Peak Oil And The Myth Of Sustainability
By Peter Goodchild
06 September, 2006
Countercurrents.org
One often hears of the need for "sustainability," and of plans to re-engineer human society in some manner that will enable the production of goods, and the consumption of resources, to extend more or less eternally into the future. Civilization will thereby, we are told, become both more pleasant and more equitable, and the planet itself - land, sea, and sky - will no longer be traumatized by the presence of humans. But those who believe in such sustainability might wish to consider whether such an ideal state is possible.It is a well-known fact that the human race is in big trouble with overpopulation and with excessive consumption of resources. These two problems reinforce one another; they are synergistic. The message has been around for several years. In 1970, for example, Paul and Anne Ehrlich published _Population Resources Environment_. In 1972, Donella H. Meadows et al. published a book entitled _The Limits to Growth_ (and there is later edition called _Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update_).
The population of the earth in 1950 was less than three billion. In the year 2000 it was six billion. What it will be in the future is not certain, but a fairly good estimate is that it will be about eight billion by the year 2030. That figure could be off by a billion or so either way, but that would not make much difference. The fact remains that the human population will be doubling again in the near future - unless, of course, something kills us off in the meantime; nearly half the population of England was wiped out by bubonic plague in the fourteenth century.
Nor can we count on a leveling-off: a slowing of population growth usually occurs in countries that have first become industrialized, and today's overcrowded countries have neither the money nor the political power to become industrialized.
Right now the world is using about thirty billion barrels of oil per year. But the oil is going to run out. The peak of oil production will probably be sometime early in the twenty-first century. (We may have even passed the peak late in the previous century, although it's hard to tell.) After that point, oil production will rapidly decline. But the demand for oil will not decline. The population, as noted, is still climbing. And contrary to popular belief, computers and other high-tech marvels are not creating a world in which "information will replace transportation." The sales of oil have not decreased with the advent of the "age of information." So - in terms of oil alone, there is a serious problem of resource depletion.
Incidentally, "alternative energy" doesn't work. As John Gever et al. explain in _Beyond Oil_, it is physically impossible to use windmills etc. to produce the same amount of energy that we are now getting from thirty billion barrels of oil. "Alternative energy" will never be able to produce more than the tiniest fraction of that amount.
Roughly half the people in the world are either undernourished or malnourished, but agriculture presents one of the worst resource problems. Topsoil is being depleted everywhere. And there is simply no more land available for increased agriculture, unless one considers marginal land that can only be used with expensive high-tech methods of irrigation or perhaps desalination; projects of this sort obviously cannot last long.
One can debate some of the above numbers, but even if we shift them up or down by fifty percent, the general effect is still the same. It is just not possible for the planet Earth to handle "the human condition," nor is there any way of improving those numbers in any significant way. And that's the bottom line. The numbers cannot be changed. The present numbers are just not "sustainable."
If all of the above is true, then there is no point in talking about "sustainability." What will happen, in fact, is not sustainability but _disaster_. The future will be one in which the reciprocal effects of overpopulation, resource-consumption, and environmental destruction reach a cataclysmic maximum, resulting in a massive die-off of the human species. There may be survivors, but there will not be many. All talk of sustainability is just fashionable chitchat. The word has use mainly as filler for political speeches. It always sounds good when politicians talk about "sustainable development," when what they really mean is "business-as-usual but with a little ecological whitewash." "Sustainable development" is an oxymoron. If the human race is on a collision course with the three above-mentioned problems, and if there is no way of averting disaster, then there is no point in talking about how to how to deal with that disaster. It would be far more practical, far more useful, to say: "Okay, disaster is inevitable. What do we do after that?"
The ancient Roman world went through very much the same stages as our own. While Rome was a republic, not an empire, the Roman people adhered to the four virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. But the Roman world became bigger and bigger. There were conflicts between the rich and the poor. There was a serious unemployment problem created by the fact that slave labor was replacing that of free men and women. The army became so large that it was hard to find the money to maintain it, and the use of foreign mercenaries created further problems. Farmland became less productive, and more food had to be imported. The machinery of politics and economics began to break down. The fairly democratic methods of the republic were no longer adequate for a world that stretched from Britain to Egypt, and the emperors took over. After Augustus, however, most of the leaders were both incompetent and corrupt. The Goths sacked Rome in A.D. 410. The Empire was crumbling. The cities and main roads were finally abandoned, since they no longer served a purpose. For the average person, the late Roman world consisted of the village and its surrounding fields.
If we have already established the premise that "the human race faces unsolvable problems," the answer is not to waste further amounts of time and energy in asking whether those problems exist. The best response is to find ways to survive within that problematic world.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Chicago Review Press has published Peter Goodchild's _Survival Skills of the North American Indians_, _The Spark in the Stone_,and _Raven Tales_.He can be reached at: [email protected]
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