Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [57]
I said to him, “When my friends and I talk about the end of civilization, we often search for some sort of marker: one of the things we’ve come up with is the end of car culture. How do you see the end of car culture playing out? Even before that, do you agree the car culture is in its endgame? What will cause it to end? And if you don’t think it’s in its endgame, is that because they’ll find new oil, or failing that, figure out a new fuel system?”
He responded, “A lot of these questions have to be gone over in basics because the mass media and the educational systems provide zero insight into them. They act as though how much oil there is and what it can be used for are of no concern to the public.
“Probably the best place to start is by talking about Marion King Hubbert, a geologist who died several years ago who became famous for charting the life of an oil field. Extraction follows a bell curve—called the Hubbert Curve—in which production rises as new wells are put in, reaches a maximum when about half of the ‘Estimated Ultimately Recoverable’ (EUR) oil has been extracted, and then tails off as wells begin to run dry. During the decline, technologies such as water flooding and gas injection may be introduced to slow the rate of depletion, but all they do is stave off the inevitable. The same pattern that is true for individual oil fields holds for geological basins as well: production rises as new fields are found and then tails off as the larger and more accessible fields are depleted. This pattern can be extended also to entire nations, and ultimately to the planet. The bottom line of all this—and this is so obvious we shouldn’t need to say it, but we have to because there is so much ignorance and intentional deceit surrounding this subject—is that the production of any field starts at zero, rises to a peak, and then falls to zero.
“For the United States, production in the lower-forty-eight peaked about 1970—as predicted by Hubbert some forty years ago—and has been on the decline ever since.”
I asked, “When will world oil production peak?”
He responded, “Before we can ask that—and that is the question, isn’t it?—we need to ask another, which is, what is the world’s volume of EUR oil? Once again, production will peak when half of this volume has been extracted.
“One of the best figures I’ve seen for EUR is about 1,800 billion barrels, which would mean that global production would peak by the year 2007. Even if EUR oil is as high as 2,600 billion barrels, that would move the peak back to only 2019. To be honest, both of these figures seem too far away, because I don’t think they fully take into account that oil consumption continues to rise very quickly. I have seen other credible figures—and these seem far more feasible to me—suggesting that global oil production has already peaked.
“Now, when United States production peaked, that didn’t mean the end of the oil age, since the U.S. could still import oil. But when global production peaks, as it either already has or will shortly, it means the beginning of the end of the economy as we know it. Five Middle East countries will regain control of world supply. This will make the oil shocks of the 1970s seem like nothing, because then there were plenty of new oil and gas finds to bring onstream. This time there are virtually no new prolific basins to yield a crop of giant fields sufficient to have a global impact. The growing Middle East control of the market is likely to lead to a radical and permanent increase in the price of oil long before physical shortages begin to appear, and they will appear within the next decade.”
Of course the most recent U.S. invasion of Iraq took place in great measure to secure U.S. access to Iraqi oil.
He continued, “This will, of course, demolish the economy, which has been driven by an abundant supply of cheap energy for a century. We’re going to live through an ‘economic