Between fact and propaganda
For most people, "The End of Suburbia" will read like a mad science fiction film, a horror story that mimics a documentary for dramatic effect. Most people are oblivious there's any serious problem, and everyone interviewed in the documentary has no doubt. And that's too bad, because much of the view of the documentary is not in dispute. In particular, there is practically no dispute:
- worldwide production of cheap (easy to get) petroleum is limited, and is already in deceline in most places.
- the domestic (USA) production of petroleum started to decline in 1970: EXACTLY when M. King Hubbert predicted in 1956 (which gives a lot of credibility to his predictions that worldwide production will start to shrink soon0
- in the USA, the amount of oil *discovered* declined each year for about 30 years before production started to decline. Now, worldwide, discovery has been declning for about 30 years....
My point is none of that is controversial: EVEN THE USA DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY AGREES WITH ALL THOSE POINTS. There's only debate on three things:
1) when will the decline start? (now or in 20 years);
2) how fast will the decline be? (2% a year? or 15% drop off, year after year?); and
3) how much will our way of life need to change to accommodate the decline.
Even the most "cheerful" scenario puts the decline off for only 20 years, but that would still be an emergency. Reducing our use of petroleum is very complicated because:
- once demand outstrips supply, the price of oil isn't going to creep up 20% it's going to go up 3x or 5x or 10x or who knows?
- once the decline starts we'll need to save energy EVERY year, whether that's 2% or 15%, just to stay even
- staying even isn't good enough. We need to save MORE and with those extra savings try to build alternate energy sources. But it would take a century to even partly replace oil with the substiutes we have now.
There is a potentially cheery side to catastrophe. If we respond well (if 30 years later than we could have) we'll have a sense of national purpose, and build a much nicer country. Railroads a lot more efficient than trucks, and pollute a lot less; I for one would like to see a crash program of of railroad rebuilding for example. And even if we had much more oil, we'd die of global warming (as to which it might be too late anyway). The sooner we make the transition to something cleaner, the better.
The End of Suburbia is terrific, except for two flaws:
--- it fails to distinguish between its fatalistic "it's too late to plan" point of view from other possible scenarios; and
--- it fails to make clear that whatever you believe, between now and 20 years from now the worldwide production of oil is going to start to decline, and our lives will change, though perhaps not quite as predicted by this one sided documentary.
As a result, the documentary comes across as a lot more shocking than it needs to. The information it contains is too much of a shock for most people to accept -- but the reality is we've known for decades that there's only so much oil in the world, and that dependancy on it is potentially fatal.
Charles