a wider net—it applied Hubbert’s calculations to oil resources worldwide and projected that supplies would peak within a decade, followed by, as Goodstein puts it, “an inexorable decline.”
The Caltech professor of physics and applied physics, who remembered all too well the upheaval caused by short-term oil crises in 1973 and 1979, immediately began to wonder how an ill-prepared world would cope with an irreversible fuel shortage in the near future. The self-evident answer: Not very well. “I thought, ‘I’d better find out what this is about, because it’s a prediction for worldwide calamity in approximately 2007.’ And, as I read up more on it, I began to think, ‘What can I do? I’m a physicist—I don’t really do anything that helps anybody,’” says Goodstein, who is also the Institute’s Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor. “Then I realized—I can write a book.”
Out of Gas was published February 2, 2004, Groundhog Day—an auspicious date (or not) for a book whose opening lines bluntly predict heavy weather ahead. “The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil. If we manage . . . [to shift] the burden to coal and natural gas . . . life may go on more or less as it has been—until we start to run out of all fossil fuels by the end of this century . . . . Civilization as we know it will not survive unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”
Goodstein says he really didn’t know what sort of reception these ominous pronouncements would get, but before the week was out, the New York Times Book Review had published an enthusiastic review, calling Out of Gas “a book that is more powerful for being brief, [written] with the clarity and gentle touch of a master teacher,” and virtually guaranteeing that the publisher, W. W. Norton, would sell out its modest first run of 15,000 copies. Now in its 4th printing, Out of Gas will be published in paperback in February 2005.
This year’s steep run-up in gasoline prices has also boosted interest and sales. “We really caught a wave,” says Goodstein, who has since been swept up in a variety of media interviews and appearances around the country, including write-ups in Newsweek, Forbes, and Fortune, and broadcasts on CNN, Fox-TV, NPR, and the new Air America radio network, where his fellow panelists—an oil company consultant and an environmental activist—promptly got into a round of verbal fisticuffs. Recalls Goodstein, “I was able to pretty much stay out of that one.”
Although Caltech’s vice provost is pleased with the widespread interest Out of Gas has evoked, he says he is disappointed, if hardly surprised, that he has yet to hear from anyone who is actually in a position to influence national or global energy policy. “This issue is the third rail of politics,” he says. “Nobody wants to touch it.”
Out of Gas is Goodstein’s third book and the first to deal explicitly with science and public policy, although he has addressed the issue at length in articles and lectures. His previous books include States of Matter and Feynman’s Lost Lecture, coauthored with his wife, Judith Goodstein, Caltech archivist and faculty associate in history. There are no plans at the moment to write another book. “When you write a book about the end of civilization as we know it, there’s not much left to cover.” -H.A.
Too Hot to Handle?
As prices at the pump have risen this year, so has the intensity of the debate over the relative abundance of Earth’s remaining oil (an issue, David Goodstein notes, on which reasonable people can and do differ). However heated that discussion ultimately becomes, it has some way to go before it reaches the level of commentary and vitriol that is routinely generated over the related question of what impact fossil fuels are having on the greenhouse effect, the atmospheric phenomenon that for eons has kept Planet Earth—like Baby Bear’s cereal—neither too hot nor too cold.
In Out of Gas, Goodstein takes on the seemingly thankless job of distilling the innumerable position papers, research studies, and policy debates on this issue down to a few immutable physical facts: At 93 million miles from the sun, Earth receives a flux of solar energy that, averaged over the face of the planet at the top of the atmosphere, comes to 343 watts per square meter. A portion of this energy is reflected, and the rest is absorbed and radiated back into space as infrared radiation. For Earth to radiate back energy equal to what it absorbs, its surface temperature would have to be roughly zero degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, its surface water would freeze, reflecting more of the sun’s light, and making Earth an even colder and less hospitable planet.
That this hasn’t happened is due to the fact that atmospheric trace gases—water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, and the other so-called greenhouse gases—absorb infrared radiation that would otherwise escape and reradiate it both out to space and back to Earth, warming the planet’s surface overall to, in Goodstein’s words, a relatively “balmy, comfortable 57 degrees Fahrenheit, as a mean surface temperature. At that temperature we evolved, climbed down from the trees and started building steam engines.”
In the preindustrial era, Earth’s atmosphere absorbed 88 percent of the infrared radiation that would otherwise have been radiated away. In the last 150 years, however, that balance has been significantly altered by humans’ ever-growing reliance on fossil fuels. Says Goodstein, “Since the beginning of the industrial age, we have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about 30 percent.”
The net result of this tinkering, observes Goodstein “is not easy to predict. We don’t know exactly what would happen if by burning more fossil fuel, particularly more coal, and increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, we were to raise the greenhouse effect, let’s say, to 100 percent, but we have a good model to look at. The planet Venus is a little closer to the sun than Earth is, but the physics should permit Venus to be very earthlike in temperature. But it’s not.Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect and a surface temperature hotter than molten lead. As we have seen, distance from the sun is only one of several variables that determine habitability on Earth. At 93 million miles from the sun, our planet could be a frozen wasteland, or it could be a Venusian inferno. The fact is that it is neither. Instead it has this delicately balanced partial greenhouse effect that is ideal for creatures like us. We mess with that greenhouse effect at our peril.” -H.A.
