[Cross-posted at the Points Summer Book Club blog on the Dallas Morning News site. Come join us for the next two weeks as we discuss and debate James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency"]
Last night we came home from dinner at some friends' house to find our entire Old East Dallas block dark. No power, no explanation. A brownout, at the end of the hottest day of the year? Who knows... .
"We'll go to a hotel," I said to my wife, before we even got out of the car. Just a couple of hours earlier, I'd been on the back deck with my friend V., grilling fish, and the temperature on his thermometer was 110. The prospect of spending an hour inside our house, the windows of which are painted shut, was petrifying.
I say "petrifying" in full recognition that I'm being hyperbolic. But I'm not, not really. I really did feel slightly panicked over the idea of trying to spend the night in a sweatbox. "Funny that this happened just as y'all are about to start blogging about The Long Emergency," my wife said. This is what she meant...
Julie explained that the discomfort and anxiety that fell upon me at the idea of having to spend a single night sleeping in extraordinary heat says something about how dependent, psychologically and otherwise, we all are on having reliable power. To be sure, having no air conditioning through the night would have been intensely discomfiting for us, but for some people -- the elderly, or the sick -- it could have been health-threatening. As I sat last night on the front porch in the darkness, wondering when we'd decide that enough was enough, and we needed to find a hotel for the night, I told my sons that this is how most people in the history of the world have always spent their nights: in darkness, except for the glow of firelight. And if it's hot out, they spend it being hot. Period. The end.
From "The Long Emergency":
It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in the dark raptures of non-stop infotainment, recreational shopping, and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in technological society.
It takes something like the loss of power (and with it air conditioning) during a terrible heat wave to give me the shivers, so to speak. Whether or not Kunstler is correct in his grim prophecies, stopping to think about how much we take for granted in our cheap-oil technological society is something we all ought to do. I do wonder to what extent our refusal, as a general matter, to consider the potential for peak-oil theory on our way of life comes from a psychological unwillingness to face the consequences if Kunstler is correct. Put another way, do we dismiss Kunstler as alarmist because he really is alarmist, or do we dismiss him as alarmist because the cost of his being correct is too much to bear?
A postscript: for some reason, the wind picked up last night around the time the power went out. It was ... well, not exactly cool, or even close to it, but tolerable outside for the first time all day. We saw neighbors out front on the sidewalks, everybody trying to figure out what was going on. Later, two teenage boys walked by on the darkened sidewalk, carrying sparklers. A bit later, we all sat on the back deck, looking up at the stars and enjoying the night breeze when the lights came back on. Julie and the baby stayed outside for a bit. She said when she came in how much she'd enjoyed that time in the dark out back, and said it's also worth thinking about what things we miss out on because of the way we live today. In other words, what good things might we get back if the Long Emergency comes to pass?
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And again, that is ignoring the other things petroleum is used for. In plants where the actual fuel is not oil, nor transported using oil, how much plastic is used? How many things using petroleum as a lubricant?
Oil is a substance that, like an octopus, even indirectly puts its tentacles into quite a bit of what we do.
In plants where the actual fuel is not oil, nor transported using oil, how much plastic is used? How many things using petroleum as a lubricant?
I'm not ignoring it; I explicitly admitted the possibility of this in my original (3:13) post: "For what component(s) of the system is oil and/or NG a sine qua non? And how much oil or natural gas is required to keep said component(s) operational?" That was not rhetorical; I really want to know. Fuel doesn't appear to be the stumbling block; neither does transportation of said fuel to power plants. Okay, perhaps lubricants & plastics are. But again, _how much_? How many barrels are we talking about here? And is substitution of other materials possible? If not, why?
Well, go into any factory. See what is made of plastic. Is there any substitute that doesn't come from petroleum?
There's probably too much variation from one factory to another to extrapolate any kind of average plastic or lubricant usage.
But, unless an alternative to those products is created, as long as it is needed for the plant to be operational, won't matter how much of it we need if the petroleum is gone.
The entire car can stop running for the lack of one small part.
If petrochemicals are the issue, then I'll stand by my hunch that, given proper planning, peak oil needn't mean the end of electricity.
1. Lubricants account for 70,000 bbl/day of US oil consumption. Petrochemicals in general account for 3.7E6 bbl/day (*). Oil resources - tar sands, oil shale, offshore, leftover conventional - could supply that amount for quite some time.
2. Synthesis of petrochemical precursors - both olefins (**) and aromatics (***) - from methane is technically feasible. And even without natural gas or methane hydrates, one can synthesize methane from CO2 & water (ala "Green Freedom") if need be. I'd rather not go this route - the energy efficiencies are likely abysmal - but it's comforting to know it exists....
3. Given that petrochemicals only account for ~20% of US oil consumption, it appears that our primary focus ought to be on reducing oil consumption in other areas. E.g., transportation. Electrify the rails, and haul more intercity freight on them. Substitute passenger rail for short-to-medium haul air travel. Deploy mass fleets of high-MPG cars to reduce gasoline usage. Carpool. Telecommute. More mass transit. And so on.
I agree that, if we do nothing, we'll probably run aground (in electricity and elsewhere).
(*) AER 2008, Table 5.13b. I subtracted out coke, fuel oil, kerosene, & gasoline.
(**) technologyreview.com/Energy/18234/page1/
(***) Jack H. Lunsford, "Catalytic conversion of methane to more useful chemicals and fuels", Catalysis Today 63 (2000) 165-174.
Well, the point being..
If we were actually WILLING to do all these things, we wouldn't be having this conversation now.
To be frank, I can't see people doing anything differently until it is darn near too late (and that's being optimistic) to make any changes without serious upheaval.
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