The “long emergency” and the new normal
CHARLES MOORE
AT LARGE
Published Thursday April 17th, 2008
Appeared on page A9
It is increasingly difficult to dismiss the sense that economic and social systems we've come to regard as "normal," locally and globally, are strained to the limit and breaking down. Crude oil nudging $112 a barrel send motor fuel prices to record highs. People in Haiti rioting and booting their prime minister in protest and frustration over skyrocketing food prices. People killed in food riots in West Africa. These seemingly disconnected phenomena are part and parcel of a perfect storm of converging factors including energy shortages, climate change, and a third-world population explosion that will oblige us to redefine "normal."
We are arguably already in what author and activist James Howard Kunstler dubbed in is 2006 book of the same title, The Long Emergency.
I don't always agree with Kunstler - 10 years ago he was profoundly mistaken about the impact of the Y2K bug, while I predicted by mid-1999 that it would be a transitory hiccup - but I think he's on to something with projected consequences of peak oil.
If you think high fuel prices of the past several months are a temporary economic blip and anticipate return to relatively cheaper oil prices of quite recent memory, you're likely out of luck. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says conventional world oil production peaked in May 2005, and the peak in all oil (including non-conventional sources like tarsands) is estimated to come in 2010.
Actually, oil production per capita peaked in the 1970s at about 5.26 barrels per year and is now 4.73 barrels per year. In the meantime, China's oil consumption has grown by 8 per cent annually since 2002, doubling from 1996-2006, and India's oil imports are projected to more than triple from 2005 levels by 2020, while at least nine of the world's 21 largest oilfields are in decline.
Even those raw statistics are somewhat optimistic, since the half of nominal reserves remaining are much more difficult and costly to extract and of poorer quality than the easy half were. A substantial proportion will never be pumped, and worldwide discovery of new oil has declined to insignificant levels.
Meanwhile global oil demand is projected to increase 37 per cent over 2006 levels by 2030 according to the U.S.-based Energy Information Administration. World population grew from 6.07 billion in 2000 to 6.45 billion in 2005, forecast to double from 1980 levels by 2030, by which time oil production is expected to have diminished back to 1980 levels, with predictable inflationary effect.
The impact will reach far beyond the cost of filling up our cars and heating our homes, and is already being profoundly felt by the world's poorest and most vulnerable in brutal food price increases driven by grain and oilseed shortages consequential to crop diversion for biofuels production, crop failures and lower production at least partly attributable to climate change, and the fact that modern agriculture is heavily dependent on oil to fuel machinery, shipped-in seed, fertilizer, and chemicals, and energy-intensive processing and distribution of food products. Few farmers grow even their own food.
The "long emergency" is already dominant existential reality for many, according to World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who told The Guardian newspaper last week: "In the U.S. and Europe over the last year we have been focusing on the prices of gasoline at the pumps. While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs." He castigates U.S. and European governments for embracing biofuels as an oil alternative, diverting agricultural land away from food and steepening the price spike.
Zoellick noted that wheat prices rose by 120 per cent over the past year, more than doubling the price of bread, while rice is up 75 per cent in just two months. On average, the Bank calculates food prices have risen by 83 per cent in the past three years, to a point that in Bangladesh a 2kg bag of rice now consumes almost half of typical daily income for poor families.
The outlook is bleak. Biofuels are a "cure" worse than the disease. A "hydrogen economy" is a pipe (line) dream. Most hydrogen to power fuel cells is derived from natural gas. Solar, wind, and tidal power will help, but can't come close to substituting for cheap oil, the end of which portends the end of a globalized consumer economy. We will be obliged to become more local and agrarian, and to rediscover techniques and skills necessary to function at a subsistence level, if that is indeed possible, given today's population dynamics and practical ignorance.
Commercial air travel will die, and the folly of letting North America's railways deteriorate will hit home.
The suburbs, under which lie much of the continent's best agricultural land, will become the new slums, and the "long emergency" may become the new normal.
Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotia based freelance writer and editor. He can be reached by e-mail at cwmoore@gmx.net. His column appears each Thursday.
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