ARCATA — Richard Heinberg, author of several books that center around the depletion of fossil fuels and its impact on industrialized society, spoke to a packed audience at the Arcata Community Center Thursday.
The presentation coincided exactly with the first presidential debate, a fact that didn’t discourage scores of people from showing up.
“We set the date some time ago and neither Bush nor Kerry talked to us about it,” said organizer Michael Twombly.
The event was part of a series sponsored by Arcata’s Committee on Democracy and Corporations. Heinberg is a core faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on Energy and Society, and Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community.
Heinberg spoke about what he claimed was the approaching fossil fuel crunch as oil discoveries decline, demand in the world increases and the human population continues to explode.
While some say population growth has leveled off in recent years, Heinberg said that the world’s population reached 6 billion in 1998, and has already added another 400 million.
“That’s equivalent to the population of North America,” Heinberg said.
The world hasn’t added the resources to deal with the increased demand, Heinberg said.
Food production has not increased at the same rate, and actually has decreased per capita, Heinberg said. Couple that with global climate change and unsustainable levels of U.S. debt and a new trend in the world toward pre-emptive war, and the world approaches a “crisis situation,” Heinberg said.
Oil depletion figures highly in the approaching crisis, and it’s not something new or theoretical, but something society has been living with for decades, Heinberg said.
The United States, for example, went from the foremost producer of oil in 1950 to the top oil importer now. The United States used to also lead the world in exporting manufactured goods, and was the world’s biggest creditor nation.
Those aspects of the U.S. economy have taken similar turnarounds, Heinberg said.
“A lot of those changes have to do with the depletion of our resource base,” Heinberg said.
A trend noted by officials in the oil industry — including Vice President Dick Cheney, who formerly headed Haliburton — reveals that less oil has been discovered in the world even as demand climbs ever higher, Heinberg said.
“We still pull oil from the ground … but for the most part its the dregs,” Heinberg said.
The resulting crunch that will inevitably occur will pit consumer nations — like the United States and China — against each other, as well as against the poor, supplier nations. Civil wars within the supplier nations could also result.
Heinberg said the options at this point are few, and the world would be better prepared if we had begun planning 30 years ago.
Quickly changing to a renewable resource in highly unlikely, so the best remedy would be to “address the demand side of the equation,” Heinberg said, especially in areas where we are the most vulnerable, such as transportation.
“We are utterly dependent on transportation in this society,” Heinberg said. “Not for convenience but for survival.”
By moving consumers and producers closer together, limiting population growth and taking other steps to address the underlying ecological dilemmas, society can perhaps avoid what most species do in situations like these — die off, Heinberg said.
“Nature will take care of it for us,” he said.
Locally, people can aim for maximum efficiency, localize and decentralize, implement energy alternatives now and just plain use less, he said.
