Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
(This appears in the British SWP magazine Socialist Review at: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=8930. It is similar to an article that appeared on tomdispatch.com a month ago, but contains critical support of Ralph Nader, something that was absent in the earlier article.) The View from Hubbert's Peak Column by Mike Davis, June 2004 Diminishing oil supplies have epochal implications for the world economy. Angry truckers celebrated this May Day by blocking freeways in Los Angeles and container terminals in Oakland and Stockton. With diesel fuel prices in California soaring to record levels in recent weeks, the earnings of independent container-haulers have dropped below the poverty line. Lacking the power of big trucking companies to pass rising fuel costs on to customers, the port drivers - many of them immigrants from Mexico - have had little choice but to share some of their pain with the public. In one action, abandoned big rigs blocked the morning commute just south of downtown Los Angeles on Interstate 5. Tens of thousands of motorists became temporary hostages of the fuel crisis. As one exasperated commuter complained to a radio station, 'This is really the end of the world.' Perhaps it is. Although real (inflation-adjusted) fuel prices are still well below their 1981 maximum, a large and ever-growing chorus of voices, ranging from former British environment minister Michael Meacher to National Geographic magazine, are shouting from the rooftops that the age of cheap oil is ending. Even if the current oil prices rises are slowed or reversed by higher Opec outputs, we will soon arrive - petroleum pundits claim - at the genuine summit of 'Hubbert's peak'. M King Hubbert was a celebrated oil geologist who in 1956 correctly prophesied that US petroleum production would peak in the early 1970s, then irreversibly decline. In 1974 he likewise predicted that world oilfields would achieve their maximum output in 2000 - a figure later revised by his acolytes to 2006-10. If the curve of global oil production is indeed near the point of descent, as these experts believe, it has epochal implications for the world economy. More expensive oil will undercut China's energy-intensive boom, return OECD countries to the bad old days of stagflation, and accelerate the environmentally destructive exploitation of low-grade oil tars and shales. Most of all, it will devastate the economies of oil-importing Third World countries. Poor farmers will be unable to afford artificial fertilisers, just as poor urban-dwellers will be unable to afford bus fares. (Already rising oil prices have brought chronic blackouts to cities throughout the South.) The only certain beneficiaries of this coming economic chaos will be the big five oil corporations and their corrupt partners - the Nigerian generals, Saudi princes, Russian kleptocrats and their ilk. Crude oil truly will become black gold. The rising value of an increasingly scarce resource is a form of monopoly rent, and a permanent regime of $50 per barrel (or higher) crude would transfer at least $1 trillion per decade from final consumers to oil producers. In plain English, this would be the greatest robbery by a rentier elite in world history. The oilmen in the White House, of course, have the best view of the terrain on the far side of Hubbert's peak. No wonder, then, that a map of the 'war on terror' corresponds with such uncanny accuracy to the geography of oilfields and proposed pipelines. From Kazakhstan to Ecuador, American combat boots are sticky with oil. To cite two examples; first, the Malaysian foreign minister warned in May that Washington was exaggerating the threat of terrorist piracy in order to justify the deployment of forces in the Straits of Malacca - the chokepoint of East Asia's oil supply. Secondly, Christian Miller, reporting in the Los Angeles Times, revealed that US Special Forces, as well as the CIA and private American security contractors, are integrally involved in the ongoing reign of terror in Colombia's Arauca province. The aim of 'Operation Red Moon' is to annihilate the left wing ELN guerrillas threatening the oilfields and pipelines operated by LA-based Occidental Petroleum. The result, Miller reports, has been a slow-motion massacre: 'Mass arrests of politicians and union leaders have become common. Refugees fleeing combat have streamed into local cities. And killings have soared as right wing paramilitaries have targeted left wing critics.' Latin America (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador) supplies more oil to the US than the Middle East and, from the very beginning, the White House has defined the 'war on terror' as including counter-insurgency in the western hemisphere. Is there a pattern here? Indeed, is there a US masterplan for the control of oil in an age of diminishing supply and soaring prices? Obvious questions, but don't ask a Democrat. Although many ordinary Americans have little difficulty connecting
Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
Anybody interested in knowing just how flexible and elastic the speculations about peaks really are would do well to read the original peakist himself, the petroleum Malthus, M. King Hubbert. Take a look at http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/nehring.pdf and you will read the King predicting a peak in the non-communist world's oil production in the early to mid 1980s, etc. etc. etc. Didn't exactly happen that way, now did it?
Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
sartesian wrote: Anybody interested in knowing just how flexible and elastic the speculations about peaks really are would do well to read the original peakist himself, the petroleum Malthus, M. King Hubbert. Take a look at http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/nehring.pdf and you will read the King predicting a peak in the non-communist world's oil production in the early to mid 1980s, etc. etc. etc. Didn't exactly happen that way, now did it? Wow, those are some spectacularly wrong projections. But there's a long history of this sort of thing, isn't there? There's a chart reproduced in Baumol et al's Productivity American Leadership - must remember to dig out the book scan the page - that tracks oil production over the last 100 years with similar projections marked at various points in the history. Someday we may run out of oil, but I suspect we'll choke ourselves or ruin the climate completely before we do. Doug
Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
sartesian wrote: Anybody interested in knowing just how flexible and elastic the speculations about peaks really are would do well to read the original peakist himself, the petroleum Malthus, M. King Hubbert. Take a look at http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/nehring.pdf and you will read the King predicting a peak in the non-communist world's oil production in the early to mid 1980s, etc. etc. etc. Didn't exactly happen that way, now did it? What I read on page iv of the report is a disclaimer that says Hubbert was one of several people who reviewed the technical memorandum but did not necessarily approve, disapprove or endorse this report. How is that the King predicting a peak? Anywhoo... the report gives a high end estimate for 2000 of 60 mbd for non-Communist world oil production. So, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production averaged 79 million barrels a day in 2003. Subtract about 18 million barrels a day for Eastern Europe, China and North Korea and that leaves 61 mbds for the non-Communist (as of 1980) world. So where's the great come uppance here, or am I missing something? All sniping at unwarranted snickering aside, my opinion is that Hubbert perhaps either misunderstood his own curve or deliberately obfuscated what it is really about. It's not primarily about just the physical quantity of crude in the ground -- although he seems to leave that impression. It's about the _relationship_ between the financially-dictated growth of the economy and the physical constraints imposed by the finite quantity of resources and also by the finite limits of technological improvement. Where Hubbert started out from is, I think, better revealed in his graph labeled Figure 1 in his 1936 article for Technocracy on Man-Hours and Distribution. That graph is titled Theoretical curves showing relation between production, man-hours per unit, and total man-hours, for U.S. (see: http://www.technocracy.org/pamphlets/man-hours-distribution.html). Undeniably, there is something fetishistic and reifying about Hubbert's and his acolytes' attachment to his curve -- sort of like a one-shot Kondratieff wave. But I think that can be attributed to the difficulty in distinguishing between the image and an explanation. It's a bit like explaining sheet music. To someone accustomed to graphing statistics, the relationships shown in the graph are almost self-explanatory. Any attempt at verbal elaboration, though, teeters between truism and hubris. The rub is that what Hubbert and his curve were up against was and still is folklore -- the hoary folklore of the work ethic and compound interest. Hubbert's curve simply says if you believe in one then you can't believe in the other or you can't have your cake and eat it too. American free enterprise folklore *insists* that you *must* believe in both simultaneously. Most people do and they are utterly baffled the moment you try to show in any way that the two are irreconcilable. I guess you just keep dumbing down your explanations with ever more 'concrete' examples until suddenly one day your dogma is written in stone. Snicker all you want at King Hubbert's small incoherencies. After all, the folks in the Hummers couldn't care less even if Hubbert successfully predicted fifty years in advance the exact date, hour and minute that world oil production will (or already did?) peak. As far as I'm concerned, world oil production has peaked when the U.S. has to have 130,000 troops occupying Iraq and Saudi Arabia has 30,000 guards protecting its oilfields and still its not enough to secure the supply. Doug Henwood wrote, Wow, those are some spectacularly wrong projections. Which ones specifically? And WHO made them? Someday we may run out of oil, but I suspect we'll choke ourselves or ruin the climate completely before we do. That's a reassuring thought. But actually, Doug, ruining the climate and choking ourselves are, effectively, ways to run out of oil. One also runs out of oil when one expends the better part of the productivity gains won from the use of energy in military action to secure the supply. You could call it robbing Peter to pay Paul. Conceivably, it might also be feasible to boost oil production by blasting it out of the ground with low-yield nuclear devices. The contaminated crude might make us glow in the dark but at least we wouldn't run out. Tom Walker
Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, sartesian wrote: Anybody interested in knowing just how flexible and elastic the speculations about peaks really are would do well to read the original peakist himself, the petroleum Malthus, M. King Hubbert. Take a look at http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/nehring.pdf and you will read the King predicting a peak in the non-communist world's oil production in the early to mid 1980s, etc. etc. etc. Didn't exactly happen that way, now did it? Checking out the 1980 report you posted says: Enough is known about world oil supplies to make a few specific observations: (1) Assuming political stability in the major exporters, non-Communist world oil supply is likely to range between 45-60 MBD* in 1985 and 40-60 MBD in 2000 (compared to 52 MBD in 1979). The sizes of potential increases in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Iraq and of the decrease in the United States account for a major portion of the variation in production possibilities (10 MBD or approximately 50% of the variation in the year 2000). --In fact, 2002 was about 63 MBD, after subtracting out USSR and China from: http://www.worldoil.com/INFOCENTER/STATISTICS_DETAIL.asp?Statfile=_worldoilproduction (2) As a group, the non-Communist industrialized countries will experience no significant increase in production. In fact, production in these countries may decrease by as much as 50% by the year 2000. 2002 OECD was 21.88 (ibid), but I can't immediately find 1980 (except U.S. at 10+). (3) In the short term, U.S. production may decline from its current level of 10.2 MBD to a level of 7.2-8.5 MBD in 1985. Production in the year 2000 may range between 4-7 MBD. The high estimate for the year 2000 (7 MBD) depends on both the annual addition of 1 billion barrels to proven reserves and the extensive use of enhanced recovery techniques. 8.06 MBD in 2002 for the U.S. (4) OPEC production during the next 20 years will not differ significantly from its current level of 31 MBD. Any increases in the production rate will be strongly dependent upon Arab OPEC producers. Except for Iran, only Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates have the reserves and Iraq the estimated potential to increase production rates. Substantial dependence on Arab OPEC (the Persian Gulf region) is likely to continue with its obvious implications for foreign policy. 28.57 in 2002 (ibid., while your report p. 45, predicted 27-37 for 2000) In sum, I don't understand the objection to this report of 1980. A new book is Dale Allen Pfeiffer's book The End of the Age of Oil and a major proponent of peak oil is http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ . Paul
Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
From the website: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/ With Richard Nehring, Hubbert wrote a book World petroleum availability 1980-2000 [pdf, 419k], also available at http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/~ota/disk3/1980/8023/8023.PDF. [1980] So it seems the disclaimer does not apply to Mr. Hubbert, at least not according to his acolytes. Perhaps we can quote Mr. Hubbert directly: 'THE END OF THE OIL AGE is in sight,' says U.S. petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert If present trends continue, Dr. Hubbert estimates, production will peak in 1995 -- the deadline for alternative forms of energy that must replace petroleum in the sharp drop-off that follows. This quote is from 1974. The reference to Hubbert as the petroleum Malthus is not a slick (pun intended) bit of tarring with a bad brush as Hubbert himself was consistently forthright in linking his analyses of resource to depletion to the need for stabilizing human population growth rates and restraining human demands for improved living standards. There is no snickering involved in opposition to this pseudo-science of resource scarcity and over-population. Just a plain, blunt criticism of its content. Regarding the production issues: Neither as Russia or the USSR has the Russian/Caspian/Georgia/Armenia area ever accounted for 18 million barrels of oil production daily. China's production has only recently reached 3 million barrels a day. North Korea has almost no production. USSR production peaked, I believe, in 1989-1990 at around 11.5 to 12 million barrels daily, collapsing drastically as the productive apparatus was literally worked to death, and the fields themselves severely damaged in an attempt to compensate for the post 1986 price break through accelerated, and destructive, extraction. Russia is now producing 8.3 million barrels/day. Regional oil production in the Caspian is about 1.5 million. Regarding the predicted daily extraction rates: The estimate fluctuates by 20 million barrels daily, from 40-60 million barrels. That, the 20 million, is like taking the US out of the picture all together, so I think the number is, as I called it, a little be elastic, too elastic to be regarded as a prediction. Regarding the non-communist world. We have here a problem of consistency. The Hubbertists are quick to argue that their position is non-ideological, based purely on geological facts, and that the peak of production is blind to social organization. To then move from that to arguments about developed communist non-communist OECD is to acknowledge the economic, social, and ideological bases for this theory. Regarding the graphing and the famous bell curve-- only the production histories of 8 out of 51 non-OECD countries follows the bell curve. I believe it is important, essential really, that we not be stampeded into supporting, reproducing, endorsing scarcity theorizing for several reasons, first of which is that there is little data to support the grand theories of peak and depletion. Second of which is that scarcity is an ideology deployed to curb the unsupportable, as Hubbert would have called it, demands of an unsustainable population, i.e human welfare.
Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
sartesian wrote: I believe it is important, essential really, that we not be stampeded into supporting, reproducing, endorsing scarcity theorizing for several reasons, first of which is that there is little data to support the grand theories of peak and depletion. Second of which is that scarcity is an ideology deployed to curb the unsupportable, as Hubbert would have called it, demands of an unsustainable population, i.e human welfare. There is little data to support any grand theories one way or the other. Either that or there is data that can be marshalled to support whatever one wishes to believe. I say this as an expert witness whose job it is to marshall data for arbitrations. The other side is always able to marshall its data that emphatically and unequivocally backs its case. Sometimes you have to crawl deep inside the so-called data to know whether it does or not. In the case of resource depletion, only data after the fact might be decisive but even that could be pooh-poohed as failing to take into account the as-yet unknown. Scarcity is hardly the problem. The problem is learning to live responsibly with abundance. We haven't learned to do that yet and unless we do the population is unsupportable because most of it is already not being supported while a tiny fraction of it is being gorged. Scarcity or no scarcity, non-renewable resources *are* finite. That's why they're called non-renewable. Or do you consider Bill Rees and Mathis Wackernagel hopelessly Malthusian, too. Not being myself versed in the collected works of M. King Hubbert, it's conceivable that your image of him as a raving Malthusian has some basis in something he wrote. I will admit I've encountered followers of Hubbert who give off an unmistakable whiff of Malthusianism. There is also, however a humanistic side to Hubbert that is incompatible with strict Malthusianism. So while not a stampeding endorser of Hubbert, I find some of what he has to say intriguing and useful. Some, I find awkward and nerdish. You seem to have an axe to grind against either the man or his epigones. I suppose working backwards from Kim Sung Il, I might disown Marx. You put curb, unsupportable and unsustainable in quotation marks and couple them with the phrase as Hubbert would have called it. Are you then paraphrasing something you project Hubbert would have said but never actually said? Or are you constructing a phrase out of separate words that Hubbert actually used? One needs to know what deep design lies behind such a peculiar and radically ungrammatical construction. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
