The latest eco-blockbuster to follow in the wake of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is A Crude Awakening, released in Britain this Friday. The movie is intended to alert its audiences to the dangerous consequences of “peak oil”—the fact the the earth’s oil reserves are in dangerous decline. But, argues Derek Brower, whose review appears this week at Prospect online, the film suffers from all the deficits of the peak oil theory it promotes. It fails to understand the nature of oil markets and it misunderstands the methodology behind estimates of remaining reserves.
Also this week: Anthony Giddens on new research by US sociologist Robert Putnam that may provide backing for Prospect editor David Goodhart’s thesis on solidarity and diversity.
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@ Derek Brower and Peak Oil
“That methodological distinction might be too boring for a mass-audience movie, but it is a crucial one. And there are other problems with the film—as with peak oil theory. Both ignore the impact of the market. Many fans of this film won’t be fans of the way global markets work, but the oil one is efficient. When oil prices rise too high, as they did in 1973 and 1981, demand drops off and new alternative sources become viable. When they do, oil demand will drop and demand for other sources will increase.”
Firstly, not all sources of energy are equal. Oil is particularly useful because it has a good Energy Return on Investment (EROI): You get a lot of energy out for the energy you put in extracting it.
Oil shales don’t compare, which is why you end up extracting a lot more of it, with more ecological damage, particularly CO2 release, to get the same energy return. This also puts upward pressure on energy prices. Rising prices do not refute the issues of Peak Oil, in many ways they are the main problem.
Mechanised agriculture means that the energy return on investment on most food production is 10%, or in other words you need ten calories of oil energy to produce a food calorie. The upshot of this is that food prices and energy prices are tied.
So the efficiency of energy markets also makes them good at pricing poor people out of food markets: A well oiled killing machine if you like.
@ Giddens, Putnam and Goodheart
“This conclusion is itself distinctly uncomfortable for liberals. Perhaps multiculturalism just will not work? Putnam rejects such pessimism. The negative effects of diversity can be overcome by a mixture of positive social change and enlightened public policy.”
In this paragraph you open up the biggest flaw in Goodheart’s hypothesis. It is a static hypothesis, based on assumed static categories of nation and ethnic minority. These assumptions do not bear out in practice, as identification is dynamic – you put it well:
“Pride in the military and *identification* with its goals was almost certainly a prime factor underlying the observed *changes* in the army.”
But how does this reflect on theories of structuration? How are the dynamics of identification, the ways in which structure produce agency and agency produce structure, identified within your framework? How does it guide a study of such practices? Is structuration a thing or a process? If a process, how does it work?
“Sweden, for instance, is a country that has experienced a good deal of recent immigration—about 14 per cent of its population is foreign-born—but it has sustained its generous and effective welfare system, albeit with many stresses and strains.”
And one of the interesting things that is happening in Swedish life is a lively discussion of how identity is produced. And there are resources there to back that public discussion.
Perhaps the problem in the US is precisely that there are not the public resources there to support the communities of practice that might lead to new forms of identification. Outside of the well-resourced military that is.
If so, this stands Goodheart’s hypothesis on its head: Perhaps it is a strong public praxis that might be the ground of identity, rather than vice-versa. When you attend the St Paul’s carnival in Bristol, it certainly seems that way.
Wouldn’t it be strange if we found out that the grand communities of Nation and State were founded on something as prosaic as making friends and becoming affectionate, and that this, as much as the sword, was the ground of good law?
This morning, BBC radio news reported that a new US Airport Security worker in need of a pass image was asked to look through a box of pictures and choose one that looked like him
While this raises laughable memories of the Beatles film Help, it also suggests we would be suicidal to ignore Goodhart’s hypothesis
We all belong to the family of man; however, short of neck chip implants , most tribes prefer to be strengthened and witnessed by making friends with and enjoying affection from their own
@ Derek Brower and Peak Oil
It is amusing to observe the persistence of wishful thinking in our civilization. The arguments by Derek Brower that he uses to more or less dismiss the ‘Pek oil’ idea are all very well known and very well proven as ‘failures’. Nevertheless, they come up over and over again.
First, dismissing the Peak Oil theory on the basis of many time failed doomsday preaching is wrong. Luckily, we now know much more about the discovering oilfields and producing them than in 1950. Do we dismiss weather prognosis today by looking at prognostician’s success rate in 1950?
However, the most glaring among Brower’s bad arguments is the one about ‘ever expanding reserves’ due to new technology and similar abracadabras. In fact, Jean Lahererre, ex-Total chief geologist was the first one who proved that ‘increasing reserves’ are just a blunder. How so?
The oil reserves in the oilfields are more or less underreported (with exception of UK and Norway). The reason is that increase of the reserves increase the value of the company and looks well on the stock market. Why declaring full reserves and then fighting with ever decreasing company value (due to decreasing reserves)? It is much better expanding the reserves one year after the other, keeping company’s value in good shape. But, the problem is actually very serious: ‘finding’ new oil in old wells makes statistics bright – we have new oil! In fact, there is nothing new; it is just old and unreported oil (reserves)….
One details Brower never mentioned – it was the ’sudden’ discovery of 240 billion barrels of oil reserves in five OPEC countries between 1982 and 1985. The background of this reserves increase was internal haggling in OPEC about export quotas that were finally linked to the ‘reserves’. So, the reserves were increased out of the blue sky in order to increase the export quotas for individual countries. As result of this book keeping blunder the reserves today may not be 50% of the initial 2 trillion barrels but 240 billion barrels less (0.75 trillion barrels).
It has also been proven, especially in the North Sea (in the Forties field) that ‘new technology’ changes nothing in the finally recoverable oil – it just speeds up the production. ‘Bottle brush technology’ or horizontal multilateral wells just shorten the life of the field.
Further, 3 trillion bbl of oil in Canada tar sands will never be produced. To produce one cubic meter of oil from tar sands, one thousand cubic meters of gas are required. And nearly everybody knows nowadays that Canada is in fact running out of gas. On the top of that, production of oil from tar sands is probably the most intensive pollution industry that will turn a good portion of western Canada into a wasteland.
Other Brower’s arguments are equally ‘light’. Azerbaijan was the first world oil producer in 1920 and today, its production is greater than ever – what does this prove? Can we hope to discover another Ghawar beneath the present one in Saudi Arabia? Does he know that 60% of world oil is produced from 1% of world oilfields and that all these giant fields are in decline?
The worst of Brower’s arguments is that nobody knows how much oil we had in the first place. We know that with a good degree of certainty; we know therefore that it is not 4 billion barrels. Today’s oil costs $100 per barrel and will cost $200 tomorrow. Someday soon, if we avoid a major economic depression, it will cost $500 per barrel. There will always be a balance between the supply and consumption – we will never ‘miss’ required oil. But, at what price? What Brower does not understand is that during the past 100 years the availability of oil defined our civilization and that during the next 100 years, the unavailability of oil will define it. Does he think that we will lead ‘business as usual’ at $300 per barrel?
Does he really think that Peak Oil theory has been devised by oil industry?
Dear Sir:
The worries of many in the petro-dollar world will take many years to evaporate, and there will be much craw-thumping and wringing of hands about the loss of oil reserves, but if anything is clear nowadays, it is as predicted that the last two Gulf Wars were really about oil. And maybe understandably so – pace the the human and civil and social rights of women in Taleban constituencies.
Still the silver lining on such clouds is about to appear in Japan, as this next month sees the unveiling of the first hydrogen hybrid car. Every revolution is technology driven – with Britain it was the bessemer converter, with France the guillotine, with Russia it was the steam engine, and so on. It won’t be long before petrol-driven vehicles such as airbuses and trucks and PLG cars will become museum pieces.
Thanks to all our friends in America who spent time on this project and unveiled the first hydrogen car at Detroit in 2005. Perry Rhodan would be proud of what our little planet can achieve. As ever, Japan has stolen ahead of the show and produced a viable cheap road-worthy version – this time at Mazda.
Rio – MMVII.
@ Rio
It is good what the Japanese are doing, but they hardly got there first. The father of the consumer motor vehicle was planning an electric car quite a long time ago…
http://www.internalcombustionbook.com/historians.php
[...] Review of A Crude Awakening for Prospect Jump to Comments (Because of this review I’m now apparently a bit of a hate figure for the Peak Oilers. A couple of them had a go at me on the Prospect blog, here.) [...]