Climate Change

Explaining how Peak Oil affects geopolitics

ASPO 2004, the Rimini Protocol, Shell and Saudi Arabia, and Iraq

The difference between those predictions are very important to us who are living now and would like to enjoy life for a few more years, but really have no importance at all in the scale of human history. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen relatively soon by human historical standards; we or our children or maybe even our grandchildren are in for some very bad times.

Every serious long-term-energy forecast comes to the same conclusion, that natural gas needs to grow twice as fast as oil, because the whole world has finally realized that natural gas is the world's single-best source of energy; the numbers on the projected demand are just absolutely enormous. What we don't have much data on is on the supply side, because the amount of analysis and data on the supply side for gas pales in comparison to what we have in oil, which isn't very good.

Now the thing that has, if you like, unnerved Matt Simmons is the way that the Saudis are now almost wholly dependent, in terms of their production, on these what are called maximum-reservoir-contact wells. These are huge, long horizontal wells, right at the top of the producing structure, which is one way of maintaining very high production levels, but equally would seem to be the sort of technology you would only use pretty late in the field’s life, and one that almost by its use implies that you’ve got fairly big problems and that it won’t be that long until the whole reservoir becomes quite unproductive, because the water level simply gets up to the producing well. So that's why there's disquiet about this.

California is importing strawberries when it is strawberry season in California; importing tomatoes from Canada; brussels sprouts from Belgium; nuts from Italy while nuts from California are being exported to Italy, etc. etc. And the consequences for the land, which in California has probably suffered as much as any other part of the planet – in other words, the huge industrial agricultural areas are now toxic, desert, sort of dustbowls, huge amounts of water wasted on vast monocultures producing ever more toxic food, and with a very clear, alarming trend towards depleting the soil, that it’s becoming very dangerous.

But we need to think about the fact that one of the most difficult obstacles that we’re up against right now is that the same corporate middlemen that have ended up manipulating farmers and consumers are also manipulating the media and manipulating government regulation as well as deregulation at international levels. So we do need to look at this as a very, very central issue. Large corporations, and that includes banks and speculative investment, are actually controlling the information that gets out.

Of course George Bush and Dick Cheney can’t say it because empires are so obviously inconsistent with the democratic republic, but everybody understands that in effect we are an empire. Two things to remember about empires is one, they don’t ever act in the interest of other people; empires are methods of concentrating wealth and power and they are incredibly destructive. All you have to do is go to the countries that suffered under empires; go to India, go to Algeria, go anywhere where a European country ravaged a local society to concentrate wealth and power, you see that. The other thing of course is we should learn from history is that all empires eventually fall.

Paul Ehrlich speaks with On Point Radio.

Speaking on dwindling oil resources and closed door decisions to deal with peak oil