The triple-digit oil price likely isn't an aberration related to Saudi hoarding or escalating violence in Libya. Peak oil should be considered a current and permanent feature of our collective predicament.
If the 2011 oil peak plays out like 2008, the high price of energy could push the global economy into another recession. The economic contraction related to high energy prices will bring the price of oil back down again, only to repeat the cycle.
The political, business and cultural opposition for active policies to better price energy and carbon, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and break from fossil-dependent transport is overwhelming in most jurisdictions in North America. Absent other solutions, fossil fuel consumption is kept down using the recession and austerity policies.
Canadian economist Jeff Rubin writes that "recessions have been the only sure fire way America has cut back on its fuel consumption and the need for oil imports". Economic contraction and restructuring is a destructive energy strategy but has become the default setting of many political and business elites. A result is that ongoing economic restructuring is incorporating energy decline with cruel social and economic justice implications.
Richard Gilbert writes that we're "we’re effectively using the blunt tool of economic recession to reduce oil consumption in the face of supply constraints". As one alternative, he proposes "oil-proofing" Canada's transit network.
We should be moving as quickly as possible into electric traction. The way to get the most for each dollar invested in this transition would be to convert diesel bus routes to electric trolley bus routes. Conversion of a two-way route costs about $5-million per kilometre, including overhead wires, substations, and vehicles. Thus, for the $8-billion that the Ontario government through Metrolinx is to spend to add a 25-kilometre streetcar line in Toronto, 1,600 kilometres of roadway used by buses could be electrified, about 80 per cent of the total length of such roadway.
If the busiest routes were converted, this would mean that almost 100 per cent of transit trips in Toronto would be electrified, instead of the present 50 per cent (the share carried by streetcars and subways). Toronto’s transit system would be effectively proofed against oil crises. Some bus electrification of this kind would be worthwhile in all of Canada’s communities with a population of 100,000 or more, and in many smaller ones. European experience suggests that bus electrification can pay for itself over time.
Bus electrification would be particularly important in Eastern Canada, which is especially vulnerable to convulsions in oil markets because more than 90 per cent of the oil consumed there comes from or via another country. Moreover, unlike almost every other part of the developed world, there is no access to a strategic petroleum reserve.
Public outcry, organizing, and the active and experimental deployment of alternatives can be used to ensure a short-term decline in the availablity of energy contributes to our collective well-being and dignity rather than worsening both. Public transit is an ideal place to get to work on this crisis.
Climate Progress directs our attention to a recent speech by the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, given at a Pentagon energy security conference. While politicians, media, and the public dither and procrastinate over de-carbonizing, US armed forces are making focused changes today and preparing for an operating environment disrupted by particular climate and resource predicaments.
[...] we are in fact seeing evidence of climate change’s potential impacts on our security. Near the polar cap, waterways are opening that we couldn’t have imagined it a few years ago – opening trade routes, presenting both opportunity and vulnerability and rewriting the geopolitical map of the world...
We in the Defense Department have a role to play here. Not solely because we should – should be good stewards of our environment and our scarce resources but also because there is a strategic imperative for us to reduce risk, improve efficiencies and preserve our freedom of action wherever we can...
When we consider the estimates of a fully burdened cost of diesel fuel approached $400 a gallon and required 1.3 gallons of fuel to use per gallon delivered at some forward-operating locations, these benefits start to really add up. This translates to fewer Marines maintaining fuel storage and distribution systems, fewer Marines dedicating their lives to protect the convoys in the routes used to deliver the fuel, or as this conference theme tells us: Saving energy saves lives.
In a similar systems approach, the Army out of Fort Irwin employed insulating foam on the roofs of its overseas deployment structures to save millions per month in air conditioning costs. And they are now working on a shower-water recycling system for their forward operating bases...
Simply put, we cannot think about energy after we get there – wherever there may be. Energy security needs to be one the first things we think about before we deploy another soldier, before we build another ship or plane and before we buy or fill another rucksack… And the demand for energy is not going to ease anytime soon.
This is no small matter. In addition to the newly developing waterways near the polar ice caps in 2008, the National Intelligence Council identified 20 of our bases that are physically at risk as a result of a rising level of the ocean.
Full text of the speech is available here.
The Georgia Straight interviews local peak oil organizers and a board member from Village Vancouver, the city's primary Transition Town body:
42-year-old [Brennan Wauters] is not the type to hunker in a bunker. He isn’t storing food, buying gold, or stocking up on weapons to survive in a post-oil world.
“I’m more a survivalist in the sense that I think we have to be psychologically prepared,” Wauters said. “I concentrate on being able to do things with as little as possible. It’s also an exercise to me, like there’s many things that I could just go to the store for. But I deliberately take a harder route just to test my own capabilities, to give me confidence that whatever happens, everything will be fine...”
For Wauters, incidents like the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico—the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, which was triggered by an explosion at a British Petroleum rig on April 20 of this year—are an indication that the world has reached peak oil production.
“Nations understand the strategic importance of energy, and the push to get that oil as deep as it is, where it is normally inaccessible by conventional means…is a direct result of oil companies and governments realizing that there is less and less oil out there,” he said.
Former energy executive Charles Maxwell, now analyst at Weeden & Co., on peak oil in the 2010s:
As the economic recovery continues, as more people use oil because there are more people in the world, and China and India continue to progress with rapid expansion of cars and the roads they are offering their people, demand for oil will continue to climb between 1 and 1.5% per year. That, combined with the depletion of these mature oil fields we’ve talked about, will bring us to a plateau by 2015-2017, where the rising production of newer oil fields will equal the falling production of old fields.
At that stage, prices will break through this $87 boundary — in about 2013, I’m thinking. And by 2015 we’ll be up to around US$130-$150 a barrel. And then by 2020, when we have 1.5% increases in demand each year and 0.5% declines on the downside, then we’ll really be in a fix. At that time, I’m looking at $300 a barrel in money of the day. But remember, by then we will have the full effects of inflation over the prior 10 years, so it would probably be something like US$200 a barrel in today’s terms, but it will have a nominal price of about US$300 a barrel.
An unpublished report acquired by Le Devoir shows the Canadian Forces are preparing to respond to more disasters, fighting, and general insecurity as a result of climate change and peak oil and other resource shortages.
The 176-report, L'environnement de la sécurité future 2008-2030 was approved by General Staff Headquarters of Defense in January 2009.
From Le Devoir (translated from French):
Conflict for control of resources within fragile states, including guerrillas, are expected. It will probably be necessary to conduct humanitarian missions to rescue people deprived of everything after a disaster, and possibly stabilization missions or reconstruction if civil unrest and instability lead to conflicts between peoples” military strategists write.
By 2030, environmental problems and scarcity of food and water, threaten to destabilize entire regions, they still feel. “It could be that the pressures caused by migration and the influx of refugees or displaced persons cause a resurgence of ethnic tensions, religious or territorial, instability and perhaps the collapse of states. These effects manifest themselves more in coastal areas (where lives 75% of world population), especially among groups of individuals, economic sectors and localities >that are already economically or environmentally sensitive to climate >variations. ”
And a specific reference to peak oil:
Operations which will also increasingly difficult to achieve as the oil will be scarce. The expected decline in fossil fuel resources and the simultaneous rise in oil prices will force the MoD to find alternative energy sources for military equipment. Rising fuel prices will drive the cost prohibitive, not to mention the cost of operations in the country or even abroad, which will strain an already tight budget. It will primarily carry out research and development to find forms of alternative fuels.
More at Le Devoir.
This is consistent with planning by other armed forces for climate change and peak oil related-conflict. UPDATE: Although Le Devoir claims the document had been previously unpublished, this does not appear to be the case. It is available in English, from the Department of National Defence, with a date modified stamp of 2010-08-26. Full report in PDF, in English.
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