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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
American consumers won't change their SUV-driving ways until there's a major fuel shortage or a global warming catastrophe, according to the new book "The End of Oil." And by then it may be too late.
May 19, 2004 | Oil, once again, is in the news. The price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is rising weekly -- the cost of filling up the tank is 45 cents a gallon higher than it was just a year ago. U.S. crude prices hit a record high of $41.55 a barrel on Monday, a fact that has international political and economic implications.
But rising prices in the U.S. aren't yet setting off a revolt at the pump. (Although sales of the very largest SUVs -- the Hummer and Ford Expedition -- have fallen in the first four months of this year, midsize SUV sales are up.) American drivers are fueling up more often than ever, motoring about 12,000 miles a year, in ever bigger gas-guzzling cars, trucks and SUVs. In an era where fears of global warming are rising almost as fast as gas prices, the question of how Americans can be driving larger, heavier cars for greater distances than they were in 1980, yet still remain largely "energy illiterate," gets to the heart of Paul Roberts' new book, "The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World."
The title is a bit misleading. Roberts is less concerned with the depletion of worldwide oil resources than he is with the economic and political dynamics that buffer "the most profligate energy users in the history of the world," aka Americans, from the likely consequences of declining worldwide stocks of fossil fuels. That's not to say there isn't an end in sight. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, oil consumption, worldwide, is growing faster than the discovery of new reserves of oil. Roberts marshals the usual figures about how oil supplies are diminishing, although experts differ about whether the peak in oil production will come in 2005 -- the current pessimistic view -- or 2035 -- the optimistic (and current U.S. governmental) view.
Pessimistic predictions about the depletion of fossil fuels have been made in the past, and yet, so far, there's been no evidence that a crisis point is imminent. One reason often provided for this is that new technologies of oil extraction and discovery have made previously inaccessible reserves, such as those under the seafloor, economically viable. But Roberts points out that the easy-to-access (and therefore less expensive to tap) reserves are clearly in decline. And what remains of the "easy" reserves is mostly under the control of the OPEC cartel, which puts the United States in an ever more dicey strategic position.
A separate problem from the issue of exactly when the production of oil will peak is the worrisome reality that worldwide demand for energy will likely soar in the next few decades, as countries such as India and China start competing with the United States for resources. To get an idea of the accelerating pace of that growth, consider that in 1995 some 33 percent of Shanghai residents rode a bike for personal transportation while 31 percent walked, 25 percent took the bus, and less than 5 percent drove. But in just the five years between 1995 and 2000, car use by residents tripled from 5 percent to 15 percent. Cars are expected to represent 50 percent by 2020, Roberts reports.
Coal, not oil or natural gas, is likely to be the cheap, dirty, CO2-spewing fuel that will generate the power for many of these rapidly developing nations. This has raised fears among climate scientists that temperatures will continue to rise across the globe in decades to come as result of carbon emissions. But the U.S.'s see-no-evil stance on global warming, which has included gutting existing pollution regulations, has not only infuriated other nations, it's also handed poorer countries an easy rebuttal when the rest of the world tries to encourage them to invest in cleaner technologies. Why should they bother when the world's biggest energy user, the affluent United States, doesn't?
And it's not just the U.S. government that doesn't care. It's the individual consumer, as well, who appears remarkably indifferent to price jumps. Roberts compellingly argues that it will take more than a temporary spike at the pump, or even the ongoing Iraq war, to wean Americans from their energy-hog habits, much less mobilize the country to confront global warming.
Roberts puts the dilemma this way: "In the simplest terms, the energy challenge of the twenty-first century will be to satisfy a dramatically larger demand for energy, while producing dramatically less carbon." He analyzes the possible options for alternative energy sources -- including the clean dream of hydrogen fuel-cell cars -- that could help the world consume less of the CO2- and pollution-rich energy we're currently bingeing on. By charting the history of energy consumption -- from wood and biomass fuels to coal and then oil and natural gas -- he makes a convincing case that massive energy infrastructures can change.
But he is not optimistic that any of the alternative fuels can compete with the entrenched fossil-fuel establishment in time to stem the impact of global warming. Every alternative source of energy has its flaws and hurdles to overcome, but their overall failure can't be pinned to specific technical issues with, for example, solar and wind power, or to the drawbacks of hydrogen as a form of energy storage. The real problem is that consumers -- and the governments that represent them -- are not yet feeling the economic pressure to inspire them to invest in such a switch.
