S tre e t R o o ts • July 10-16, 2015
News
Page 7
“Afterburn:
Society
Beyond
Fossil
Fuels”
by Richard
Heinberg
BY MIKE WOLD
C O N TR IB U T IN G W RITER
et’s face i t We all know we’re in
trouble. Last year was one of the
hottest years on record, and 2015
looks to be worse. In that context being
reminded that we will run out of fossil fuels
might sound like good news. But it’s more
complicated than that.
Richard Heinberg’s “Afterburn” — despite
being a collection of talks and essays — lays
out in lucid, reasonable and understandable
detail the consequences of the convergence
of two coming crises: the environmental
disaster of increasing carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere and the less-acknowledged fact
that we’re on the verge of running out of
cheap, easy sources of fossil fuel energy.
Note that Heinberg doesn’t say we’re
running out of fossil fuel. The media has
recently been full of the assertion that we’re
not running out of oil because we’ve found
new sources and new fields. All that will
happen, they say, is that the price may go
up. But, as Heinberg points out, what we’re
approaching is the point where the energy
invested in extracting fossil fuel is so high
that it approximates the energy gained from
that fuel. When that happens, it won’t
matter how high the price goes up.
“Energy is what moves the economy;
money is just a means of keeping track of
wealth,” Heinberg says. “Economics 101
tells us that supply of and demand for a
commodity such as oil (which happens to be
our primary energy source) must converge
at the current market price, but no
economist can guarantee that the price will
be affordable to society.”
No matter how profitable it is, when the
energy cost of fossil fuel approaches the
B
energy benefit, it’s an unsustainable
situation.
Before we get to that point, though, the
cost of energy will increasingly drag on the
economy as the long-term average price of
fuel goes up. That will make it more difficult
to deal with the other problem: global
warming. Heinberg says a window of
opportunity is closing. We won’t be able to
use fossil fuels to develop means to rebuild
our economy based on renewable energy.
This is especially true because of the delay
in transitioning away from fossil fuels, due
to global-warming denial and the inertia of
energy companies.
Heinberg says fossil fuels have some
unique characteristics, not easily replaceable
by wind, solar or even nuclear power. First,
the energy in the fuel is easily transportable
and easy to store, such as in your gas tank
or in tank farms. Second, the renewable
energy tends to be from sources that are
intermittent. He suggests it is unlikely that
wind or solar power can ever be stored as
efficiently — say, in batteries — and used for
goods transport and air travel in the way we
use gasoline. The consequence is not that
we need to give up on alternative energy —
in fact, even if global warming weren’t a
consequence, sooner or later we would run
out of cheap fossil fuels. But it means that
efforts to simply replace petroleum and coal
power with solar and wind power, without
changing our underlying transport and
power systems, will be insufficient The
infrastructure of our civilization needs to
change. Battery operations may work for
small private automobiles, but they’re not
very useful for large trucks or airplanes.
Shipping costs will inevitably rise, meaning
that local economies need to be revived.
Energy efficiency will have to come to the
fore.
This means that prosperity, as we’ve
defined it in the 20th and 21st centuries, is
coming to an end, especially in the
industrialized nations. A world economy
based on ever-increasing material
consumption will be impossible. Much of
our material prosperity is based on cheap
energy. As energy becomes more expensive,
and as we fulfill a moral obligation to stop
stripping resources from the less developed
world, we’re going to have to search for
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other forms of success aside from material
prosperity.
Heinberg sees hope in the move to more
localized forms of production and
distribution. He also sees his forecast crisis
as an opportunity to restructure society in a
more sustainable way. As he puts it: “When
infrastructure changes, what seemingly was
solid melts into air, paradigms fall, and
institutions crumble, until a new societal
regime em erges.... What a perfect
opportunity for ah idealist*
He lays out his points clearly, with little
rhetoric and with more than a shade of
criticism for environmentalists who suggest
that we can keep living the way we’ve been
living but just substituting renewable energy
for fossil fuels.
Economic growth, he says, is at an end.
The real question is whether we can
mobilize the political force to make the
transition while we still have the resources
to develop the machinery, the techniques
and the social institutions that will allow us
to restructure the economy, and the
transport system without a massive crisis of
hunger, deprivation and chaos.
À H Ì
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