THE END OF OIL by Peter Goodchild[1]

1. World petroleum production will peak early in the twenty-first century and then go into decline. The uncertainty of the date is due to the uncertainty of the published data on world reserves. BP Amoco's Statistical Review of World Energy for 1999, for example, includes a mysterious jump of 300 billion barrels for OPEC in 1987, probably a false figure created for political and economic reasons.

2. One would imagine that the down-slope should be the same as the up-slope, since an oil field becomes depleted gradually. However, oil is required for the drilling and pumping of oil. By 2005, an entire barrel of oil will be required to get another barrel of oil out of the ground. At that point, it would be senseless to continue drilling for oil. Contrary to the beliefs even of most pessimists, therefore, the down-slope will not be a slope at all, but a cliff.

3. Alternative forms of energy are all impractical for various reasons. Fuel cells themselves require fossil fuels. Biomass energy requires impossibly large amounts of land. Sources that produce electricity cannot be used to fly airplanes. Solar, wind, and geothermal power are only effective in certain climates. Nuclear power will soon suffer from a lack of fuel.

4. All sources of alternative energy provide insufficient "energy return on investment" (EROI). Oil is required to produce almost any other form of energy, since oil is needed to run the machinery, make the machinery, and transport the fuel. It is pointless to use an alternate source of energy if the output is less than the input.

5. Modern agriculture is highly dependent on oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and the operation of machines for harvesting, processing, and transporting. Without oil, we don't eat.

6. The human race now consumes well over 25 billion barrels of oil per year. About 38% of all the energy we use is oil. No form of energy is as cheap, as abundant, and as versatile as oil. Oil is the life blood of modern civilization. When oil disappears, civilization crawls to a halt.

7. Our present civilization was built on abundant high-grade metal ores and abundant petroleum. We are now operating on low-grade ores and much deeper petroleum. When the ores and petroleum are gone, there will be nothing left with which to build a later civilization. Contrary to Spengler and Toynbee, civilization is not a cycle, an eternal return. We will, no doubt, find a way to live (quite happily, perhaps), but it won't be civilized.

Second Reading

Happiness is easy. It is letting go of unhappiness that is hard. We are willing to give up everything but our misery...

From radio, newspapers, TV, from cause-oriented movies, books and magazines, from scare letters on behalf of every conceivable cause, from a constant stream of out-of-town speakers, and from the sprinkling of grapevine news and warnings tucked in little conversations throughout the day, we get a steady picture of a world ever fretting and wringing its hands. The ordinary and the prominent do it alike, and so we have assumed there must be some value in this time-honored form of fear. But is there? ...

The world is indeed a dangerous place and obviously there are times when the worst we fear does happen, but of the little that does, what did being sick with dread ever do to protect us? Fear neither causes the thing feared to happen nor prevents it. It is mere static. It is an absence of music. It is not power. There is calmness at the center of us, a very deep well of happiness that cannot be exhausted, but it is not experienced while our perceptions are twisted by doubt...

My belief is that we will not lessen anguish by maintaining the very state of mind we wish to see the other members of our worldly family released from. No matter what our words or actions, to be bitter and outraged is to teach our faith in the value of those emotions...

Who really knows the effect of one happy thought? Is it possible that it circles the globe, finding entry into any open heart, encouraging and giving hope in some unseen way? I am convinced it does. For whenever I am truly loving I feel the warmth and presence of the like-minded, a growing family whose strength lies in their gentleness and whose message is in their treatment of others. I believe it is good and right to be happy, and I know from experience that it is the only way I personally can be kind.

- From notes on how to live in the world ... and still be happy Hugh Prather (pp. 1-7)

SERMON

Some of you may have noticed that I changed the title for my sermon today. "Die off or take off" is still very much on my mind and will inform my words this morning but in a different way than I originally planned. As I read more and more on the subject the last few weeks, I realized I couldn't fairly deal with the topic in just one sermon without risking leaving you all terribly depressed. And since today is the annual meeting, I didn't think I'd be doing anyone a favor by creating an unpleasant emotional climate.

My fear about leaving you depressed was based on my own feelings of concern that deepened as I read articles about the challenges we must face after the oil runs out. We just don't currently have a source of energy comparable to petrochemicals in supply, concentration and versatility. Planes won't fly with solar cells. A cloudy day could cripple a solar based power grid. Several cloudy days could put a harvest at risk if solar powered tractors couldn't run. Our standard of living, our food supply, international trade, technical innovation, basically the carrying capacity of the planet is dependent on the millions of years of stored energy we use up every year in our gas tanks.

I shared my concerns from my reading with a few members of our congregation. Instead of trying to offer some hope or optimistic solutions, they challenged me even more warning me about the coming dangers of environmental degradation, topsoil loss, global warming that threatens to melt the polar ice caps raising sea level several hundred feet, and some accident in genetic engineering that will create a plague which will wipe us out. I'm sure each of us has our favorite fear that sometimes keep us awake at night as we worry about our children and grandchildren's future. Each generation has an immanent Armageddon waiting to happen hanging over their heads. Ours today, more and more, comes from the world of technology and science.

There is a countervailing vision that came to me through the medium of television which has always convinced me emotionally that the future is bright not dark. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series, painted a picture of the future I found very attractive at an early age. No matter what the problem the crew encountered, there was some recombination of magical technical adjustments and recombinations of plasma and tachion fields that could solve it. You don't see Captain Pickard worrying about gassing up the Enterprise. They have so much surplus energy, when he wants a glass of Earl Grey tea, he has the replicator produce the whole thing, glass and all on command!

Star Trek and Star Wars are emblematic of the mind set that rules our thinking today. Technology will save us from any and every trouble we have before us. The march of innovation in semiconductor production has lulled us into believing we can do anything. Well, without oil to fuel all this innovation, we may be looking at a very different future.

The original Science Fiction writers were much more sanguine in their view of how science and technology will affect our future. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein painted a frightening picture of a man creating a more intelligent and powerful being than the rest of us who eventually destroys his creator. This is a regular SF theme: technological innovation leads to human destruction - the opposite of Star Trek. One of the more grim visions of the future was put forward by H. G. Wells in his book, The Time Machine. He envisions the world in 802,701 in ruins populated by gentle loving child like people called the Eloi on the surface of the planet while underneath the surface, in the dark tunnels lived the Morlocks. The Morlocks tending their machines underground gave food and clothing to the Eloi, raising them like cattle to be eaten like domestic livestock.

Bill Joy recently wrote for Wired magazine about the possibility that in the next 50-100 years, we may have the ability to create machine intelligence greater than our own. Self replicating machine intelligence that may not have much use for us. The simplicity of gene splicing is opening up the possibility of life form innovations with great potentials for good and harm. A simple one like adding a gene to rice to improve iron absorption could have a dramatic effect on the health of millions dependent on rice as the staple of their diet. Yet a unabomber Ted Kazynski clone could use the same technology to modify HIV to make it an airborne, more durable virus potentially infecting us all.

This is just the beginning of the current voices of concern about our future. We haven't even touched on whole classes of concerns that are even more terrifying. The paths to destruction seem to multiply every day as our knowledge and imagination expand. The more we know the more threats we can perceive.

And all these predictions do not come true in exactly the way we expect. Malthus extrapolated what he knew from mathematics and science predicting the first die off of our population due to our limitations in food production. He was wrong, at least in the near term. The principles he brought to the problem are correct but he left out a few variables like our ability to increase crop yield.

I've lived my entire life under the cloud of nuclear annihilation. During the eighties when Reagan became president and rattled our nuclear saber at the Soviet Union, many of us feared the worst. I remember hearing lectures in the 80's about what a one megaton bomb in the middle of San Francisco Bay would do to us in Berkeley. It wasn't pretty. At the Democratic Convention I attended last Tuesday, Sen Moynihan made veiled references to how close we've come to nuclear accidents that only a few insiders know about. And today the threat has lessened B not gone away to be sure B but I haven't talked about mutually assured destruction for at least 10 years.

How about the depletion of the ozone layer? Yes there is a significant threat still hanging over our heads but also there is hope because of swift action banning certain kinds of CFC's. While many environmental threats still remain, resolve is building to address them. Our rivers and streams are cleaner than 50 years ago. Taking the lead out of gasoline made a difference in people's health.

All this said, I still think oil depletion will have a huge impact on us as soon as this summer as gasoline reserves are at a lower level than in 1973. For everyone's benefit, the sooner we wake up to the coming oil depletion the better our chances for a "soft landing" in a world that runs on renewable energy. Nothing could help us wake up faster than seeing the price of oil double or triple to better reflect its real value and our dependence on it for prosperity.

What will happen when we start running out of oil? The probable outcome is anarchy and social devolution. We are seeing the beginnings of these kind of breakdowns in places like Sierra Leone where government and public services and order dissolve and private armies rule the streets; where ethnic violence is driven by economic hardship. It is easy to forecast more of this kind of violence not less.

Yet there is every likelihood that the future will follow another path of greater and greater social control in the developed world. Our lives will be governed by greater and greater restrictions of our freedoms for the good of all. To prevent the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, carbon based energy will be limited. To conserve oil for transportation, food production and military needs, gasoline will be rationed. To better protect our water and soil resources, land use regulations will tighten. The government will function more and more as our common protector guarding our survival following Gerrett Hardin's solution to the Tragedy of the Commons: mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.

The flaw in our thinking about all of this is seeing ourselves at the end of an epoch rather than in the middle of one. We sit at the top of the pyramid of civilization and evolution and want to hold on to our position. Many of us are pleased with our material standard of living and want it to constantly improve or at least not erode. It could be that the challenges ahead will lead in 500 to a 1000 years to paradise on earth after the third and fourth nuclear wars.

Perhaps we are the dinosaurs of the next epoch of evolution. As we already know from the world of technology, challenges drive innovation. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years. That's a very long time, many orders of magnitude larger than our time ruling this planet. All kinds of evolutions were driven by the ice ages as life struggled to continue. I don't doubt that life beyond oil will also involve tremendous innovations and changes which we would be foolish to even guess at or predict.

My point is that the future is quite likely to be very different than what we imagine. It is impossible to predict how we will collectively respond to each challenge. The world of what is possible in our future is infinitely large, gladdening and/or terrifying depending on what images dominates our minds. Looking into that future matters greatly because the quality of our lives could be at risk depending on what way the economy we depend on goes next. Who knows, maybe cold fusion will really pan out! And there is always the possibility that Elijah and Jesus will ride down out of the sky or aliens will land and take over.

Because of the emotional trauma of looking long and hard at all these possibilities, is it any wonder people would rather fly to the Bahamas and stick their head in the sand after a long cool Caribbean drink?

So the question today is: what resource will help us ride out whatever storms come our way? My argument is there is no better resource than to be part of a realistic and forward thinking democratic religious Unitarian Universalist congregation.

The traditional religion looks to the past for guidance and inspiration. The past may not have the answers we need. We Unitarian Universalists look also to present and future. We are grounded and responsive to the problems of today and this world not the promise of salvation beyond the grave. We are non-sectarian, open to wisdom and understanding wherever we find it, allowing our tradition to move with the evolution and expansion of human understanding. We are much better positioned to respond to social evolution than any other tradition because we are able to change with the times. We need only look at the terrible problems the mainline denominations are having simply recognizing and embracing the sexual orientation of Gays and Lesbians, work we've already moved a long way toward an attitude of acceptance on in the last thirty years.

To be able to sustain a large population on our planet with diminishing energy resources will require an increase in social organization as we cooperate to more efficiently use what we have. Frontier, rugged individualist thinking must gradually decline as we become more and more interdependent in order to survive.

Yet as our outer freedom declines, our inner freedom need not. This is the great lesson of the voluntary simplicity movement. What can give life the most meaning is not what we consume but how we experience the joy and beauty of being alive. Religion can be of great value to us as we find new meaning developing our inner freedom. Buddhist monks are teaching us that one can be very happy with very little. The Christian monastic orders have much to teach us about what makes for excellent quality of life. The Islamic tradition is based on the power of devotion and prayer. We Unitarian Universalists can be the mediators of this wisdom to a secular world facing tremendous changes in standard of living.

The powerful spiritual truth independent of every religious tradition I test every day is: meaning is independent of circumstances. The opportunity to live a meaningful and fulfilling life is independent of our economic situation, our marital status, our family situation, our age, even our state of health. My personal experience has been that participation in a religious community increases our access to that meaning and fulfillment. There are many different outer forms this can take that only the heart can recognize. I've dedicated my life to honoring the traditions we inherit and assist in the birth of new ways for the spirit of life to move through us and give us this sense of meaning.

Today I encourage us to be realists rather than optimists or pessimists about the future. There are grave dangers ahead for us which we must learn about to prepare us to respond. No matter what, all of us can experience joy and celebration as we face probable hardship in our future.

Let that reality be sweetened by the strong possibility that our survival and quality of living will be enhanced by participation in a Unitarian Universalist religious community as we work to turn our inner and outer world toward the good.

[1] Message-ID: <20000517022918613.AAA175@prjg> From: "Peter Goodchild" <prjg@myna.com> Mailing-List: RunningOnEmpty@egroups.com; Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 22:29:49 -0400