The Peak Oilers

From an op-ed piece by John Tierney (NY Times), in today's Statesman, on overpopulation hysteria:

In 1968, the year after the U.S. population reached 200 million, Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk and other scientific luminaries signed their names to a full-page advertisement.  It pictured a beatific baby in diapers who was labeled, in large letters, "Threat to Peace."

"It is only being realistic," the scientists warned, "to say the skyrocketing population may doom the world we live in."  They shared the concerns of Paul Ehrlich, who was on the best-seller lists warning of unprecedented famines overseas in the 1970s and food riots on the streets of America in the 1980s.

On Tuesday morning, when the 300 millionth American was born, the parents weren't worrying about a national shortage of food.  If anything, they were worrying about their child becoming obese.  There is more food available per person -- in America and the rest of the world -- than ever imagined by the 1960s doomsayers, Malthus or the ancient Greek philosophers who discussed the need for population control.

Tierney goes on to compare the overpopulation hysteria to fears about global warming.   

The better comparison would be to the peak-oil panic; that's the direct descendant of the overpopulation doomsday predictions.  The Peak Oilers claim that:  (1) world-wide production of oil has peaked or is about to peak; (2) as a result, we'll soon face dwindling supplies of oil; (3) the decline will happen too rapidly for us to develop alternative fuels or technologies to compensate; (4) our industrial system for producing food -- from cropland to grocery store -- is so heavily dependent on oil that food prices will skyrocket or food supplies will dwindle to unsustainable levels; (5) only the prepared (those with access to food from their backyard garden or a community garden) will avoid hunger or even starvation.

Here's a typical peak-oil website.  Here's another.  Here's another, holding up Cuba's transition from an industrial to an agrarian economy as a model for all of us.  Here's the website for the Austin chapter of the Peak Oil Society (my term).  This Peak Oil blogger does a good job of conveying the sense of impending catastrophe:

Barring a sudden, massive shift to alternative energy or a different lifestyle, the world is about to experience an economic and social catastrophe unlike any other in history, followed by a reversion to some kind of pre-industrial life.  Given the amount of energy used to simply produce and transport food, a depression of this scale implies mass hunger and starvation.

I don't know whether oil production has peaked or not.  It's got to peak sometime because it can't keep going up forever.  But I don't believe that dwindling oil supplies will devastate the economy or our food supplies.  No matter what, the local supermarket will be a better bet than the backyard; that's what comparative advantage and specialization of labor are all about.

If you think this is good clean fun, here's the resolution the local chapter presented to the City Council.  Lots of the proposals are just sensible energy-saving tips.  But some would do serious damage if adopted.  They want a "Task Force" (shudder) to assess ways to "mitigate the risk" (shudder) of peak oil.  And they want the City to mandate community gardens in every neighborhood (that's 67 or so by my count) and convert arable land within the city limits to agriculture.  The cost of the land alone would easily run into the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars.  Add to that the labor and resources squandered.

A few months ago, I wouldn't have given this loony proposal a chance.  But I've learned that if you put the issue to a task force controlled by the wrong people, anything can happen.   

Comments

[M1EK]

I'm a 'moderate' peaker who also shudders at the Roger Bakers of the world (represented by the resolution you saw) - but there's an important reason to support some government action at this point in time: we already face having to unwind 50 years of (subsidized) suburbia once oil gets too expensive to use as trivially as we do today. There's no purely market solution to sprawl that won't result in at least a moderate economic depression - if you think so, drive out to Cedar Park some day and start trying to figure out how you would provide jitney/transit service to those people and what you'd have to charge them to make it work. (Then, what do they stop spending money on to make up for it)... All the economics in the world can't make up for the physical location and layout of the subdivisions and the office parks.

The long-range economic signalling that we would normally rely on is also broken by the aforementioned suburban subsidies as well as direct and indirect subsidies to the fossil fuels themselves.

Also, the cornucopian position (generally, farther past your apparent stance in the same direction) generally relies on an ignorance of physics - particularly in the realm of energy density (i.e. people who think we can continue to drive as we do today, one to a vehicle out in the 'burbs, but just with hydrogen fuel cell SUVs or with electric SUVs fueled by new nukular plants).

Generally, when a hard science such as geology or physics comes into conflict with what an economist is telling you, bet on the hard science every day.