PsychoticDan
05-05-2006, 18:13
I've been waiting for three years for the LA Times to acknowledge Peak Oil and they still haven't, but at least they published this article. Why does the LA Times hide from this issue? We are the car capital of the world and stand to lose more than anyone else. While the NY Times and CNN are publishing op/eds and making moview highlighting our fargility, the "two cars in every garage" city pretends these prices are a fluke of the market.
We Should Have Listened To Hubbert (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe_magida5may05,0,1291596.story?coll=la-home-commentary)
By Arthur J. Magida, ARTHUR J. MAGIDA's new book, "Opening the Doors of Wonder," will be released in the fall.
May 5, 2006
IT WAS THE BEST of times: I'd bought a brand-new 1974 Fiat 124 sport coupe the year before for $3,500; gas was only 58 cents a gallon, and I was still so spry that I could drive all night from a weekend trip and somehow report to work Monday morning fresh and alert and more or less useful to my employers.
It was the worst of times: As an environmental reporter in Washington, I interviewed a maverick geologist, M. King Hubbert, who told me that oil production from the Lower 48 had already peaked and that our days of carefree joyriding were doomed.
I was deflated, but not as deflated as now. In today's money, gas then cost "only" $1.69 a gallon and the sticker price for my Fiat was about $11,000. But one thing that has not changed is Hubbert's prediction that oil production was on the down slope.
Sitting in his comfortable home in the Washington suburbs, the kind of house that said "college professor" and "smart geologist" (Hubbert was both), he told me: "A child born in the middle 1930s will have seen the consumption of 80% of all American oil and gas in his lifetime. A child born about 1970 will see most of the world's reserves consumed." Bummer.
Hubbert first arrived at his unpopular conclusions in 1949, a time when the Earth's wealth seemed limitless and predictions of doom churlish. Seven years later, he devised a mathematical proof — a curve known as Hubbert's Pimple — to plot the consumption rate of any exhaustible resource.
The Pimple shocked the oil companies, which were blinded by their faulty vision of infinite petroleum. So was the rest of America, which loved tooling down interstates and curving around cloverleafs, sometimes on the way to Grandma's, sometimes on the way to nowhere.
Hubbert persisted. Stamina and certainty are what we expect from prophets. "Growth, growth, growth," Hubbert warned in the mid-1970s. "World automobile production is doubling every 10 years; human population growth is like nothing that has happened in all of geologic history. The world will only tolerate so many doublings of anything, whether it's power plants or grasshoppers."
Or automobiles. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the U.S. was home to 237 million vehicles in 2004. That's expected to jump 38% by 2030. The situation worldwide is no better. In 14 years, maybe sooner, the number of cars and light trucks around the planet will climb by 6.5% to 1 billion — one for every 6 1/2 humans, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
WE HAVE YET to grasp what Hubbert was telling us. Maybe we never will. We're such suckers for our cars, for zipping about hither and yon, that we can't see beyond the windshield into our future, a future with ever-shrinking oil supplies and ever-sillier assumptions about what we can reasonably expect from our autos. We deem ourselves eco-diligent when new cars sold in the U.S. in 2030 will get 38 miles per gallon — better than the current 21 mpg but scandalous compared with Europe, where new cars have been getting 35 mpg since 2003.
The irony about Hubbert was that he was no wild-eyed tree-hugger. During his 20 years with Shell and 12 years with the U.S. Geological Survey, he probably never wore Birkenstocks, although it's possible he had a bowl or two of granola. He was not a doomsayer. He was a truthsayer. The truths he spoke could have given us a 50-year head start on solving our energy woes.
Instead of using that half a century to our advantage, we displayed that most basic of human qualities: an inability to shake off a comfortable present for the uncertainties of an unknowable future. Homo sapiens is a most peculiar species. Even when change may be in our interests, we tend to cling to the old ways because they are the known ways.
Hubbert, as usual, was prescient. In a 1949 article in Science magazine, he warned: "It is upon our ability to … evolve a culture more nearly in conformity with the limitations imposed upon us by the basic properties of matter and energy that the future of our civilization largely depends."
More than five decades since Hubbert issued that call, we have yet to achieve a culture that is "in conformity with the limitations imposed … [by] matter and energy." Rather, we are still behaving like mad alchemists, determined to bend reality to our will, still pursuing the fool's gold of inexhaustible energy, still ignoring Hubbert's Pimple, which has burst in our faces.
We Should Have Listened To Hubbert (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe_magida5may05,0,1291596.story?coll=la-home-commentary)
By Arthur J. Magida, ARTHUR J. MAGIDA's new book, "Opening the Doors of Wonder," will be released in the fall.
May 5, 2006
IT WAS THE BEST of times: I'd bought a brand-new 1974 Fiat 124 sport coupe the year before for $3,500; gas was only 58 cents a gallon, and I was still so spry that I could drive all night from a weekend trip and somehow report to work Monday morning fresh and alert and more or less useful to my employers.
It was the worst of times: As an environmental reporter in Washington, I interviewed a maverick geologist, M. King Hubbert, who told me that oil production from the Lower 48 had already peaked and that our days of carefree joyriding were doomed.
I was deflated, but not as deflated as now. In today's money, gas then cost "only" $1.69 a gallon and the sticker price for my Fiat was about $11,000. But one thing that has not changed is Hubbert's prediction that oil production was on the down slope.
Sitting in his comfortable home in the Washington suburbs, the kind of house that said "college professor" and "smart geologist" (Hubbert was both), he told me: "A child born in the middle 1930s will have seen the consumption of 80% of all American oil and gas in his lifetime. A child born about 1970 will see most of the world's reserves consumed." Bummer.
Hubbert first arrived at his unpopular conclusions in 1949, a time when the Earth's wealth seemed limitless and predictions of doom churlish. Seven years later, he devised a mathematical proof — a curve known as Hubbert's Pimple — to plot the consumption rate of any exhaustible resource.
The Pimple shocked the oil companies, which were blinded by their faulty vision of infinite petroleum. So was the rest of America, which loved tooling down interstates and curving around cloverleafs, sometimes on the way to Grandma's, sometimes on the way to nowhere.
Hubbert persisted. Stamina and certainty are what we expect from prophets. "Growth, growth, growth," Hubbert warned in the mid-1970s. "World automobile production is doubling every 10 years; human population growth is like nothing that has happened in all of geologic history. The world will only tolerate so many doublings of anything, whether it's power plants or grasshoppers."
Or automobiles. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the U.S. was home to 237 million vehicles in 2004. That's expected to jump 38% by 2030. The situation worldwide is no better. In 14 years, maybe sooner, the number of cars and light trucks around the planet will climb by 6.5% to 1 billion — one for every 6 1/2 humans, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
WE HAVE YET to grasp what Hubbert was telling us. Maybe we never will. We're such suckers for our cars, for zipping about hither and yon, that we can't see beyond the windshield into our future, a future with ever-shrinking oil supplies and ever-sillier assumptions about what we can reasonably expect from our autos. We deem ourselves eco-diligent when new cars sold in the U.S. in 2030 will get 38 miles per gallon — better than the current 21 mpg but scandalous compared with Europe, where new cars have been getting 35 mpg since 2003.
The irony about Hubbert was that he was no wild-eyed tree-hugger. During his 20 years with Shell and 12 years with the U.S. Geological Survey, he probably never wore Birkenstocks, although it's possible he had a bowl or two of granola. He was not a doomsayer. He was a truthsayer. The truths he spoke could have given us a 50-year head start on solving our energy woes.
Instead of using that half a century to our advantage, we displayed that most basic of human qualities: an inability to shake off a comfortable present for the uncertainties of an unknowable future. Homo sapiens is a most peculiar species. Even when change may be in our interests, we tend to cling to the old ways because they are the known ways.
Hubbert, as usual, was prescient. In a 1949 article in Science magazine, he warned: "It is upon our ability to … evolve a culture more nearly in conformity with the limitations imposed upon us by the basic properties of matter and energy that the future of our civilization largely depends."
More than five decades since Hubbert issued that call, we have yet to achieve a culture that is "in conformity with the limitations imposed … [by] matter and energy." Rather, we are still behaving like mad alchemists, determined to bend reality to our will, still pursuing the fool's gold of inexhaustible energy, still ignoring Hubbert's Pimple, which has burst in our faces.