GELFAND ON … DENIAL-It's traditional at this time of year to look back at what we have accomplished or how we have blundered, and to look forward at how we might fix things. So far, we should classify this decade of the 2010s as the Age of Denial. People, and Americans in particular, continue to avoid serious thought about human population growth, the predictable effects of global warming, the degradation of the oceans, and even the depletion of top soil in the Midwest. At this moment, our most critical economic and social problem is something called Peak Oil, and it's not even getting play in the alternative media, much less on the network news.
About a decade ago, I wrote a series of columns on another internet site about the issue of Peak Oil. Basically, it is the observation that there is only so much easily obtainable oil, and the timeline for human use will look like a bell curve. Oil usage increases until the world's reserves can no longer sustain increased production. For technical reasons, this is around the point in time when we have used half of what was originally there. Then production declines because old fields become depleted and new fields are smaller and harder to find. The drop in production is actually one of the few cases where we can use the term "exponentially" in the correct sense.
The United States hit its peak oil production around 1970, and it has been in decline ever since. It's true that with improved technology, we can squeeze a few more drops out by drilling deep offshore, slant drilling, and steam cleaning the tar sands, but these are expensive methods. This whole scenario was explained by geologist M. King Hubbert back in 1956, when he introduced the idea of peak oil to the world.
A few years later, Hubbert predicted that worldwide, the oil supplies would follow a similar pathway, but would take until 1995 or so to hit the peak. We have probably been at or around the point of peak oil for most of this decade.
The economic effects of peak oil are as obvious as they are frightening. The most immediate effect is to increase oil prices, and this has its own effect of slowing the economy down. There was a period in which Saudi Arabia could modulate the world's rate of oil production by turning up the flow, but even that is a thing of the past. Oil prices jump up and down in response to rumors and temporary conditions -- the worldwide economic slowdown has tamped them down a bit over the past few years -- but the overall pattern is a steady price increase, all other things being equal.
When I wrote my first column about the depletion of oil reserves, it was the year 2005. Since that time, the price of a barrel of oil has approximately doubled. We should understand that peak oil has probably already occurred, and we will be spending the rest of our lives, and our children their own lives, dealing with the consequences.
But we avoid the long term relevancies. There was plenty of oil yesterday and there will be enough today to maintain a modest lifestyle, and we all hope that there won't be another big oil shock very soon. How Los Angeles would deal with ten dollar a gallon gasoline and rising electric rates is anybody's guess. It would make for some interesting municipal elections. How about twenty dollars per gallon? How do we prepare?
Peak oil is just one of the big denials we persist in holding onto. Global warming is obviously the other, as our political discourse shows only too well. The magazine Popular Science recently decided to stop allowing comments on its website because they were uncontrollable. A popular PBS radio program had its staff members read off some of the comments in response to one Popular Science article on global warming, and denial is the perfect term to describe them. Nastiness is another, but this discussion is about cognition rather than the authoritarian personality. Those commenters were themselves just responding to a well funded propaganda campaign that does its best to undermine the communication of scientific reality. When you hear a United States Senator call global warming a hoax, you know we have a big problem. When it's the party policy, it's an even bigger problem.
When Paul and Anne Ehrlich published their book The Population Bomb back in 1968, Americans took note. Probably the main reason was that Paul Ehrlich went on the Tonight Show and explained the issues in detail. The population of the USA has grown substantially since Paul Ehrlich sat on Johnny Carson's couch, and nobody even seems to be noticing nowadays. The world has added the equivalent of about two USAs and two Europes in population over these years, and it's become a non-story.
To put it more bluntly, let's divide human history into the era before Ehrlich sat on Johnny's couch, and the era after. Between 1900 and that 1968 date, the world's population approximately doubled, growing by about one and a half billion people. That's a huge amount of growth in a short amount of time, compared to any other previous era of which we have knowledge. Since Ehrlich sat on Johnny's couch, the world population has doubled again, to approximately 7 billion.
If this kind of increase were sustainable, we could expect that the human population of the world would be in excess of 10 or 12 billion people by the end of this century. It's obvious that current technologies and land use cannot sustain this level of growth. The alternatives are family planning on the one hand, or famine and widespread death on the other.
Avoiding this problem is denial, and it's a worldwide problem.
It's also a case of huge denial at the political level. The anti-abortion wing in this country fights against foreign aid that includes family planning, because of the fear that some of this aid supports abortion. This ought to be an issue that can be finessed or even subordinated to the wider problem, but apparently this is not the case. The worldwide population explosion has gotten us to a number in excess of seven billion, and it is still growing. This affects all other problems including peak oil and global warming, because every added person requires a certain amount of fossil fuel during a lifetime.
When you consider global warming, declining supplies of petroleum, the expanding population, and depletion of soil quality, you might say we are looking at the perfect storm for humanity. There are various approaches that we might pursue, ranging from the social and religious (make family planning an essential element of family life) to the technical. The techno-fixes include biodiesel, which is a fancy word for plant oils, solar electric production, and every other element of energy production that we can get our hands on. And still, we have to figure out how to do this without adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
These issues seem terribly obvious to me. Global warming is becoming pretty well established, and even if we don't have 100 percent confidence in the conclusion, we have a growing level of evidence. Peak oil is not only clear and apparent, it is obviously the central element of American policy, foreign and military, for the past several decades. (That's for another column, but it is both a brutal and rational approach when you think about it.) The population explosion is as simple as a curve on a graph, available on Wikipedia or lots of other sources.
And yet political movements and whole religions deny or ignore these problems, as if they didn't exist. That's why I think it's fair to call this decade the Age of Denial.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch and can be reached at [email protected]) –cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 97
Pub: Dec 3, 2013