What happens to a system when it runs out of what keeps it going?
Down through the ages, thousands of systems and dozens of great civilizations
have come to an end.
The most common reason for a system's failure has been the
population out-breeding the carrying capacity of its environment. Overpopulation
has usually resulted in over-farming so
the land's fertility runs out or over-irrigation so the land
becomes poisoned with salts and will no longer grow crops.
Of course, there has often been the problem of too many people
born for the available territory. This results in either a natural die-off
or war.
Another factor is intelligence. All too often a developed system
provides a living for those incapable of surviving in a more primitive system.
Also, the less capable tend to have more children than the more intelligent
who favor a more comfortable life-style over unchecked parenthood. As the
less intelligent so far outbreeds those with the knowledge and ability to
run the system and cope with emerging problems, the system goes under because
of a lack of brainpower to maintain it and make it grow.
Among primitives, in ages past and in the Third World today,
the main reasons for having as many children as biology allows are 1: Children
are a gift from our god and so must not be prevented. 2: We need children
as labor. 3: We need children to care for us in our old age. 4: Fathering
a lot of children is a proof of manhood. Those who believe a higher standard
of living will change such attitudes are both ignorant of human nature and
too late. Already, most so-called undeveloped nations have been swamped with
surplus and incompetent citizens.
In the past, climate change, which led to cold or drouth, has
caused populations to invade more favored areas. This has often resulted
in the invaders wiping out systems or being wiped out, themselves. Often,
climate change has simply been the factor that pushed an over-populated system
over the edge. That might happen to us.
A factor largely unrecognized is the failure of those in the
best position to know the problems, to even know there are any real problems.
They live in a little world of their own, closed off from the masses of people
who believe they will take care of them. They seldom even know when they
are personally threatened.
In the late 1790s the people of France revolted and wiped out
the aristocracy and the French intelligentsia. The upper-class victims of
the French Revolution were in a state of shock and surprise until they were
led to the guillotine. Why didn't they improve the system to prevent revolution?
Barring that, why didn't they run like hell before being rounded up and
beheaded?
The Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia suffered a similar
fate when the Bolsheviks took over after having promised to kill them all.
Czarist Russia had the largest secret police apparatus in history but police
intelligence didn't translate into political intelligence. Only a relative
few of Russia's brightest and best escaped to other countries.
Europe's Jews, reputed to be one of the most intelligent of
all ethnic groups, listened to years of Hitler's genocidal propaganda. But
only a small percentage of scientists and movie people paid attention and
then only because of restrictions placed on their own professions. Meanwhile,
the world's top politicians and industrialists excused and often profited
from Hitler's programs until they had to unite in destroying him. The power
elites seem never to learn and those who depend on them seem never to learn
that those of the ruling class are not really in control.
At the beginning of this year 2000 I taped some programs concerning
our planet's reaching a population of six billion. The programs showed two
examples of high-level people supposed to keep track of how our system is
running. They are Jerry Taylor, Director of Natural Resources at the CATO
Institute and Ben Wattenberg, American Enterprise Institute.
On CNN's Millinium and Talk Back Live the two experts were
interviewed concerning the impact of six billion people on our planet's
resources. Neither saw a problem.
Some time in the 1800s the world's population reached one billion.
By 1930 it had doubled to two billion. In 1975 it doubled again to four billion.
Now it's six billion.
Anyone who is conscious of the environment or has the least
understanding of ecology knows that our species has already outbred the carrying
capacity of our environments and our socio-economic systems. Yet, Jerry Taylor
said of our planet's fresh water supply, "If all we did was to increase the
efficiency with which we use water....the planet could sustain forty billion".
He said he didn't think the population would reach that figure. He continued,
"Mankind doesn't simply use resources, we create and invent them". Needless
to say, he didn't elaborate.
Any farmer who irrigates will affirm that his area's water table
has been going down steadily over the years. Those who tap artesian wells
are alarmed over the aquifers; those are the underground water stores it
took millions of years to accumulate and which will not be replenished in
a thousand lifetimes. They're going the way of the oil.
Ben Wattenberg, the second expert on the program said, "We are
not running out of resources. There is only one true resource and that is
the intellect of man". If I could give this expert some advice I'd advise
him to watch the nightly news.
Roosevelt told the American people at the beginning of a depression
only relieved by a world war, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself".
I was just a baby then but as I became a Depression-era child, I learned
early on that there was a lot more to fear than fear itself.
Since then, I've lived through eleven presidential administrations.
I know what fear is. And the greatest fear you need to realize is that our
power elite depends on the Jerrys and Bens for their knowledge of our environment
and our socio-economic system.
Now to our subject, oil. Daniel Yergin wrote the book, "The
Prize, The Epic Quest For Oil, Money And Power". You should get the book
from your library and read it well. I recorded most of the PBS
series and you can hear it on this web site. The narration explains it well
enough without the visual.
"The Prize" takes us from the first well to the Gulf War. It
tells of the terrible waste of an unrenewable but critical resource.
The first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1858. Up until
the automobile, oil was used mainly for illumination. Its primary use was
as kerosene for lamps and gasoline was a useless by-product. So many drillers
got into the act that within a few years the price of oil went down to 20
cents a barrel. Also, the waste was fantastic as the landscape turned into
a black, oily mess. No oil comes from Pennsylvania today. But Jerry and Ben
would say there is no end to our oil supply. That's what they thought in
Texas in the 1920s. So much oil was taken out that its price went down to
two cents a barrel and the government had to step in and regulate it.
There are three stages in getting oil out of the ground
commercially. The first is when the well is drilled and the oil comes out
under pressure as a gusher. The well is then capped and the oil is then directed
into containers. Finally, the pressure dies, showing there is less oil down
there. Then they have to use pumps to get the oil. But then there comes a
time for the next stage. This is when the only oil left is a thick sludge
saturating the sand and gravel at the bottom of the former oil pool. This
has to be gotten out by forcing super-heated steam down there and dissolving
the sludge and pumping it out at a cost of something like $60 a barrel for
inferior oil.
Now with an acknowledged oil shortage our government has been
begged to release oil from our national reserves. Clinton agreed to release
30 million barrels to stave off fears of a shortage of home heating oil in
this coming winter.
Our oil reserves are said to give us only 60 days supply of
overall usage. So why doesn't the U.S. just pump more oil out of the ground
and thus save the reserves? The bitter truth is that the U.S. has effectively
run out of oil.
The first oil well drilled in Libya produced 75,000 barrels
a day. That's the way it used to be here. But now many Texas oil wells produce
only eight to ten barrels a day, down to the sludge level and not enough
to replenish the reserves, much less to fuel our economy.
Dick Cheney said on September 24, 2000 that the U.S. produces
less than half of our oil needs. That could be as little as one per cent
and is probably near that.
For the last few years the world's economy has been running
on $28 to $35 a barrel oil, mainly from the OPEC nations. These nations have
their own growing populations and growing economies to pay for with the sale
of their oil. To raise the price to $40 a barrel is not greed but absolute
necessity as the world's oil prospectors frantically look for it, find it
and take it all out. The times of easily available and easily affordable
light sweet crude oil are over, never to return. An energy-starved planet
must have more oil or face universal disaster and a terrible die-off of up
to four billion people, most of whom should never have been born in the first
place.
On September 28 CNN broadcast an evaluation of the world's oil
supply, narrated by Natalie Pavelski. Natalie: "Estimates on when the oil
will run out have ranged from ten years ago, which was wrong, to fifty years
in the future, depending on who's doing the talking". (The fifty years in
the future estimate is the kind that people like Jerry and Ben give to people
to give them hope that this Disneyland for dummies will last as long as they
do.) An oil man who's name I didn't catch said, "We are ten to twenty years
away from when oil production is going to start declining and consumers are
going to have to find other sources for transportation and other uses.
Natalie: "Nobody's really sure how much oil is out there. Every
few years the U.S. Geological Survey makes an educated guess."
Gene Whitney of the U.S.G.S. said, "Since our last assessment
in 1994, oil endowment of the world, by our estimates has increased by about
20%".
Natalie: "But some of that oil would be expensive to extract
or politically problematic".
Whitney: "There's a very large supply in the ground. The question
is what's economically viable, and that will determine when oil is displaced
by other energy sources".
Natalie: "While oil production is expected to peak this century,
worldwide demand for energy is expected to keep growing. That could bring
a push for inovative new energy sources. Or it could lead to oil shortages
and problems both economic and political".
CNN's take on the oil situation is typical. There is no real
problem. There will be enough oil in your lifetime. There is plenty of time
to develop another source. Unnamed.
Actually, our systems are totally locked into the use of fossil
fuels and the internal combustion engine. Moreover, as long as there is any
oil worth bringing up, the manufacturers of internal combustion engines and
the oil cartels will fight the development of any energy which will displace
what they are used to and have invested everything they have in.
If you also are totally locked into our system and have resigned
yourself to sink or swim with it you will be among the billions throughout
history who were locked into systems that failed. But if you have what it
took your great-great grandparents to adapt and to survive, you will read
my article, "The Coming Age Of Steam" and the article on steam-driven aircraft.
Steam will not save our present system. But you can help to make it the old-new
energy-mechanical system which will truly last as long as there is intelligent
life on our planet.
