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Article: Power Now, Payment Later

Review of the book The End of Oil by Paul Roberts.
First appeared in the European edition of the Transatlantic Times, January 2005

Power now, payment later
The End of Oil by Paul Roberts
Hardback
Publishers: Houghton Mifflin (US); Bloomsbury (UK);

Theoretical knowledge about what we should do is all very well, but most of us are hopeless at taking action until motivated by pain or pleasure. Even then, it has to be pretty immediate. This is why (real) deadlines work but diets rarely do. It’s why politicians risk illicit affairs. It’s why smokers give up only when it starts to hurt, by which time it’s often too late. And it is why, despite the breathtaking consequences, not a single industrialized state is seriously preparing either for the end of cheap oil, or for the consequences of burning so much of it.

The End of Oil, Paul Roberts’ accessible, balanced account of our dependence on oil and the daunting energy options we now face, is all the more compelling because oil has rarely been off the front pages since this work was first published just a few months ago. Indeed, the engine driving his narrative – a belief that the last of the cheap oil will be extracted sooner than either public or politicians believe – could today be taking shape before our eyes. If so, our problems may be greater that even Roberts thought: at heart, this book is a plea for us to take action now to avoid catastrophic consequences later. Wait until it hurts, he argues, and it will be too late to do anything about it.

Roberts does give us some grounds for optimism (of which more later), but not until after he has led us through some alarming territories, illuminated with quotes from the many experts and insiders he has talked to. The first of these is his driving theme: the end of cheap oil. The forecast peak in world oil production, after which it will be physically impossible to pump oil out of the ground fast enough to meet demand, has been comprehensively reported by others, most notably Richard Heinberg in The Party’s Over. Roberts does look at the issue of when the peak might occur (anytime between now and 2030, with those betting on 2008 to 2010 looking increasingly smug), but his emphasis is on the likelihood that “the easy oil – the huge oil reserves in easy-to-reach fields – has already been discovered and, in many cases, especially outside OPEC, pumped out.” The oil that remains will be extracted at increasingly greater financial, political and military cost, potentially throwing the world into such a truly terrible turmoil that the discovery of any new “supergigantic” oil field would, surely, be greeted by all as a blessing?

Sadly not. The end of cheap oil, Roberts submits, is a difficult but surmountable rock we must face on one side. On the other is the far harder place of global warming. Here, using data and quotes from government and respected academic sources, Roberts points out that, despite the fact that even conservative estimates of the consequences of global warming include catastrophes (such as flooding, crop failure and desertification) on an horrendous scale, so little progress is being made in reducing carbon emissions that “most climate experts now believe that earlier hopes of stabilizing atmospheric carbon at 450 parts per million [a former ‘line in the sand’] are simply untenable”. The last thing planet Earth needs, is yet more oil to burn.

Bravely, Roberts then attempts to remain non-partisan whilst tackling the murky worlds of big business, politics and “energy security” (i.e. using any means necessary to maintain supplies). Given that he so vehemently believes that the world is on a near-suicidal course, this was never going to be entirely convincing, but he does make a good attempt, explaining, for example, how some aspects of the Kyoto agreement would penalise the US more than Europe. In doing so, he manages both to maintain his credibility and convey a great deal of “insider” information. Much of this is fascinating and throws light on political and military decisions across the world especially, inevitably, in the Middle East. Securing hard information in these sensitive areas is difficult though. Reflecting this, Roberts fails, a little too often for comfort, to identify the insiders he quotes.

Returning to safer (though no less important) ground, Roberts looks at what can be done to avoid the worst political and climatic consequences of the end of cheap oil. Here (at last!) there are some shafts of light. Not that Roberts is a utopian: he throws large, wet blankets over any hopes that a ‘hydrogen economy’ is around the corner, or that power stations burning coal scrubbed of its carbon will soon save us all. Instead, a strong case is put for the growing readiness of a multi-source approach to easing the pressure on oil. In particular, he cites the remarkable progress of wind and solar power (Japan installed 25,000 rooftop solar systems in 2002 alone, he reports, and solar is now growing at 30% pa) and how these technologies might complement hydrogen to provide constant, reliable power sources on a genuinely large-scale. Being widely dispersed, such a power network would also be harder to disrupt and would not provide obvious targets for terrorists, in the way that nuclear and liquefied natural gas plants do.

But perhaps the most encouraging message in The End of Oil is Roberts’ conviction that, if we can only shift our attitude towards it, the greatest “source” of energy is within easy grasp, can be secured almost without noticing it and yet it will displace enough demand to enable the industrialised world to disregard OPEC oil altogether. Gulf-dominated oil can be “conquered” without firing a shot. How? Efficiency. Or, to use the taboo ‘c’ word: conservation. Roberts reports how, according to California’s ‘efficiency czar’ Arthur Rosenfeld, “by making basic improvements to cars and buildings, America could save the energy equivalent of twelve million barrels of oil a day, thereby obviating the need for imports”. We don’t strive for that saving, Roberts argues, because we focus too much on capital costs and not enough on running costs.

This has been true but, with gasoline in the US now over $2 a gallon and more than three times that in much of Europe, heating oil up over 40% on a year ago and crude struggling to get back under $50, our focus might be shifting. It has begun to hurt now.

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