In his press conference last week, President Bush was fixated on the year 2041 as the point that social security will come off the rails financially if not reformed soon. He emphasized the year 2041 several times.
I wonder if the president has done the math on world oil supplies. A year ago (2004) just about any authority would tell you that, based on the current rate of use, the world oil supply would last another 37 years. Which would bring us to 2041. What a coincidence. Of the two issues, social security and oil, I have to think that running out of oil would be the more compelling, since social security will not exist unless there is an industrial society to support it. Inasmuch as industrial society runs on oil, and no combination of alternative fuels can take its place, a reasonable person would have to conclude that we face a hell of a problem.
Energy is what the president pretended to address in the first (and much briefer) part of his press conference — and he was asked hardly any questions about it during the Q and A. The president’s view is that “new technology” supplied by human ingenuity will eventually solve America’s problem with oil. This reveals a misunderstanding very common among those in the US public who think about these things at all, namely, that technology is thought to be synonymous with energy, that they are essentially the same thing.
The fact that energy and technology are not the same thing is crucial to understanding our predicament. There are really only five energy sources available to us: non-renewable oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, and renewable solar (which includes wind, hydro, photovoltaic, and bio-mass, all dependent on sunlight acting on the earth.) The hope is that technology will somehow allow us to capture an equivalent amount of energy from renewables that we now get from non-renewables. This is the central fallacy of techno-hubris. And this popular delusion is one of the unfortunate unintended consequences of America’s successful landing on the moon in 1969 — the idea that we can do anything if only we wish hard enough. Talk about diminishing returns as expressed in culture!
Of course there’s a catch with the theoretical 37-year supply of world oil. The catch is that we don’t have to run out of oil, or even close, to have trouble with a depleting supply. All that’s necessary to destabilize the major industrial systems we depend on is a fractional yearly decline in production, say two or three percent, because that will mark the end of conventional industrial “growth” that global finance requires to continue operating. It also matters that the US has been depleting its oil at about that rate for thirty-five years and that we make up for our declining oil supply by importing two-thirds of the oil we use from other nations, many of them unfriendly.
President Bush has therefore wasted the first two months of his second term following a mistaken set of priorities. The system that is most in trouble is the oil-addicted American way of life and all its familiar accessories: the single family home in the suburbs, the multiple millions of cars and trucks running at any time, and the food grown and processed on fossil fuel “steroids.” If we don’t reform that system than nobody in American society will have security of any kind much sooner than 2041.
