(Part three of three)
In a Nov. 15 Toronto Star column, Linda McQuaig, author of It's The Crude, Dude, noted the U.S. consumes 25 per cent of the world's oil, yet its domestic reserves represented only three per cent of global supply.
And according to the people cited in The End of Suburbia, the global production of oil -- pretty much a non-renewable resource -- either has peaked or is about to peak.
Yet the suburban lifestyle of much of North America -- big homes, long commutes, car-based transportation -- is predicated on cheap, bountiful energy.
This is where The End of Suburbia comes in. This independent doc actually drew a full house on a very cold Thursday night in T.O. -- it was shown at the Workman Theatre (part of the addictions complex, ironically enough).
The film was produced by Paris, Ont. resident Barry Silverthorn, directed and written by Torontonian Gregory Greene and narrated by Vision TV's Barry Zwicker.
It walks you through the history of suburbia, how they were first meant to offer country living and evolved into soulless dormitories.
But the real edge to the film is based on the thesis that the world is running out of oil -- and without it, suburbia in its present form can't exist.
"Now we're stuck in a cul-de-sac with a cement SUV," said James Howard Kunstler, a New Urbanist who describes suburbs as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
The film touches on the Great Blackout of Aug. 14, 2003 -- when 57 million people in eastern North America simultaneously lost power (see 365 days ago ... for my recollections).
Energy banker Matthew Simmons noted the blackout occurred at 4:13 p.m. on a hot August day when industrial, commercial and consumer demand were all at their peak, leaving the grid under maximum pressure. For him, it was crazy the situation ever got to that point.
(Go to this Natural Resources Canada website for a copy of a report on the blackout)
The film makes the point we can't grow the economy without growing the electricity supply. But our options for doing so are limited.
Here in Ontario, the McGuinty government wants to phase out coal-fired plants by 2007, but nuclear power is expensive and has its own problems, sites suitable for hydro power are becoming fewer and natural gas reserves are also in decline.
It makes you think we're starting to sink into energy-shortage quicksand.
After that cheery bit of news, we're introduced to M. King Hubbert, once a top geologist in the United States, who predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil production would hit a peak in the early 1970s and then irreversibly decline.
Simmons said that by 1970, Hubbert's reputation was in shambles. But in retrospect, what year did U.S. oil production peak? 1970! Hubbert predicted world production would peak around the year 2000. In March 2003, Saudi Arabia said it couldn't pump more oil to stabilize prices that rose because of the Iraq war.
One person in the film said if Saudia Arabia has no headroom, then world production has likely peaked (or words to that effect).
If you look at the graphs on this page on the Hubbert Peak website, consumption by far outstrips supply for the U.S., China and India. Even OPEC member Indonesia is a net importer now.
Ask yourself if that could lead to global conflict -- or if it already has.
Here's some math: The U.S., with it's 293 million people, account for 25 per cent of oil consumption. It consumes about 19.5 million barrels per day (source: CIA World Factbook).
China, with 1.3 billion people, consumes 4.6 million bbls/d.. India, with 1 billion, consumes 2.1 million bbls/d.
If those countries' oil consumption ever hit about two-thirds the U.S. level, then China would consume 57.3 million bbl/d and India 44.4 million. However, I don't have the expertise to say when or if that might happen. The two-thirds number was also pulled out of the air. But clearly, as the two countries become more prosperous and develop consumerist middle classes, oil consumption will likely rise (Those calculations were mine; they didn't come from the film).
But if we're at, past or close to the peak of global production, as the film claims, where's that oil going to come from?
There would be two possibilities:
1. It starts to get really expensive
2. Wars are fought to control its supply
Michael C. Ruppert, publisher of the From the Wilderness newsletter, put it this way to an audience: "Do you think Dick Cheney was kidding when he said this war would last our lifetimes?"
Technology has gotten us out of jams before. Optimists might say it will happen again. There were no optimists in this film. Technologies like hydrogen fuel cells were dumped on as a myth.
Richard Heinburg -- educator and author of The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Powerdown : Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World -- thinks the U.S. will start feeling the impact of the post-peak reality in five years.
The vision the people quoted in the film propose is quite apocalyptic: trillions in value disappearing from the stock market, food production plummeting, the end of the "3,000-mile caesar salad," and vast areas of suburbia left as slums.
If there's any bright spot, it's the rise of the New Urbanism -- walkable, livable communities.
Now, the problem I have is there is absolutely no one in the film to argue the counter-point -- not even maliciously edited to make them look especially dumb to the true believers, like most docs of this type do.
There are lots of websites on the oil supply crunch phenomenon: Hubbert Peak, PeakOil.com (a shadowy group of "private citizens"), PeakOil.net -- website of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas and run by Dr. Colin Campbell.
Here is what was said about Dr. Campbell -- who appears in the doc -- in a Sept. 21 Wall Street Journal article:
The oil industry calls Dr. Campbell a crackpot. Since he began writing about a looming peak, the industry notes, he has progressively postponed his predicted date, from 1995 to 2005. This roughness of the numbers, the industry says, points to a more fundamental problem with the peak-oil theory: It underestimates the power of technology to find more oil -- indeed, to broaden the concept of oil itself.
That this debate can occur points to a striking fact: Nobody really knows how much oil exists. More to the point, nobody knows how much can be gotten out of the ground. Much of the oil lies in places with volatile politics, including the Middle East, Russia and Africa. Further complicating the calculation: Beyond the pool of conventional oil that the industry can easily extract today lie vast stores of hydrocarbons that, until recently, haven't been thought of as oil. Among them: tar-soaked sands in Canada and oil-laden shale rock in places including the western U.S.
So far, over the approximately 150 years since the first oil well was drilled, the world has burned through about 900 billion barrels. Dr. Campbell thinks the world will be able to pump out about that much more. The industry, however, contends Dr. Campbell is being far too pessimistic. Exxon Mobil Corp., for instance, estimates there are something like 14 trillion barrels of fossil fuel still in the ground, including the tar-soaked sands and other nonconventional forms. It figures the industry can extract a good chunk of that.
If Dr. Campbell and his colleagues are right, then nations should rush to promote fuel efficiency to minimize economic upheaval. If they're wrong, but the world follows their advice anyway, then huge sums of money could be wasted jumping to alternative energy sources that, while environmentally friendly, would be more expensive than oil.
In fairness, the article also said Campbell and his theories are getting some attention now in the mainstream.
But in terms of resource economics, there is a difference between economic reserves and the resource. Generally speaking, as the price of the commodity goes up or a technological breakthrough allows for cheaper extraction, some of the resource can be turned into an economic reserve. However, I suspect that in oil's case, it just puts off the day of reckoning.
One strange omission in the film, considering its energy-centredness, is any serious discussion of climate change. Our wastage of energy -- and there's a direct line between it and the oversized homes and car culture of the 'burbs -- drives up our greenhouse gas emissions.
Even if we weren't running out of oil, we should be leading more conservation-minded lives to stave off that event.
The End of Suburbia plays a role by putting forward a thought-provoking thesis -- one that I can't personally say is right or wrong. Watch it, but with your media literacy filters turned on and functioning.
However, when:
- Rummy is being given the green light to make covert, lethal mischief anywhere in the world, and
- When Dubya doesn't think he has anything to apologize for with respects to Iraq, and
- When he calls for an ownership society and not a stewardship one, and
- When Cheney is telling Iran it might want to capitulate, lest it be smoked by Israel, and
- When no oil company is building new refineries and
- When the U.S. is putting forward deployment bases throughout an "arc of instability" that includes the oil-producing areas of Central Asia, then
I wonder.
But if young Americans are dying in oil-rich Muslim lands to ensure the freedom of SUV owners to keep burning gas like there's no tomorrow, that would be quite the cruel, sick joke on them. Wouldn't it?