Running On Empty

[Lightning Rod]

Running On Empty
for release 04-15-05
Washington D.C.

Recently the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment returned its report. The four-year, $24 million study involving 1,360 scientists from 95 nations concluded, after examining extensive data including satellite photos and field surveys, that we have used up, trashed or otherwise destroyed about 60 percent of available farmland and forests and fish and fresh water on the planet. Not a pretty picture. Especially with the world population at over six billion and growing.

Thomas Malthus, in 1798, just years after the inception of our Republic, predicted what has become known as the Malthusian Catastrophe. He said that population was going to outstrip food production and that there would be widespread famine and death and the population would be forcibly reduced. As we know, this didn 't happen. The population of the world has increased four-fold since then, and babies are still welcome and there is food in the supermarkets. Malthus didn't foresee small things like the Industrial Revolution and the associated green or agricultural revolution. The harnessing of steam power and later petroleum power has spared us the Malthusian Catastrophe. Until now.

James Kunstler's article in the Rolling Stone delineates the Peak Oil situation and it's likely ramifications. If you are interested in what your life will look like in several years go here.

If we are to believe the Peak Oil prognosticators and the scientific priests, our collective environmental credit card is maxed out and we are about to have to pay the proverbial piper. Our agricultural system is propped up by cheap petroleum. Without the cheap petrol to run our threshers and our tractors and our irrigation pumps and without the fertilizers and chemicals that power our food machine and without the fuel to power the trucks that bring the produce to market, we are likely to experience more discomfort than simply having to park our SUV's when the real crunch happens. We might have to learn to grow our own food. And in my case, brew my own beer and cultivate my own pot.

I don't really want to write on this subject because I'm afraid I'll start to sound like Thomas Malthus. The only reason I even mention this is because I have a one year old grandchild. I've lived it up like the rest of us all my life on cheap energy charged on Mother Earth's own credit card. But, according to the experts, the bill is about to come due. Is the world really going to come to an end when we run out of cheap oil? I doubt it. But our lives could change substantially.

For several years now, I have been listening to talk about Peak Oil and I mostly viewed it as alarmism. But these days you can't drive past a gas pump without noticing that there is something going on in the oil business. Gas is $2.50 a gallon (that's more than Perrier Water.) Oil was selling for sixty dollars a barrel last week.

I grew up in the West Texas oil patch. My family was supported by the oil business. I watched wells being drilled and looked at drilling samples and seismic logs scattered around the house. Intermediate Texas Sweet Crude was $3.35 per barrel in those days, but the dollar ain't what it used to be. Around about 1970, the US hit domestic peak oil. Our domestic production began to decline and we had to rely more heavily on foreign oil. This was partially due to depletion of the resource and partly a result of a geo-political decision made by the oil companies. There is still a massive amount of oil locked in the limestone under Texas but it is much easier and cheaper to get oil out of the sand in Saudi Arabia. So, the oil moguls decided to just leave the oil under Texas and suck on the easier straw in the Middle East.

That might have been a wise business decision at the time. But what the oil execs failed to foresee was that the major oil hogs on the block, the US and Europe, weren't the only pigs around. In case you haven't noticed, the people in India and China that used to get around on bicycles and rickshaws are now driving SUV's too. We find ourselves in another Malthusian situation where the demand for the product is increasing while the production is declining.

What does this mean? It means that we are going to have to change our lifestyles. And I'm not talking about flimsy gestures like recycling our cans and plastic bottles. And I'm not talking voluntary either. What do you do when there is no gas at the pump and no potatoes in the market? You grow your own potatoes and get a bicycle. Or you could sit in your SUV and listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio until the battery runs out. Regardless of what you do, your life is about to change.

What kind of changes? Oh, small ones at first. No long distance car vacations. Carpooling perhaps. Then there will come a time when it costs you a hundred bucks a day in gas just to commute to work, so you'll have to decide if it is worth it to get up in the morning. Ok, so you go to the grocery store and there are four hydroponic tomatoes on sale for nine dollars apiece. They came all the way from Chile and gas ain't cheap. Instead of paying the Chem-Lawn guy to come out and fertilize your St. Augustine grass you might need to consider ripping it out and planting okra. Just small changes

The sad part about this situation is that we who occupy the modern industrial world are so strung out on a single commodity, the junk we call oil, that we are in too much of a stupor to see that what we have here is not an energy crisis, it's an ingenuity crisis. This is the Universe, people. It's made out of energy. We can get it from the sun, the wind, the plants, the tides and the atom. George Bush might even know how to pray for it.

The Poet's Eye doesn't see the imminent downfall of civilization because of the oil crunch, but there are going to have to be adjustments. Oil won't be gone in my lifetime but my grandchild will not likely drive an SUV. I hope she is lucky enough to have a moped and solar energy in her house.

<center>In sixty-nine I was twenty-one and I called the road my own
I don’t know when that road turned onto the road I’m on

Running on - running on empty
Running on - running blind
Running on - running into the sun
But I’m running behind---Jackson Browne</center>

[mnaz]

"No long-distance car vacations"......


Suddenly I am experiencing pangs of guilt....



Maybe Tom Friedman is right..... gas ought to be fixed at $4.00 a gallon.... that would set me straight.


(Tom Friedman is foreign affairs correspondent for the NY Times, or something like that.... He's just written a book about the new global economy.... heard him on NPR the other day)

He claims $4.00/gal. gas would change people's behavior, and the automakers would have to retool.... we would consume far less oil and produce far less greenhouse-effect emissions.... the US could become a world-leader in this, etc., etc.....

He pointed out that all of these flag-waving Hummer drivers are helping us to effectively fund both sides of the "War on Terror".... tax dollars to fund the military and oil dollars to fund unsavory regimes which produce terrorists, or something along that line....

some interesting commentary, I thought.