[Marxism] Out of gas

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, February 8, 2004
'Out of Gas': They're Not Making More
By PAUL RAEBURN

If all you knew about David Goodstein was the title of his book, you might
imagine him to be one of those insufferably enthusiastic prophets of doom,
the flannel-shirted, off-the-grid types who take too much pleasure in
letting us know that the environment is crumbling all around us. But
Goodstein, a physicist, vice provost of the California Institute of
Technology and an advocate of nuclear power, is no muddled idealist. And
his argument is based on the immutable laws of physics.

The age of oil is ending, he says. The supply will soon begin to decline,
precipitating a global crisis. Even if we substitute coal and natural gas
for some of the oil, we will start to run out of fossil fuels by the end of
the century. ''And by the time we have burned up all that fuel,'' he
writes, ''we may well have rendered the planet unfit for human life. Even
if human life does go on, civilization as we know it will not survive.''

He's talking about 100 years from now, far enough in the future, you might
say, that we needn't worry for generations. Surely some technological fix
will be in place by then, some new source of energy, some breakthrough. But
with a little luck, many readers of these pages will live until 2030 or
2040, or longer. Their children may live until 2070 or 2080, and their
grandchildren will easily survive into the 22nd century. We're talking
about a time in the lives of our grandchildren, not some warp drive, Star
Trek future.

And what about that technological fix? ''There is no single magic bullet
that will solve all our energy problems,'' Goodstein writes. ''Most likely,
progress will lie in incremental advances on many simultaneous fronts.'' We
might finally learn to harness nuclear fusion, the energy that powers the
sun, or to develop better nuclear reactors, or to improve the efficiency of
the power grid. But those advances will require a ''massive, focused
commitment to scientific and technological research. That is a commitment
we have not yet made.'' Drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge,
and scouring the energy resources of national lands across the West might
help the constituents of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Vice President
Dick Cheney's friends in the energy industry, but it won't solve the problem.

Goodstein's predictions are based on a sophisticated understanding of
physics and thermodynamics, and on a simple observation about natural
resources. The supply of any natural resource follows a bell curve,
increasing rapidly at first, then more slowly, eventually peaking and
beginning to decline. Oil will, too.

It has already happened in the United States. In 1956, Marion King Hubbert,
a geophysicist with the Shell Oil Company, predicted that oil production in
the United States would peak sometime around 1970. His superiors at Shell
dismissed the prediction, as did most others in the oil business. But he
was right. Hubbert's peak occurred within a few years of when he said it
would, and American oil production has been declining ever since. There was
no crisis, because this country tapped the world's reserves, and the supply
increased along with demand.

Now Goodstein and many others have shown that the same methods, when
applied to global oil production and resources, predict a Hubbert's peak in
world oil supplies within this decade, or, in the best-case scenarios,
sometime in the next. Once that happens, the world supply of oil will begin
to decline gradually, even though large quantities of oil will remain in
the ground. The world demand for oil will continue to increase. The gap
between supply and demand will grow. But this time the gap will be real;
there will be no other source of oil (from the moon, Neptune or Pluto?) to
flow into the system.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/books/review/08RAEBURT.html


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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