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BOOK
REVIEW
Brave nightmare
world
The End of Oil: On
the Edge of a Perilous New World by
Paul Roberts
Reviewed by David
Isenberg
In retrospect, one of the
funniest lines about the US invasion of Iraq will
be the one uttered by the war's defenders who
managed  to insist with a
straight face that this wasn't a war for oil.
Oil is the lifeblood of the world economy.
It is so deeply entrenched in our societies that
it is an existential fact of life. And any country
that happens to have a substantial share of the
world's proven reserves will always be, to use a
military term, a center of gravity.
But as
the very lucidly written The End of Oil
makes clear, the day of reckoning for the oil
industry is in sight, at least for some of us, and
the costs when the oil runs out and the world is
forced to confront both its energy needs and its
abysmal lack of preparation for a successor to
petroleum are going to staggeringly high.
One doesn't have to look far for signs of
this. Consider that the US National Commission on
Energy Policy, a bipartisan group of top energy
experts, recently released a strategy, more than
two years in the making, to address major
long-term US energy challenges. The report,
"Ending the Energy Stalemate: A Bipartisan
Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges",
contains detailed policy recommendations for
addressing oil security, climate change,
natural-gas supply, the future of nuclear energy,
and other long-term challenges.
Also,
members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC) meeting in Buenos Aires in
mid-December appeared to be more concerned about
the impact on their economies of measures to
reduce greenhouse-gas emissions than about the
potentially disastrous consequences of global
warming, which are largely attributable to the
burning of fossil fuels.
If the past is
truly the prologue to the future, then author Paul
Roberts, a longtime contributor to Harper's
magazine, has served us well. For in large part,
his book is a history of not only oil but of
humanity's quest for energy. As he notes, for most
of the past 6,000 years, human history has been
characterized by a constant struggle to harness
ever-larger quantities of energy in ever more
useful ways. The wide-scale use of coal in England
set the conditions for the Industrial Revolution.
A century later, oil and natural gas completed the
transformation, dragging the industrializing world
into modernity and in the process, fundamentally
and irrevocably reordering life at every level.
In short, energy is the Holy Grail. As
Roberts writes:
Energy has become the currency of
political and economic power, the determinant of
the hierarchy of nations, a new marker, even,
for success and material advancement. Access to
energy has thus emerged as the overriding
imperative of the 21st century. It is a guiding
geopolitical principle for all governments, and
a largely unchallenged heuristic for a global
energy industry whose success is based entirely
on its ability to find, produce, and distribute
ever-larger volumes of coal, oil, and natural
gas, and their most common by-product,
electricity. Yet even a cursory look reveals
that, for all its great successes, our energy
economy is fatally flawed, in nearly every
respect. The oil industry is among the least
stable of all business sectors, tremendously
vulnerable to destructive price swings and
utterly dependent on corrupt, despotic
"petrostates" with uncertain
futures. That, however, does not begin
to cover the downside. Other factors must include
climate change due to the greenhouse effect; the
finite quantities of petroleum remaining; the
challenges of finding, producing and distributing
it; its use in generating electricity - the
fastest-growing segment of the energy market - and
its overwhelming demand on the existing
infrastructure; the breakdown of the energy system
in the developing world, where the urgent quest
for survival doesn't allow for environmental
considerations; and the future energy demands of
countries such as China or India, to name just a
few of the issues Roberts covers.
Roberts'
reporting is both wide-ranging and insightful. In
detailing the global oil addiction, his travels
take him from Saudi Arabian oilfields to
Azerbaijani pipelines to natural-gas terminals in
Mexico to a Vancouver power company to wars
between competing gas-station chains in China.
But he never strays far from his central
point: that the energy economy is changing, and
not always for the better. We no longer have a
choice in the matter. To use a favored expression
from those who talk about the probabilities of
another September 11, it is not a question of if,
it's a question of when.
Make no mistake,
change is coming. And if history is any guide at
all, it will be traumatic. That is assuming that
the countries of the world actually try to
cooperate with one another on issues such as
energy conservation or adopting new energy
technologies, ie natural gas, hydrogen, solar and
wind. It also assumes willingness on the part of
the existing multinational energy companies to
move forward on these technologies instead of
trying to wring every last cent out of their
existing capital stock. That is not something the
current US administration is likely to encourage
given its existing ideology.
One of the
more interesting issues that Roberts covers deals
with the "peak oil" theory; in essence, the point
when we hit the halfway mark in using the entire
world's oil supply. While scientists and
free-market ideologues argue over reserves and
undiscoverable and recoverable oil, one estimate
has us hitting the peak in just 25 years, around
2030.
Of course, that figure could be off,
but other facts are indisputable - such as the
fact that the majority share of the world's oil is
in the Middle East, is controlled by OPEC, which
already exerts inordinate influence over world oil
prices, and will gain more as non-Middle East
sources run out. And they are running out fast.
Even taking into account optimistic projections,
such as increased Russian oil production, non-OPEC
oil production will peak in 2015.
However,
the book is not entirely gloom and doom. There are
things that can be done. But because of the
central role of the United States as an oil
consumer and key market for the rest of the world,
its active participation is required on issues
like the increased availability of natural gas,
adoption of a carbon penalty, and an all-out
effort to cut consumption of oil and other energy.
Boosting automobile fuel-efficiency standards
would be an example. How likely is this?
Considering the last time the United States got
serious about that was after the 1974 oil shocks,
not very.
The End of Oil: On the Edge
of a Perilous New World by Paul Roberts, 2004,
Houghton Mifflin. ISBN: 0747570752, 332 pages.
US$33.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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