The First U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions
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2004 Conference Proceedings
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Richard Heinberg Presentation: Powerdown
Slide 1 Thank you so much for that history. That was great to hear. Many of us may still be reeling under the effects of the bad news we have had over the last two weeks. I shrink from adding to that burden, so if there is anyone here who just absolutely can't stand one more iota of bad news, I suggest you leave right now. It's not that I wish to bring you bad news, but these are sobering subjects that we will be considering over the next hour or so. My reason for being interested in this subject is simply that I would like to have as accurate a map as I can of what's actually going on in the world. And what's actually going on in the world right now is sobering. So if we have an accurate map, I think then we are better situated to respond intelligently to what's happening. And that's my real motive.
Slide 2 Peak oil is only of course one of our immense global challenges right now. There is continuing population growth – we just passed six billion in 1999, and since then we have added about 400 million more humans to the planet. It's true that the rate of population growth has slowed, but we're still adding in absolute numbers at an astonishing rate. 400 million people is about equivalent to the population of North America. So since 1999, we have added a North America's worth of population to this little finite planet of ours, and I don't think we've added a North America's worth of resources or support infrastructure. So this is a cause for some concern. Then, combined with that, declining per capita food production. And on top of that, climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, and so on, and on top of that, unsustainable levels of U.S. debt. That hardly seems like it's the same category as the others, but in a way it is, because in order to address these other problems intelligently, we're going to have to change a lot of what we're doing, and that's going to require investment in alternatives of all kinds, agricultural alternatives as well as energy alternatives. And that investment is going to be very difficult if in fact the U.S. dollar is about to collapse and the U.S. economy possibly with it. So all of these taken together are daunting, and all of them are related. They're all related in one way or another to our 200-year party that has been fueled with oil, natural gas, and coal.
We can all relate to this, because we've all lived through it. Every single one of us has lived through this fossil fuel party, and that's basically all we know. This is reality for us. This is what we take for granted. And the depletion of oil and natural gas is not something that is far in our future, something that we can only speculate about. We've lived through that too, that's also part of our experience.
Slide 3 In 1950, the year I was born, the U.S. was the world's foremost oil producing nation. We were the world's foremost oil exporting nation for many decades before that. We were the largest exporter of machine tools and manufactured goods. Over 60% of all the goods exported in the world had a Made in USA tag on them. We were lending money to the rest of the world, and we were self-sufficient in nearly all resources. Now a lot has changed since 1950.
Slide 4 Today of course, we are the world's foremost oil importing nation, the world's foremost debtor nation. We are borrowing money from the rest of the world, and of course, we're importing lots of other things, and jobs are fleeing elsewhere. Is all of this simply the result of bad management? We've had lots of that and we're still suffering under it now, but I would suggest that these transformations in the United States and America over the past 50 odd years have not been just due to bad management, but they've been due largely to the depletion of the energy resources that made this the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world.
Slide 5 This is where the oil industry started, back in 1859. Very soon a bright young fellow by the name of John D. Rockefeller figured out that a lot of money could be made from this black gooey stuff and he started the world's first multinational corporation, Standard Oil. He became the world's wealthiest man, and of course Rockefeller oil and Rockefeller money worked their way into every crevice of American life, politics, banking, the university system, on and on. When I was writing the book Cloning the Buddha about biotechnology, I discovered in my research that actually the whole science of molecular biology came about as a result of a grant or a series of grants actually, from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation was interested in the whole subject of eugenics and finding the molecular basis of heredity for the purpose of, in their words, social control. So they hired some physicists. They figured out the DNA molecule, and the rest is history, all tracing back to oil, and the money from oil.
If you don't understand oil and oil money, it's really hard to understand American history since 1850.
Slide 6 A couple of slides here that just illustrate the transformation that actually has occurred in our lives. This is a stacked representation of work done over time in the United States by humans, domesticated animals and machines as a percentage of the total horsepower in the economy. And as you can see in 1850, most of the work being done in the U.S. economy was by the muscles of domesticated animals, horses, oxen, and so on. 18% was from human muscle power and most of that was from kidnapped Africans. And only this 16-17% was from fuel-fed machinery, and most of that fuel was wood. How things have changed. By 1960, the amount of work done in the U.S. economy as a percentage of total horsepower is down to virtually zero, and all of the work done by fuel-fed machines. You hear about increases in labor productivity. It has nothing to do with people working harder. It has everything to do with people controlling more machines and controlling more energy with their machines in order to accomplish work. So more energy has gone into the U.S. economy. Where does this energy come from?
Slide 7 This is a comparison. This is nonrenewable energy in the U.S. economy and this is renewable energy in the U.S. economy, and the amazing thing in this slide is the amount of renewable energy in the U.S. economy hasn't changed that much since 1850. It's just about doubled as of 2004 from what it was in 1850. So all of that increase in energy in the U.S. economy has come from nonrenewable resources.
Slide 8 Here's an interesting concept – the idea of energy slaves. If all of the stuff done for us every day, all of the work done for us every day, heating our homes and entertaining us and pushing us around on streets, had to be done with human muscle power, how many humans would it take to do all that stuff for us? Well, it would take about 300 on average. So each of us has about 300 energy slaves. I don't know about you, I can kind of get off on the idea of having one or two energy slaves to pick up my dirty socks and wash my dirty dishes, but three hundred. And we think of this as normal. This is how people are supposed to live. If you look at this in the context of human history, or across human cultures, it's extraordinary. It's far from being normal.
Slide 9 Oil in particular is important because it provides 97% of our transportation energy. It's also critical for industrial agriculture, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, clothing, and on and on. I'm not going to bore you with this long list, but oil has insinuated itself into every aspect of our lives.
Slide 10 So this is the story of our lives. Here is the story of oil in the lower 48 U.S. We see these bars going up like this. That's discovery. And this is production. Production, of course, is the word used in the industry. What it really means is extraction. Nobody is producing oil, they're just extracting it out of the ground. So discovery peaked around the early 1930's with discoveries in east Texas and Oklahoma. And then, about 40 years later, production peaked, around 1970, and it's been going downhill ever since. There is virtually no new oil being discovered in the continental U.S. It's not for lack of trying or looking. More oil wells have been drilled in the lower 48 U.S. than in any other region of the world, in fact, more than in the rest of the world put together. So we have poked around and we've used the best scientific equipment to do it and we've found about all there is to find. So the U.S. is the template. Other countries in the world are sooner or later going to follow the example of what we have seen in the U.S. So it is important to grasp this.
Slide 11 U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, a lot of things changed. Prior to that time, we had been mostly self-sufficient. Remember those earlier two slides, the U.S. in 1950 and the U.S. in 2004? Here's the fulcrum. Here's where things really started to change, around 1970, because it became clear then that we would have to import more and more oil in order to maintain our lifestyle. Either that or we would have to change our lifestyle, and we decided, or somehow it was decided, that rather than changing our lifestyle, we'd just import more oil. And in order to do that, of course, we would have to sort of take charge of the whole oil production and distribution system around the world which would require the use of our military and so on. The long gas lines of 1973, the Arab oil embargo, and the price hikes of 1979 after the fall of the Shah of Iran really drove home the point of how dependent we had become and how vulnerable we had become because of our dependency.
Slide 12 Following its national oil production peak, the U.S. was able to compensate by importing more oil from other nations. But–this is the important point–following the global oil production peak, we will not be able to compensate by importing more oil from other planets. We have passed the U.S. production peak but we are just coming up upon the global oil production peak, and that is going to be of even greater significance, and not just for our country, but for the world as a whole.
Slide 13 So when is this global oil production peak going to happen? There are basically four ways of predicting when global oil production is going to pass its all-time peak and start on its inevitable downhill slide. Everyone agrees that this going to happen. The only question is when. There is some dispute. The range of estimates goes from about now until about 2030 or 2035. So how is one to know? What are these estimates based on? Here's a short course on predicting oil production peak. First of all, you can calculate the halfway point of extraction based upon estimates of the total amount that nature left for us that we can extract. There is this natural bell-shaped curve that we saw with the U.S. oil production. That bell-shaped curve is caused by the fact that when we've extracted all the cheap easy stuff, the rate of extraction necessarily tends to decline because the stuff that's left is harder to get out of the ground, more expensive to access, oil is not just in nice big reservoirs that you can empty out. It's in porous rocks, sometimes in shallow or snaky reservoirs. You have to drill more wells as time goes on, and so on. It becomes more expensive and more energy intensive. And you're not going to get all of that oil out of any given reservoir. Usually, at the end of the process, maybe 30-40-50%, even 60%, is still left in the ground, because it would just be too hard to get the rest out. It would cost more in energy terms as well as monetary terms to get it out of the ground than the stuff would be worth. So you estimate how much is totally there in the world. Are we about halfway there yet?
Slide 14 These are published estimates of about how much oil was there to start with, and those estimates converge on about 2000 billion barrels, or two trillion barrels. If you want some smaller numbers to think with, think of it this way. Two trillion barrels is about a hundred cubic miles of oil. It's about a hundred cubic miles. So far we have extracted and burned pretty close to one trillion barrels, which would be about 50 cubic miles of oil. So we're pretty close to that halfway mark right now.
Slide 15 Another way of figuring out if we're close to that halfway mark, is with what are called creaming curves, and oil economists and petroleum geologists and statisticians love these things. Basically what this shows is cumulative discovery, in other words, with every passing year you add up how much has been discovered. And at first, that line is rising rapidly because each new year of discovery brings considerably more. But gradually as time goes on, the amount being discovered each year is adding incrementally less. So that creaming curve tends to point to an asymptote. It is pointing to a maximum figure which is right around, a little bit more than, two trillion barrels according to this particular estimation. So somewhere between 1.8 and 2.4 trillion barrels is the likely ultimately recoverable. And as I said earlier, we're pretty close to that halfway point.
Slide 16 There's another way of predicting when global peak is going to happen. Remember, with the U.S., it was about 40 years between our peak of discovery in the U.S. and our peak of production. Now there is no natural law that says it should be 40 years for other countries, or for the world as a whole, but experience is showing as one country after another does reach its oil production peak, that there is a time lag of usually just a few decades between the peak of discovery and the peak of production. Global oil discovery peaked right around 1963. This is not controversial information.
Slide 17 This slide is from ExxonMobil. It's from the slide show of Harry Longwell, executive vice president of ExxonMobil. And it very clearly shows global oil discoveries have been on average going downhill ever since the early 1960's. So that's about 40 years ago. Now as I said a moment ago, with some countries it may be less, with some countries it may be more. For the North Sea, for example, it has been more like 30 years from peak of discovery to peak of production, and with Iraq for a counter example, it's likely to be more like 50 years between Iraq's peak of discovery and peak of production, for political reasons, because they went through a couple of decades of sanctions and war, which kept that oil in the ground that otherwise would have been extracted. But if you average out all of those countries, the shorter countries like Norway, and the longer countries like Iraq, you still end up with something like 40 years as a good guesstimate as the likely lag between peak of discovery and peak of production globally. And if we go by that, we should expect peak of production globally to occur within the next few years.
Slide 18 Notice on that previous slide, there was a little uptick right at the end which seemed to show that discoveries were increasing. This shows that in a little more detail–1999 and 2000 were very good years for discovery. Those were discoveries in Kazakhstan, the Kashagan field. Since then, the general downhill trend has resumed.
Slide 19 2003 was even worse. Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, described 2003's exploration results as "little short of horrifying", saying we would probably have to go back to the early 1920's to find a year when fewer large oil discoveries were made. The 1920's were years before east Texas, before any of the major finds that have been made. So we're back to that level now. Clearly, global oil discoveries are declining rapidly.
Slide 20 Another way of looking at that is discovery in relation to extraction or production. In the 1960's we were discovering far more every year than we extracted, and that changed in the early 1980's, and since then, we have been extracting more every year than we discover. We are extracting about 4 barrels of oil for every new one we discover every year at this point.
Slide 21 And the problem is not just that we are not drilling enough exploratory wells or wildcats. This is basically the same slide that we just saw a moment ago, but superimposed over it is the number of wildcat or exploratory wells. And you notice as discoveries were starting to dwindle, the oil companies began investing more in exploration because they figured, clearly we're going to need more oil, so let's start looking harder. And that continued until the mid-'80s and has been dwindling ever since. The reason for that is that exploration doesn't pay very well any more. In 2003, the global oil industry invested 8 billion dollars in exploration, and they found 4 billion dollars' worth of oil. So that's not much incentive to increase their investments in exploration.
Slide 22 How about another way to predict global oil peak? Add up nation by nation peaks to arrive at the date for global peak. If the U.S. has experienced this all-time oil production peak, it stands to reason, if it's the template, we're likely to see that in other countries, and we have. Of about 44 or 45 significant oil producing countries, about 25 are past their all-time peaks.
Slide 23 Example is North Sea. This was supposed to be a miracle that would save us, because remember in the 1970's, we had the oil shocks, everyone was worried about our increasing dependency on oil from the politically unstable Middle East, and here was a new source of oil controlled by nice friendly countries like Denmark, Norway, and the United Kingdom, and it was an economic miracle, especially for Great Britain. Great Britain had come to be known in the 1950's and '60s as the "sick man of Europe", because after World War II and the loss of its colonial empire, Great Britain was in the economic doldrums, seemingly perpetually. And the tremendous windfall of wealth from North Sea oil was an economic miracle for the British. But those discoveries, which peaked in the early 1970's, have been going downhill ever since and production has peaked now for the North Sea in all three countries, and in fact, for Great Britain, 2004 is the first year since the early 1970's for Great Britain to be a net oil importer once again. So every year there are fewer nations in the column of oil exporting nations, and more countries in the column of oil importing nations. So doing a bit of math, Richard Duncan, of the Institute for Energy and Man in Seattle, has come up with the prediction of global oil peak for 2007.
Slide 24 Finally, once we are starting to zero in on global oil production peak and getting closer to that date, we can apply some more finicky methods, as Chris Skrebowski of Petroleum Review in London has done, where he has compared new production capacity needed in the next few years with the production capacity that is now in development. Let me explain this.
Slide 25 We need more production capacity every year just to stay even. Now when I speak of production capacity, I'm talking about how much oil can we produce, say, on a daily basis. Right now the world produces or extracts 82 million barrels of oil per day. Next year, we will need to produce more than 82 billion barrels per day to meet increased demand. By the way, this slide is from the International Energy Agency, nothing controversial here. The IEA, which is based in Paris, is notoriously conservative in its outlook on global oil, and extremely optimistic about the industry's ability to meet demand. Nevertheless, this is what the IEA says. It says in 2005, the industry will have to develop a million and a half barrels a day of new production to meet increased demand, and it's actually likely to be more than that, because demand is growing extraordinarily fast right now globally. On top of that, we'll need to develop another four million barrels a day of new production in order to offset declines in production from existing fields that are past their peaks of production, and they're declining. So we need almost six million barrels per day of new production capacity next year to stay even. Now that's a considerable feat, for the industry to do that, but in 2006, we'll have to do the same thing and a little bit more in 2007 and 2008. This is cumulative. In other words, every year, the industry has to develop this much more in production capacity. Now, can we do that? Chris Skrebowski of Petroleum Review did a study that was published in April of this year called "Oil Field Megaprojects," in which he simply went around the world and looked at where is new production capacity going to come from?
Slide 26 It's noteworthy to check in with John Thompson, president of ExxonMobil Exploration Company, who's basically saying the same thing as the IEA was saying in that last slide. "We estimate that world oil and gas production of existing fields is declining at the rate of 4-6% a year. To meet projected demand of 2015, the industry will have to add about 100 million oil equivalent barrels a day of new production. That's equal to 80% of today's production level, in other words, by 2015, we need to find, develop and produce a volume of new oil and gas equal to 8 out of every 10 barrels being produced today. So that's how that cumulative need for new production capacity adds up, it adds up very quickly. And the cumulative need is quite extraordinary.
Slide 27 So where does the new production capacity come from? It has to come from new discoveries, and we've just seen that new discoveries have been falling off dramatically. Or we have to develop unconventional petroleum resources like natural gas liquids, or tar sands from Alberta, or shale oil from Colorado, or polar or heavy oil from Venezuela, and these unconventional resources are often extremely expensive to develop and expensive to produce. Or we can get new production capacity from reserve growth, which is an industry term which means basically, we've said that we have reserves in–let's take Iraq for example–we've said that we have reserves there of 112 billion barrels, but this year we've put in the dipstick and looked at it, and in fact, we think we have 120 billion barrels instead. So sometimes, the oil companies underestimate at first how much is actually there, and sometimes new recovery technologies enable them to extract a larger percentage of the total resource than they otherwise would have been able to.
Reserve growth historically has been a major factor in the oil industry's being able to expand its production capacity from year to year. Now there are good reasons for thinking that reserve growth is not likely to be of as much help in the future as it has been in the past. One reason is that reserve growth was especially significant in the U.S., where American oil companies tended to underreport their reserves for tax reasons, so that they wouldn't have to pay taxes on the total amount, and then they would book reserve growth, reserve additions, every year in order to keep the stockholders happy. Yes, we're adding new reserves to keep up with our production. It looks very good on the balance sheet. Well, the same situation does not apply in other parts of the world. Also, reserve growth tended to be a bigger factor with oil that was discovered in earlier decades of the century, say, oil that was discovered in the 1940's or 1950's, before we had some of these new recovery technologies.
Back in the '40s or '50s they would estimate the recoverable reserves based on the existing technologies. We've improved the technologies, so now we can increase our estimates of what is recoverable from a given reservoir, a given country. But with newer discoveries, the same is not going to be true, because with the new discoveries, we've already added in the effect of the new technologies. If we discover a giant oilfield in the 1990's or today, we're already assuming that we're going to be using secondary recovery techniques, bottle-brush drilling, water pressurization, and so on. So reserve growth is something that has been significant in the past but not likely to be so significant in the future.
When we add all of those factors together, we get a rather disturbing picture. Chris Skrebowski, just to finish up with his "Oil Field Megaprojects" report, found that looking forward from now for the next 5 years, there are projects coming on line off the coast of Nigeria, off the coast of Brazil in deep water, and in the Gulf of Mexico, virtually all of them deep-water projects, which tells you something right there, because these are some of the most expensive, difficult projects to bring on stream. We've already picked the low-hanging fruit, so that's where we're having to look these days. Adding together these new projects, we get about 7 or 8 million barrels a day of new production capacity for the next 5 years. But as we saw in the slide from the International Energy Agency, we're going to need almost 6 million barrels of new production capacity per day just next year alone. So what are we going to do in 2006, 2007, and 2008? And so Chris Skrebowski comes to the conclusion again, that global oil production peak is likely around 2007 to 2008. So we have four different methods of predicting global oil production peak with converging answers to the question of when will the peak occur.
Slide 28 This is a chart published monthly by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, and there is a lot of useful information in this chart. It shows that conventional oil, which is this area here, has probably pretty much peaked already. Conventional oil is the gooey brown or black stuff that's under pressure. You drill a hole in the ground, put in a pipe, and it comes out. That familiar cheap, easy stuff has already probably peaked. And where we're getting virtually all of our growth in new production capacity is from deep water, polar, natural gas liquids, heavy oil, tar sands, all of these nonconventional, extremely expensive and difficult alternative sources of petroleum.
Slide 29 Meanwhile, and this is another IEA slide–meanwhile, spare production capacity; in other words, what the industry could produce on any given day over and above what it actually is producing, spare production capacity, which the industry likes to keep within the range of 4-10 million barrels a day, spare production capacity in 2004 has evaporated.
Slide 30 So even the IEA, the nice, conservative, optimistic, international energy agency, is saying things like coming oil shock. Older fields are maturing and declining. New discoveries are of smaller fields. The industry is forced to produce flat out. Global reserves have been overstated. This is remarkable. The International Energy Agency is admitting that global reserves have been overstated for political reasons. What they are saying is, instead of reserve growth, which is what the industry has been counting on for decades and decades, we're about to start seeing reserve shrinkage. And in fact, we've already started seeing that, with Shell Oil Company, which just this past year had to downgrade its reserves on four separate occasions. That disease is spreading to other oil companies, by the way.
What's this about global reserves being overstated for political reasons? Well, what the IEA is referring to primarily is the tendency for OPEC countries to overstate their reserves in order to gain market share. Back in the late 1980's, OPEC made a rule which said that member countries could export commensurate with their stated reserves. So within two years of this rule change, every OPEC country stated reserve increases of between 50 to 200%, when virtually no new important discoveries had been made. So how much oil really is there in Saudi Arabia or Iraq or Iran, or Venezuela, for that matter? Probably considerably less than what the official estimates tell us. Now there is no global oil cop, again with the big dipstick, to go around and check to see if Saudi Arabia really has 256 billion barrels as we read in The New York Times and Time magazine, and National Geographic, over and over again. Those numbers are self-reported.
So why – if it's so clear that global oil production is likely to peak just within the next few years – if it's true that we're overwhelmingly dependent on oil for our way of life, and if it's true that when global oil production peaks, it's going to change everything that we care about, our economy, our way of life, our ability to travel easily and cheaply, our ability to get cheap food from long distances, all of these things – if that's true, why isn't the government warning us? Well, part of the reason is that our government has adopted statistical forecasting methods that are highly questionable, that give nice, optimistic results that are good for Wall Street, but that give us absolutely no warning about what's actually going to happen.
Slide 31 This is the U.S. Geological Survey forecast, published in 1999, upon which most economists base their understanding of oil production going forward into the future. The U.S.G.S. used a number of very questionable methods in its forecast, and this is just one example. In forecasting future discovery, they said, let's look at parts of the world that we haven't really explored fully yet, like for example, East Greenland. We can be 95% sure that one barrel of oil will be found in East Greenland. But we can be only 5% sure that a sizable amount, like say, 112 billion barrels, will be found in East Greenland. So we'll split the difference and assume that East Greenland has 47 billion barrels of oil. Now that assumption leads to the conclusion then that this historic trend of declining discovery is about to reverse itself and shoot upwards. Now since this forecast was released in 1999, we haven't seen this. Again, 1999 and 2000 were particularly good years, yes. But since then, 2001, 2002, 2003, have been lousy years for global discovery. And in fact, the low estimate, the assumption, the 95% sure assumption, that only one barrel of oil will be found, that kind of statistical method, yields results that do in fact correlate closely with our actual experience. If they had followed that more conservative forecasting method, they would have predicted global oil production peak for 2010 or sooner.
Slide 32 The market is beginning to get wind of all this–certainly the fact of evaporating spare production capacity is something that cannot be avoided. And so as a result, we have seen prices for oil over the past year do this. And this is why we are paying what we are at the gas pump right now.
Slide 33 So where is all of this oil that's left? This is Europe, Asia/Pacific, North America, former Soviet Union, Africa, South and Central America, and the Middle East. Now, we have to take into account that because of overstatements of reserves for political reasons, the Middle East probably should be about one-third, this bar should be about one-third shorter than it actually is. But still, even given that, there is a heck of a lot of oil in the Middle East, a very important region going forward.
Slide 34 And that oil tends to be located in geographically very small regions. Just this little horseshoe-shaped region encompassing Iraq, only certain parts of Iraq and Iran, eastern Saudi Arabia, and so on–that's where it all is.
Slide 35 But the importance of OPEC oil going forward is extreme, because as we can see, non-OPEC oil production is peaking first. It's peaking virtually now, and increasing or continuing production capacity is going to be coming mostly from OPEC. So that means that from a political standpoint, whatever oil is in the ground in the Middle East is of extreme strategic importance.
Slide 36 So what's our plan? I like to call this slide "The Four Horsemen" of the Apocalypse.
Slide 37 You might remember that the invasion of Iraq – this was the original name, the original official name for the invasion operation, and that invasion name was "Operation Iraqi Liberation", O-I-L. You can understand why they decided very quickly to change that name. Now could this be motivated by knowledge or understanding of global oil production peak, impending global oil production peak?
Slide 38 Well, I think so frankly, because we know that Dick Cheney is, was, an oil man. When he was still the CEO of the world's largest oil services company, Halliburton, he gave a speech to the Petroleum Institute in London, where he said, "There will be an average of 2% annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with, conservatively, a 3% natural decline in production from existing reserves," he's basically saying exactly the same thing as the IEA and John Thompson of ExxonMobil said. That means by 2010, we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels of production capacity per day. That's more than 6 times Saudi Arabia's current output. Where are we going to find six new Saudi Arabias by 2010? Not likely to happen. It is not likely to happen. So therefore, let's just send the army over to the other side of the world, commandeer what's left, and use it till it's gone. Good plan.
Slide 39 We have been told to expect war for the remainder of our lifetimes. This is about terrorism, war on terrorism. What we are looking at fundamentally is resource wars. And those wars are going to occur between rich consuming nations and poorer producing nations, such as the U.S. and Iraq, or any other nation that seeks to maintain control of its resources for the benefit of its own people, or to raise prices arbitrarily. Think of a country like Venezuela, or some poorer West African nations.
We are going to see increasing competition between consuming nations. Thinking now of the U.S. and China. China surpassed Japan this year to become the world's second foremost oil importing nation. Oil imports in China are increasing at a rate of between 30 and 40% per year. We all have nice images in our minds of the Chinese riding millions of bicycles through the city streets, but last year, Shanghai banned bicycles on their streets, because they were getting in the way of cars. China has its eye on exactly the same oil that the U.S. does. Oil in Saudi Arabia. Virtually all of the recent contracts that have been let by the Saudis for oil exports going forward for the next few years, virtually all of those contracts have gone, not to the U.S., not to Europe, but to China. China is even haggling for contracts for Venezuelan oil, African oil, Central Asian oil. Now currently, the competition between the U.S. and China is on a relatively friendly level. After all, the two countries are locked in a kind of embrace. We buy cheap manufactured stuff produced in China at Wal-Mart, and China takes that foreign exchange income and reinvests that back in the U.S. economy, buying Treasury bills and so on, enabling us to run up huge government deficits. But China also takes some of that foreign exchange income and uses it to buy food from American farmers, U.S. food exports, surplus, agricultural surplus. So the two countries are very interdependent. And yet at the same time, they both need the same resources in order to continue doing what they are doing now. When it's clear that global oil production has peaked, the competition between these two nations is likely to become a little uglier. I don't think it's likely to be a shooting war right off the bat; however, economic competition could become quite fierce, and the Chinese have some rather powerful weapons in that regard. All they have to do is stop buying U.S. debt and the U.S. dollar will collapse.
We are also likely to see increasing civil wars within producing nations for control of their own resources. We're already seeing that in Colombia, in South America, again in West Africa, and very likely, in Iraq going forward in years ahead.
And finally, asymmetrical warfare between rich consuming nations and non-state entities within producing nations, otherwise popularly known as terrorism.
Slide 40 Maybe we don't have to concern ourselves with this right now. This is just showing the increasing dependence from less stable areas of the world.
Slide 41 So the sites of the coming resource wars are the Middle East, West Africa, South America, and finally, Central Asia. No great surprises there.
Slide 42 So if we are to avoid resource wars, what are we going to have to do as a global community? Well, let's start with the U.S. What are we going to have to do? We are going to have to, among other things, find other sources of energy, because right now, petroleum, natural gas and coal make up the lion's share of the energy that we use. Let's take a look here. What's left. Nuclear electric power, wood and waste, hydroelectric power, and geothermal and other–and the footnote says solar and wind.
Slide 43 Let's look at this as a pie graph. This little pie slice here, which represents between 6 and 7% of our total energy budget, that little slice is renewables. And if you expand that slice, you see that most of it is taken up with conventional hydroelectric power and wood, people heating their homes with wood, towns burning municipal waste for energy, and then there's a little in the way of alcohol fuels, and geothermal, and then wind makes up about 1%, and solar makes up about 1%. Now we're not talking about 1% of the total energy pie, we're talking about 1% of this little slice. So if you add solar and wind together, currently we're getting 0.17% of our total energy budget from solar and wind combined. Now why make a big deal out of that? Because solar and wind are two primary energy sources that we could grow. We can't grow hydroelectric production that much, because we've already dammed most of the rivers. We're not going to burn a heck of a lot more trees, because if we start doing that, then we'll run out pretty soon. Wood is renewable, but it's exhaustible. We can produce more power from solar and wind, but look where we're starting from. If we were to double our total solar and wind capacity, what it is currently, what we've worked for 20 years to build up, if we were to double that, and that's not a small feat–and then if we were take that amount and double it again, we still wouldn't be up to 1% of our total national energy budget.
So what's required in order to make that piece of the pie grow significantly is not just a billion dollars here and there of seed money from the federal government. What's required is hundreds of billions of dollars a year in new investment, and the International Energy Agency acknowledges this. In their recent report, they're anticipating, in order to meet our energy demands by 2030, we're going to have to increase our investment in energy production dramatically to something like 550 billion dollars a year globally, 16 trillion dollars by 2030, we're going to have to spend. And that is assuming that most of that investment will go to fossil fuel resources, and that's assuming that those resources will be there, to be found and developed. So if we were to follow the IEA path, which basically is echoed by the industry itself–I was at this presentation by an executive of ExxonMobil a few weeks ago, who basically showed the same graphs and same expectations of growth and investment and so on–by 2030, we will be even more dependent on fossil fuels than we are now, and we will have spent $16 trillion to get there, and then what will we do? At that point, then we'll have to spend trillions more to develop an alternative renewable energy infrastructure to replace the fossil fuel infrastructure that is now obsolete because we've run out of oil and gas. It's insane. It's absolutely insane. And yet these are the responsible agencies telling us what we're about to do.
Slide 44 Is hydrogen the answer? I'm not terribly sanguine about hydrogen. I think it will have important niche applications. Hydrogen, of course, is not an energy source. It's a way of storing energy, it's a way of producing potential transportation fuel from electrolysis using water, but you have to have lots of electricity. Yes, you can produce it using solar and wind, but you're got to have a lot of solar and wind production capacity installed to make much of a difference in that regard.
Slide 45 I'm not going to dwell on this very much, except to say that I think that many people are under an illusion that hydrogen cars are just around the corner, and that in 10 years, we'll all be driving them, and we won't even notice the difference. We'll pull up to the same filling station where today we're buying oil, and we'll just plug in and fill up the car with hydrogen. It's not going to be that easy. It's not going to be that simple.
If there's no easy supply side solution, and there isn't, it would take a fair amount of time for us to go through all of the available alternatives and see how in fact, each of them would require immense investments in order to replace oil and natural gas, or many cases, simply wouldn't be able to do so no matter how much we invested. Nuclear, for example. In order to replace oil and gas in this country, let's say, just for transportation, how many new nuclear plants would be needed? We have 103 right now. Well, it turns out we'd need about a thousand more. Are we going to build 1000 more nuclear plants when the cost overruns from the ones we've already built have practically bankrupted whole utility industries that have had to have been bailed out by taxpayers and so on? It's not likely that that's going to happen. So if we can't rely just on the supply side, we're going to have to look at the demand side of the equation, reduce our need for fossil fuels. How do we do that?
Slide 46 Well, we have to look at where we're spending energy. This is just for transportation. Transportation is where we have to start, because that's where we use the most oil, and that's where we're most dependent on oil. Right now, we're using most of our oil to make gasoline to run personal passenger automobiles, and that's about the least efficient way of transporting ourselves that has ever been invented. A long distance plane that is filled with passengers is more efficient than a passenger car, then regional train, long-distance bus, city bus–this slide is from France, by the way, so it has some alternatives not even available to us in this country–commuting train, national train, Paris Metro, TGV, walking, and finally, bicycle. Bicycle is the most efficient. But look at this tremendous range here. We are going to have to find our way down this slope and basically give up the automobile as a preferred means of transportation. It's not about finding alternative fuels for cars, it's not about developing hydrogen cars–it's about finding ways to do without cars. We have to do some energy triage here. Where are we likely to get the most significant savings from? Where are we spending our most energy?
Slide 47 So it's all well and good to replace our incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, yeah, we should all do that, but look at the percentage of our energy usage that goes to home lighting. It's not the biggest energy sink in our lives by any means. Rather, home heating and driving and eating are the biggest ones. Those are the big three. So we have to find ways of reducing transportation, insulating our homes much, much better, and working with the sun, with thermal mass, to reduce the amount of energy we use for home heating, and then we have to find ways of producing food using much less energy. We have developed a form of agriculture in the modern world that is so energy intensive it is almost unbelievable. A coyote gets its energy from food, from running down, let's say, jackrabbits. And if it takes the coyote more energy to run down a jackrabbit than it gets from eating the jackrabbit, the coyote dies. Right? But in modern industrial agriculture, for every calorie of food that we eat, typically something like 4 to hundreds of calories of fossil fuel energy have gone to produce that calorie of food. Now that's an energy imbalance that would be impossible under any other circumstances except for the temporary, one-time gift of fossil fuels. So we have to find ways of producing food organically, without the giant tractors, and we have to find ways of transporting food far shorter distances, that means moving producers and consumers closer together. It means growing gardens in cities, where the food is going to be consumed. It means the end of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad. It means the end of bananas in the middle of December in Toronto.
Slide 48 Now what we actually need to do is pull together on a World War II-level basis. We have shown that we can do this. People are extraordinarily cooperative if they understand that they are under threat, if they understand that their collective efforts will make a difference. People can do amazing things. Back in World War II, you couldn't just go into any department store and buy nylon stockings or new tires for your car, or even new gasoline for your car. These things were rationed. The people were willing to go along with that because they understood how important this was. They understood if they worked together, they could accomplish something important. People started growing Victory Gardens on golf courses, front lawns, tearing up pavement to grow gardens, and by the way, this was not a government program. It started with ordinary people. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to suppress the Victory Gardens. But finally, after it became clear that they couldn't suppress the movement, the USDA decided to take credit for it. All of this we can do again. It's going to need some good leadership, and it's going to need some people out ahead of the curve who understand how to do these things in their lives, how to build more energy efficient houses, how to grow their own food, and so on, so that they can teach others.
Slide 49 Overall, our options are pretty easy to enumerate. We can fight for the last drop.
Slide 50 We can wait for a technofix, and basically, that's going to lead us right back to Plan A, because the technofix is likely not to arrive, and if we don't have anything better under development, we'll end up just fighting for what's left.
Slide 51 Don't worry, technology will save you!
Slide 52 Or – we can address the underlying ecological dilemma. All of this that we have been talking about as related to fossil fuels is really just an expression of a universal, timeless problem that we humans have faced as long as we've been on the planet, and in fact, that every species has faced.
Slide 53 And that is, the problem of resource depletion, habitat destruction, and population pressure. That has been happening ever since the first human society existed. Every civilization has faced this, and most civilizations, in fact, have collapsed, because of their inability to respond to the ecological dilemma.
Slide 54 There are only so many possible kinds of responses to this. You can move elsewhere, find unexploited resources, you can exploit existing resources more intensively; you can find new kinds of resources like uranium. Nobody ever thought to exploit uranium before. But all three of these are supply-side responses to the ecological dilemma. And our genius as humans is that we have been able to deploy these supply-side solutions in ever expanding, ever proliferating kinds of ways, and particularly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but really going clear back to our harnessing of fire, tens of thousands of years ago. We have gotten so good at the supply side solution that it's hard for us even to contemplate the demand-side solution. Other species, when they confront the ecological dilemma, usually are forced to adopt, sooner or later, the demand-side solutions, simply limiting population, limiting per capita resource use. If nothing else works, the species dies off. When I give my talk to groups of economists or engineers, typically all they want to hear about, all they want to contemplate are supply-side solutions. Okay, it's an energy crisis and we're running out of fossil fuels, so let's find alternative sources of energy. And these are very bright people.
I spoke recently at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, National Laboratories, as you can imagine, all of these incredibly bright engineers. Every one of them had an idea for a new supply-side solution. Well, I'm not that interested in supply-side solutions. I'm sure we'll come up with very clever things. But unless we deploy demand-side solutions, we are going to hit the wall one way or another, sooner or later. Because fossil fuel depletion is just the first – maybe not the first – but the most extreme symptom of this ecological dilemma. We're seeing essentially the same thing happen with fresh water, with fish in the oceans, with global climate, on and on, amphibians, loss of species diversity. So really, this is what I'm interested in talking about. And I have to say that's virtually all I'm interested in talking about.
We have to find a way of making a smaller footprint on this planet, of using fewer resources and more slowly and parsimoniously, of reducing our numbers, reducing the numbers of human beings on this planet. I'm not talking about killing off millions of people, I'm talking about reducing the human birth rate, to the point where, over time, we have reduced our numbers to the point where we are within the long-term carrying capacity of Planet Earth. What is the long-term carrying capacity of Planet Earth for humans? Nobody knows. But a good first guess would be how many people were on Earth before the Industrial Revolution? About one billion. How many of us are there now? About 6.4 billion. So there are probably about 5 billion people who are alive today only because of fossil fuels. That's a sobering thought. Again, we have to find our way peacefully, amicably, cooperatively down this precarious ramp.
Slide 55 One way of doing this would be by implementing some serious international agreements such as this one that has been proposed, the Uppsala Protocol, which basically would simply limit oil exports and oil imports, so as to undercut profiteering, undercut competition, for the remaining resources. We have to cooperate. Cooperate or die. Now I think the rest of the world, most of the rest of the world, is willing to contemplate these kinds of extraordinary measures. Most of the rest of the world has signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, after all. It's really just this country that is standing in the way. But unless the world's foremost oil consuming nation is willing to sign on to an agreement like this, it's not going to happen.
Slide 56 There is no single magic elixir or quick fix to any of this. I don't even like using the word "solution", because you know, there are some problems that have solutions, like balancing your checkbook. Your checkbook is out of balance–you can spend five minutes or five hours, whatever it takes, and at the end of the day your checkbook will be balanced and that problem will be solved. There are other problems in human life that don't have solutions, like aging. Getting older. You can do that in better ways or worse ways, but you can't just make the problem go away. Similarly, with what we're facing now with fossil fuel depletion, there's no solution to global oil peak, fossil fuel depletion, and so on. There is nothing we can do to just make the problem go away. But there definitely are things that we can do that would be more intelligent responses. And there are responses that will be extremely unintelligent, I think. The most intelligent ones will be to aim for maximum efficiency with whatever we need to do, localize and decentralize our economies, take the movie of globalization we've been living in for the last 20 years and run that movie in reverse. Use alternatives now before the marketplace tells us that it's cost effective to do so, because we need to have those alternatives in place if at all possible before it hits the fan. Simply use less. Contract our expectations rather than expanding them.
Right now we have the world's foremost propaganda system in place here in this country. We spend $225 billion a year on a propaganda system to tell us to buy and use and consume and waste more every year. It's called the U.S. advertising industry. We need exactly the opposite message. We need people to understand that they need to use less. Economic contraction – it's not going to be easy, but that's the direction we need to go. And finally, we need to raise awareness and talk about the issue. Because if people don't understand what's at stake, if they don't understand what's happening to them, then our so-called leaders are simply going to dangle scapegoats in front of people's eyes, and say, well, it's all because of some nasty people on the other side of the planet who are withholding our oil that just happens to be under their sands. And all we have to do is go over and bomb them and everything is going to be okay. Well, it's not going to be okay. But if people understand what's happening, then may be a willingness for politicians at some point to follow. If the people lead, perhaps the leaders will follow. If there is a groundswell of understanding, then the leaders may feel that they have enough support to be able to say some things that people may otherwise not want to hear. I have spoken with several politicians, our local member of the House of Representatives, who is a member of the Energy Subcommittee of the U.S. House. I've given her my PowerPoint presentation. We've stood on the same stage together and talked about energy issues. But she doesn't talk about peak oil, because she knows that it's just too scary. Well, if people start understanding this issue, maybe my representative, maybe yours, maybe politicians of all stripes, will begin to be able to start talking about this and do something about it.
Slide 57 In the meantime, we need to also ensure local food security. Don't depend upon food from 1500 miles away. Don't assume that that food is always going to be there. Who are your local farmers? Ensure local water security. Reduce your need for transportation, personally and as a community. What infrastructure can you put in place to reduce the need for transportation? How about car co-ops, for example? Support your local economy. Wal-Mart is soon going to be a thing of the past. Because all of that imported stuff from China is going to simply cost too much to import. However, in the meantime, all of these huge big box chains will have destroyed the local infrastructure, local economic infrastructure, of small towns all across America. It's already largely happened. We've got to stop that process. We have to foster the local manufacturing of essential goods for local consumption. Who makes shoes around here? Who makes clothing? What do we really need? Think about that. What skills can you bring to your local community? What necessary skills can you offer your neighbors? And finally, we need to plan for long-term emergency services. Most of our emergency services are planned only for very short term emergencies, and we are facing probably a decades-long emergency going forward with peak oil and the succeeding events.
Slide 58 This is how you can contact me if you want. This is all rather sobering, isn't it? It would be nice if none of this were true, and if I'm wrong about any of this or all of it, great! I'd be happy to be proven wrong, quite frankly. But if this is right, if this is true, then we are facing the greatest challenge of our lifetimes. And anything that we can do to prepare for this, anything we can do to knit together our local economic infrastructure, anything that we can do to support each other through this process of transition, will be extremely meaningful, not only for ourselves, but also for the next generation and the generation after that. Because, quite frankly, if we don't do some of these things, if we don't respond intelligently, there may not be a generation after that. It's that important. Thank you very much for your attention this evening.
Question and Answer Session
Q. Is a slow economic collapse contraction possible and if so is that preferable over a quick one?
A. Although I think a slow economic collapse or contraction is possible, in some ways I think that's preferable over a quick economic collapse. If I were looking at this not from the standpoint of a human being, but from the standpoint of a sea otter, I might scratch my head and say, we need quick collapse. The sooner these people are gone, the better off we'll all be. With a quick economic collapse, I think the likelihood of global nuclear war is dramatically increased. A slow economic contraction I think is very unlikely; however, on the other hand, we have to look back to the one historical precedent we have, the 1970's pretty much as a whole. As a result of the oil embargo, higher oil prices, oil consumption declined and we saw actually some economic contraction. We managed to make it through that pretty well. We increased our energy efficiency pretty dramatically. That suggests to me that it would be possible for us to have maybe a dozen years of slow economic contraction without real extraordinary hardship. And if we weathered that well, if we designed as we went along, then I think we might be able to do what Cuba has done, and by contracting, gradually end up with simply a low-energy steady state economy. And that would be the ideal. That would be my first preference. It's not going to be easy or simple, but that would be my first preference.
Q. Am I acquainted with the permaculture people?
A. Very much so, yes – absolutely. Permaculture is wonderful and we will be talking about it a lot this weekend. As a matter of fact, David Holmgren, who is one of the originators of the whole permaculture idea, came out with a book just a couple of years ago which talks a great deal about peak oil. And he says in the book that from the very beginning, he and Bill Mollison envisioned permaculture as a response to the inevitable end of the age of fossil fuels.
Q. What was the role of 9/11 in all of this and what do we do with Bush?
A. Oh, how I wish I had an easy answer to that. We are looking at, I think, one of history's great tragedies playing out here. If ever there was a time in human history when deft, intelligent leadership was needed, now is such a time and what we have in its place hardly bears description. 9/11 in my view was a facilitated event. I don't doubt that it was accomplished as a result of a plot of foreign terrorists, but I believe also that that plot was very early on intercepted, understood and permitted to happen, and that in fact, deliberate aid was given by members of the Administration. It was in effect, as my friend David Ray Griffin calls it, a new "Pearl Harbor". It was an excuse, then, to launch the new resources wars, first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and soon, I'm afraid, likely to be in Iran and other countries as well.
Q. What should we look for as signs of peak oil in our daily life?
A. I think we're seeing them all around us really, the steepening prices of oil, the evaporation of spare production capacity, the increasing competition between U.S. and China for long-term contracts from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Central Asia. All of these things would not be happening if we were not approaching peak oil, if we weren't within probably a year to eighteen months, to maybe 24 months of global oil production peak. I'd say we are likely to see oil prices increase in a volatile way over the next 18 months or so. In other words, we'll see another spike and then the economy will start to reel as a result of high energy prices, that will kill some demand, and as a result of demand destruction, oil prices will go back down for a few months, and then they will achieve new heights, but if you look at the graph and average it out, it will be a steepening increase in oil and natural gas costs. I think we're likely to see more large-scale blackouts like we had on August 13 of last year, because of natural gas shortages in this country. This winter we are riding on the question of good or bad weather. If it's good weather, we will get through the winter okay. If it's bad weather, we will run short of heating oil and possibly natural gas as well. Next winter, we are almost certain to experience natural gas shortages and probably heating oil shortages unless we just have extraordinarily warm weather. So that's the kind of thing we're going to have to get used to as time goes on.
Q. Don't corporations see this coming and shouldn't they be investing in renewables and efficiency and so on?
A - It's a complicated situation. First of all, not all but many of the oil companies are themselves are in kind of a state of denial about all of this because the people who are running the show, the people in the front office who make the decisions, are economists, rather than petroleum geologists. If you look at the people who are actually doing the work, the geologists, they understand all of this very well. And I hear from them pretty frequently by e-mail. But the people who are actually making the investment decisions and running the corporation don't understand all of this. They are schooled in economic theory which basically says resource depletion is almost impossible to occur by definition. That sounds insane, but if you look at modern economic theory, that's essentially what it says. Secondly, some of the oil companies are investing in alternatives, in a kind of tepid way. Shell, BP, they both have solar divisions. In fact most of the solar panel manufacturing going on right now is being done by oil companies, with some exceptions–Sharp in Japan is a big solar manufacturer. But also, looking at it from their standpoint, oil production peak, if they manage it right, is the biggest business opportunity in history. Because right now, it doesn't cost them that much more to extract oil than it did 6 months ago, but they're getting twice as much money for it. Now that doesn't sound so bad from their point of view. Who cares if it starts to become a little more scarce, who cares if their reserves are declining, if in fact, for every dollar of investment, they are making 10 times more in the way of return? So from their standpoint, I don't see huge incentives yet for them to diversify that strenuously.
Q. What about oil becoming utilities so that oil extraction and refining and distribution is under the umbrella of a government commission rather than corporate controlled?
A. That would be a good idea. I think we actually need something like that, and that's also the point of the Uppsala Protocol on a global level, is to take it out of the hands of simply the market, because the market cannot handle what is coming. We are going to desperately need government intervention in the market in order to make it through this energy famine, which is essentially what we are facing. So yes, I think that's an excellent suggestion.
Q. Solar and wind depend a lot on battery technology, and batteries are inherently unsustainable. You have to replace them every few years and so on.
A. Yes, and that's yet another reason to look more at demand side solutions rather than supply-side solutions. There are other energy storage technologies being developed, even something as simple as a flywheel, just pumping energy into a big flywheel that is in a vacuum, and then drawing the energy back off. It turns out that is a relatively efficient means of energy storage. And there are others. But primarily, we really need to look at demand side solutions.
Q. Will the U.S. Empire peak in a sense because of the global oil peak.
A. This is a whole talk in and of itself. The U.S. Empire is extraordinarily overextended and it is on the verge of collapse, and that I think is part of what is making its masters that much more irrational and arrogant. Well, look at the situation. Where is the oil? It's in Eurasia, most of it, over 70% of it, 75% of it, central Asia, Middle East, Russia. And who's contending for that oil? Russia, China, Europe, and the U.S. are primary users, and Japan. Well, we have to send boatloads of armies and weapons halfway across the world to fight for the stuff, which costs immense amounts of money that bankrupt our economy, and then when we get it, we have to transport it back using oil tankers that are extremely vulnerable to all kinds of sabotage and military technologies, and so on .. and who are we fighting? We're fighting people who are right there in Eurasia. Again, Russia, China, Europe. We're not fighting Europe. We're not fighting any of these people. But ultimately, these are the people that we are competing with for control of these resources. It's a losing proposition. The U.S. cannot win the game of global domination.
Q. I have some real questions about whether enough people can wake up from their trance; is there enough mass sanity, amongst us humans?
A. It is easy to get a little pessimistic about all of this. And I've had the remarkable experience over the past few months of seeing my audiences start to get more pessimistic than I am, which is really scary! But I would have to say, it's a great tonic to get outside this country and see the rest of the world. Because when you're in this country, and reading the papers, and seeing what our leaders are doing, it's pretty easy to think there's no way in hell we're going to make our way out of this without global nuclear war. These people are just too crazy, and the people I see around me driving the SUV's–you'll have to pry their fingers off the steering wheel. But you travel elsewhere in the world, and the story is very different. People in Europe are already using energy at one-half the per capita rate of us Americans. And then you travel elsewhere from there into the Third World, and you see that there are people happily, cooperatively living low-energy lifestyles right now. So, can we do it as a species? I don't know, but are we capable of doing it in theory? Well, yes, I can say with confidence that we are, because we're already doing it in a million different places.
Q. Unclear question on alternative solutions?
A. Well, I think all of them are good ideas. I think all of them need to be thought through more thoroughly. And we all need to be doing that. We all need to be engaged in that process. These are good first approximations. They're good first suggestions. Yes, let's get on board with them, and when we go home, we can't imagine that by endorsing some proposed solution that thereby the battle is won, the problem is solved, we can go on with our daily life. It's going to be a huge, huge effort, even once we're all on the same page, with one or another of these proposals or still another one that may be the next generation approximation of what's needed. It's going to be a huge haul between then and actually accomplishing it. Again, we're talking about trillions of dollars of investment and many, many years of very hard work and sacrifice on the part of all of us and our friends and neighbors and people around the world. It's not going to be easy. We shouldn't kid ourselves that it is. But what's the alternative? So we have our work cut out for us. Great to be with you.
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