The
View From Hubbert's Peak
By Mike Davis
27 May , 2004
TomDispatch.com
Angry
truckers celebrated this May Day by blocking freeways in Los Angeles
and container terminals in Oakland and Stockton. With diesel fuel prices
in California soaring to record levels in recent weeks, the earnings
of independent container-haulers have dropped below the poverty line.
Lacking the power of big trucking companies to pass rising fuel costs
onto customers, the port drivers -- many of them immigrants from Mexico
-- have had little choice but to share some of their pain with the public.
In one action, abandoned
big rigs blocked the morning commute just south of downtown Los Angeles
on Interstate 5, making tens of thousands of motorists temporary hostages
of the fuel crisis. As one exasperated commuter complained to a radio
station, "This is really the end of the world."
Perhaps it is. As
Venezuela's energy minister Rafael Ramirez told the Financial Times
on May 24, "The history of cheap oil may have ended."
Although real (inflation-adjusted)
fuel prices are still well below their 1981 maximum, an ever-growing
chorus of voices, ranging from former UK environment minister Michael
Meacher to National Geographic magazine, echo Ramirez. We will soon
arrive, they claim, at the summit of "Hubbert's peak."
M. King Hubbert
was a celebrated oil geologist who in 1956 correctly prophesized that
U.S. petroleum production would peak in the early 1970s, then irreversibly
decline. In 1974 he likewise predicted that world oil fields would achieve
their maximum output in 2000; a figure later revised by his acolytes
to somewhere between 2006 and 2010.
If the curve of
global oil production is indeed near the point of descent, as these
experts believe, it has epochal implications for the world economy.
More expensive oil will undercut China's energy-intensive boom, return
OECD countries to the bad old days of stagflation, and accelerate the
environmentally destructive exploitation of low-grade oil tars and shales.
Most of all, it
will devastate the economies of oil-importing third-world countries.
Poor farmers will be unable to purchase petroleum-based artificial fertilizers
just as poor urban-dwellers will be unable to afford bus fares. (Already,
rising oil prices have brought chronic blackouts to cities throughout
the globe's southern hemisphere.)
The only certain
beneficiaries of this coming economic chaos will be the big five oil
corporations and their corrupt partners: the Nigerian generals, Saudi
princes, Russian kleptocrats, and their ilk. Crude oil truly will become
black gold.
The rising value
of an increasingly scarce resource is a form of monopoly rent, and a
future permanent crude-oil regime of $50 per barrel (or higher) would
transfer at least $1 trillion per decade from consumers to oil producers.
In plain English, this would be the greatest robbery by a rentier elite
in world history. Someday, Enron may seem like the equivalent of a liquor
store hold-up by comparison.
The oilmen in the
White House, of course, have the best view of the lush terrain on the
far side of Hubbert's peak. No wonder, then, that a map of the 'war
against terrorism' corresponds with such uncanny accuracy to the geography
of oil fields and proposed pipelines. From Kazakhstan to Ecuador, American
combat boots are sticky with oil.
To cite two recent,
almost random examples: First, the Malaysian foreign minister warned
in late May that Washington was exaggerating the threat of terrorist
piracy in the Straits of Malacca in order to justify the deployment
of forces there -- right at the chokepoint of East Asia's oil supply.
Second, T. Christian
Miller, reporting in the Los Angeles Times, revealed that U.S. Special
Forces, as well as the CIA and private American security contractors,
are integrally involved in an ongoing reign of terror in Columbia's
Arauca province. The aim of "Operation Red Moon" is to annihilate
the leftwing ELN guerrillas threatening the oilfields and pipelines
operated by LA-based Occidental Petroleum. The result, Miller reports,
has been a slow-motion massacre.
"Mass arrests
of politicians and union leaders have become common. Refugees fleeing
combat have streamed into local cities. And killings have soared as
right-wing paramilitaries have targeted leftwing critics."
Latin America --
Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia and Ecuador -- currently supplies more oil
to the United States than the Middle East, and, from the very beginning,
the White House has defined the War on Terrorism as including counterinsurgency
in the Western Hemisphere.
Is there a pattern
here? Indeed, is there a US master plan for the control of oil in an
age of diminishing supply and soaring prices? Obvious questions, but
don't ask a Democrat. Although many ordinary Americans have little difficulty
connecting the dots (to use a currently popular expression) linking
blood to oil, the Democrats, with few exceptions, refuse to ask any
deep or probing questions about the economic architecture of the New
American Empire.
Thus John Kerry
has waffled between advocating an energy version of Fortress America
(via the integration of Canadian and Mexican oil resources) and complaints
that the Bush administration hasn't put enough pressure on OPEC, especially
Saudi Arabia, to expand production. One of the richest members of the
Senate in history, Kerry seems congenitally allergic to the kind of
anti-corporate populism and bold muckraking that has made Michael Moore
an international anti-Bush icon.
Too bad. A genuinely
progressive candidate might have found a rich precedent in the proceedings
of a celebrated 1930s Senate investigation into the role of the international
arms trade in fomenting war and intervention. The Nye Committee, named
after the senator from North Dakota who chaired it, probed deep into
the shadow world of arms dealers and munitions corporations. Is there
any less urgent need to call today for congressional hearings into the
oil industry's comprehensive corruption of US foreign policy?
Mike Davis is the
author of 'Dead Cities: And Other Tales', 'Ecology of Fear', and co-author
of 'Under the Perfect Sun: the San Diego Tourists Never See', among
other books.