Es curioso el
mecanismo de negación mental que mantenemos todos a la hora de pensar el futuro
y las alternativas energéticas que nos quedan. Nos quedan pocas alternativas,
chicos, y ninguna tan eficiente como la del petróleo, que, como todos saben y nadie se termina de creer, se está por acabar.
Al menos, el petróleo fácil, el que no cuesta tanto extraer. Via el blog El
Legado de Casandra (http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com) llegamos a esta nota
de Eugene Marner para el diario británico The Daily Star. Acá va:
Título: The Peak
Oil Election
Epígrafe: The
peak for conventional crude production arrived between 2008 and 2011. It seems
that we passed the peak for "all liquids" in 2015, even though it
will take some more time to be sure that an irreversible decline trend has
started. Of course, reaching the peak has generated a vehement denial that the
peak even exists. In this article, Eugene Marner comments on how and why the
presidential elections completely ignored the hard facts of the declining net energy
supply from fossil fuels. (Image from
"The Victory Report")
Texto: Here in
the USA, we held an election recently that left most surprised, many dismayed,
and many others eager to explain what happened, why it happened and what we do
now. Lots of deep thinking and heavy breathing have gone into those analyses
and I don’t mean to compete here with students of history and politics. I
would, however, like to offer what I think may be an important part of the
context for recent events, a context that is defined and enforced by geology
and physics. I suggest that the election of 2016 can be called the Peak Oil
Election, although the issue certainly never came up in public.
Back in November
2000, The Daily Star published a guest commentary in which I wrote about peak
oil, the moment when global production of oil reaches its maximum and starts
its inevitable decline. I had hoped to rouse people to think about the grave
consequences that would ensue when oil, the key resource that fuels and
supports our civilization, is no longer widely and cheaply available. Clearly
that didn’t work very well, as most people still don’t have any idea what peak
oil means, much less that its consequences are unfolding around us right now.
No doubt our media, always complicit in a corporate agenda (oil companies are
big advertisers), have not done much to inform the public but, more alarming
than the blithe disregard of the population at large, is the apparently total
cluelessness of both the two major presidential candidates and most of their
advisers and entourages as well as the Congress. The Army Corps of Engineers
issued a report back in September 2005 called Energy Trends and Implications
for U.S. Army Installations that sounded the alarm about peak oil coming soon
but that didn’t get much attention, either.
The economy is
widely acknowledged to be the critical factor in most elections. Both Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton, like most politicians everywhere, talked and
continue to talk about “economic growth.” Voters can forgive scandals, bigotry,
nastiness, stupidity and just about everything else but, when they see their
standard of living falling, their jobs vanishing, their children with no future
(and sometimes with nothing to eat), they blame politicians, rightly or
wrongly. Politicians usually pretend to have solutions that almost always
involve some path or other to “growth.”
Although none of
us alive today can remember a time when economic growth was not part of our
expectation for the future, such growth has only been conceived of for about
the last 200 years. Until fossil fuels became the energy that powered the
Industrial Revolution, economies grew by making war on their neighbors and
taking their wealth. That was the stuff of history: empires rose on the principal
of capturing territory and exacting tribute and eventually collapsed under the
weight of their military costs and the expense of hauling all the loot back
home.
Europeans had
nearly exhausted the resources of their corner of the Eurasian landmass when
Columbus came upon what was called the New World. Of course, it was just as old
as every other place and, contrary to the persistent mythology, was not empty
but chock full of animals, plants and, yes, many millions of human beings
living in complex cultures. For the next three centuries, first the Spanish and
Portuguese and, soon after, the Dutch, French and English crossed the Atlantic
to subdue, conquer, and kill off the inhabitants in order, in traditional
imperial fashion, to steal their stuff. Europe became rich again. That was how
growth was done before about 1800 and the beginning of the fossil fuel age.
From the
beginning of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was powered by coal,
which was dirty but had much higher energy content than wood and charcoal, the
main fuels that humans had used until then. In 1859, a hustler who called
himself “Colonel” Edwin Drake drilled the first commercially viable oil well in
Titusville, Pennsylvania and the petroleum age began. Oil is an incomparable
fuel: at the beginning it was easily extracted, easily transported and, best of
all, a single gallon of oil contains as much energy as a fit man working hard
for three months or about 700 men working for an hour. One gallon. That huge
amount of energy suddenly available is what gave rise to what we now call
“economic growth.” More production and consumption requires more energy inputs
and oil made it possible. But on a finite planet, nothing can go on forever
and, by the 1960s, oil companies were finding less new oil each year than we
were burning. Thus, about 40 years later, peak oil. Coal and gas will continue
to be available for a while, but both will start to decline within a decade or
two. Both already have serious financial problems, and neither one can do what
oil does.
Let me return to
why I called this the Peak Oil Election. Neither candidate spoke about it.
Perhaps they don’t know about it. Or if they do, don’t want to believe it. Or
maybe no politician can get elected by promising that the economy will continue
to contract and energy supplies become ever scarcer. It was the Peak Oil
Election because peak oil defeated both of them. Without increasing energy
consumption, there can be no economic growth and, without increasing supplies,
there can be no increase in energy consumption. The so-called renewables are
hopelessly dependent upon fossil fuels for manufacture, installation and
maintenance and are much less energy-intensive than fossil fuels.
The fact is that
because oil production cannot be increased, economic growth is now over. Donald
Trump’s promise to bring back coal production, increase all fossil fuel
extraction and rebuild manufacturing are simply not going to happen, not
because of Trump but because policy is no longer in charge. From now on,
geology and physics call the shots. The remaining oil is too expensive to get
to and extract. Oil companies can’t make a profit at a price that customers in
a contracting economy can afford to pay. The growth game is finished as will be
soon the multitude of financial frauds that, starting with the peak of United
States oil production in 1970, have come to comprise much of our economy.
We need a new
sort of politics and economy: local, cooperative, community-based, low-energy,
conservationist, non-polluting, an economy that sustainably supports biological
needs and health, rather than pursuing riches. I don’t think any politicians
are going to do that for us; we need to do it for ourselves.
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