Post-Peak Oil

 

Detail of photo by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
for Bloomberg Green

Perhaps the most profane guest lecturer I ever brought to campus was James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. I qualify this with "perhaps" because I also helped to bring Junot Díaz to campus. Kunstler is certainly the more curmudgeonly of the two: a professional pessimist for whom dire predictions are a moral imperative. It is as if we were stepping off a curb in front of a fast-moving bus, and he is trying to push us out of its path with books, lectures, and profanity-laden blog posts.

I was reminded of this by a recent story from Bloomberg. In Toxic Spills in Venezuela Offer a Bleak Vision of the End of Oil, journalists Fabiola Zerpa, Peter Millard, and Andrew Rosati describe the multiple environmental catastrophes that are accompanying the financial collapse of what was once a leading national petroleum industry.

As the article describes in detail, the demise of petroleum in Venezuela is following a path that is not likely to play out in other producing areas. It is, after all, failing to refine oil while it still has plenty. Most other oil fields -- and the global oil field as a whole -- will not run aground financially until reserves are proportionally much scarcer than they are in Venezuela at the moment. 

But the tale is a cautionary one for another reason: it is difficult enough to get polluters to take financial responsibility for the havoc they cause while they are profitable. It is much more difficult when they have run out of money. It is for this reason that regulatory programs such as RCRA in the United States require industries to show strong financial reserves as part of any process of permitting potentially polluting facilities. 

As oil reserves dwindle worldwide -- and all of them will -- abandoned fields and infrastructure will require close scrutiny. Unfortunately, many of the costs of our oil addiction are likely to be borne by generations who do not enjoy the benefits.

Oklahoma Questions

Earlier this month, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch surprised many observers by writing a 5-4 decision in favor of indigenous rights. I had not been aware of the McGirt v. Oklahoma case until the day it was decided, when I saw various links indicating that the map of Oklahoma was to be redrawn. As a geographer, I naturally had some questions.

A map of Oklahoma circulating since July 9.

Because the McGirt case concerns jurisdiction over a criminal case, the immediate effect of the "redrawing" relates to which areas remain the purview of state or federal prosecutors and courts. The majority opinion cites long-standing treaties as the basis for federal jurisdiction on behalf of tribal governments. In his dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Roberts appears to emphasize the inconvenience of this result for the State of Oklahoma, rather than whether the treaties are or are not valid. Journalists Chris Casteel and David Morris describe the ruling in an article and video posted on The Daily Oklahoman immediately following the ruling.

A few days later, the NPR program 1A (please get to know this show if you do not already!) assembled an expert panel to discuss the ruling in a broader context. Host Jenn White discusses the McGirt case, the name change of the Washington-area NFL team, and the victory of native people in the Dakota Access pipeline case with indigenous academics and activists, as well as Jonodev Chaudhuri, ambassador to the United States for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. This discussion is a half-hour well spent, as the experts answer some of the questions raised by these rulings and indicate that some of its geographic implications remain far from clear.

Food Resilience, Not

Those who protest (sometimes violently) against common-sense measures to protect public health during the Coronavirus pandemic are attacking the immediate cause of the severe dislocations they are facing: mandates from state or local government. But what really should concern them are much deeper patterns. Short-term measures to protect public health are merely exposing deep fault lines that have run through our society for some decades; it is not difficult to imagine a world in which the same stay-at-home measures would not cause such immediate and widespread dislocation.

In an interview with environmental journalist Steve Curwood, author (and one-time BSU visitor) Michael Pollan explains this with remarkable clarity in a 14-minute radio segment entitled Coronavirus Shocks US Food System. He describes the disconnect between two geographies of food in the United States: that of grocery stores and that of food service (such as restaurants and schools).

Spoiler alert: he mentions a third, much more resilient segment as well. He cites several examples of local food networks that have found ways to adjust distribution patterns -- away from restaurants and toward farm-box subscriptions, for example. This corroborates recent reporting from Australia, where planners have found that suburban sprawl has made Melbourne more vulnerable -- both to food-supply disruption and to wildfire.

All of the above has to do with what is available in the food system; sadly, another dimension of the crisis is the rapidly growing number of people who cannot afford food even if it is for sale at relatively low prices. Since the 1980s, social safety nets have eroded along with wages; a great number of people in what many still call the wealthiest nation on earth (it is not) cannot afford to eat if they miss a paycheck. 

Cars in Minneapolis queuing for food pantry (trailer in upper-right)
Photo: Mother Jones

As of this writing, the Federal government has authorized $9,000,000,000,000 that is called "stimulus" or "relief" but which is not targeted at those who most urgently need it. The result is a shockingly rapid surge in those seeking relieve at through local food banks, as documented by Mother Jones in mid-April.

Burying the Survivors

Photo: Geoffrey Scott Baker, resident of nearby Oella who calls Ellicott City his muse

I remember this riddle from middle school days -- "If a plane crashes on the U.S.-Canada border, where would they bury the survivors?" The punchline, of course, is that you don't bury survivors.

I was reminded of this when reading Ambitious Ellicott City flood prevention plan would tear down 19 buildings in historic downtown, by Baltimore Sun journalists Sarah Meehan and Jess Nocera. The headline is an accurate summary of what Howard County officials have proposed in response to the devastating floods of July 2016 (see my Flood Flash and and Flood Peak articles) and May 2018 (Flooding: It's Not in the Cards).

The headline hints at some of the problems with the response of county officials. The plan is indeed ambitious, in the way that Al Capone was ambitious at banks: it contemplates obliterating the victims. The financial cost to be paid by the county would be high, but the businesses that have rebuilt in the "flood zone" would not survive in new locations. They thrive because of the "sense of place" to which they have contributed for years or decades.

The plan announcement seeks to downplay the impact of the demolition by pointing out that 5 percent of the historic district would be affected, and this map with much less than 1 percent in red reinforces (and exaggerates) that message. Everyone who cares about the place, however, knows that this is the most important road segment on the map, or indeed in the entire county.



Moreover, the removal of buildings in the path of the flood waters will not "prevent" flooding. As detailed in the Preservation Maryland Statement on Ellicott City Demolition Proposal, the county's plan merely moves victims out of the way but does not even include study of the radically altered upstream hydrology that has driven the floods.

Main Street Ellicott City -- A walkable downtown with arts, history, architecture, cuisine, and coffee

The story is a reminder that climate change is leaving less room for error in many of our decisions about the environment. In this case, decisions about land use that would normally have made flooding quantitatively worse are now making it qualitatively worse -- a threshold has been crossed into an entirely new type of flood risk.

Lagniappe

I have to admit that -- like many people from this part of Maryland -- I take the woes of Ellicott City personally. I have been a customer in most of the buildings slated for demolition, and my favorite librarian and I bought wedding gifts for each other in Discoveries.

Discoveries, around the anniversary of the 2016 flood. We tried to go again in May 2018, but downtown was thriving and we could not find a parking space. We were actually glad to see that. The next day, it was destroyed by a disaster resulting from climate change and poor land-use planning upstream.

Humans Should Act Our Age

Our geologic age, that is.

Geologists who define ages and epochs according to the rise and fall of organisms have come to realize that one particular species has dramatically altered the earth in ways that will be detectable well into the future. That species is us: Homo sapiens sapiens. As the name implies, higher-order thinking distinguishes us from the rest of our genus, and indeed from the rest of all life. It may be both our doing and our undoing.

A lot of that thinking has been directed at the extraction of resources that could be used both for energy and for useful products. Those resources, especially coal, petroleum, and natural gas, provided both concentrated energy and material -- plastic -- that could be used to manufacture almost literally anything.

The Anthropocene (human age) is so called because that process of extraction has fundamentally changed the Earth in ways that some humans have difficulty believing. The earth is indeed so vast -- comprising billions of cubic miles of material -- that it seems unlikely that a "mere" humans could affect it in any significant way.

The first step in understanding how this is possible is to think about the spatial scale of Earth's environments. I help to run an educational project called EarthView, in which we take a giant, inflatable globe to school gyms. We point out that on a 20-foot globe, almost everything that counts in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere -- indeed, the entire biosphere -- is within 1/5 of an inch of the surface. At the scale of an ordinary classroom, all of our resources are within the thickness of the paper covering it.

The second step in understanding how humans can significantly alter the planet is to think about the temporal (time) scale of human activity. Over a few millennia of civilization, humans have changed land-use patterns through hunting, fire, and agriculture. And in just a couple of centuries, we have extracted fossil fuels that have formed over a period of about 300,000,000 years. We use energy for our homes, factories, planes, trains and automobiles that was derived by photosynthesis when India was still attached to Antarctica.

About half of the oil, coal, and natural gas are formed from decayed layers of plants and animals that were growing during the carboniferous period and developed under heat and pressure ever since have been released into the atmosphere and oceans in just two centuries. In half a century, much of that has been turned into plastics that -- whether dutifully recycled or not -- have accumulated into Texas-sized sludge islands in the oceans.

Anthropocene imagined. Image: Shutterstock by way of NPR.
Note vertical exaggeration of the near-surface features.
The Earth has a diameter of 8,000 miles; almost all of our experience is
within a layer that is far less that 1 percent of that thickness.

Thus have geologists recognized our new age. The ability of our children and their children's children to thrive -- or even to survive -- the changes will depend upon our taking much greater interest in what we have wrought, and much greater responsibility for ameliorating the damage.

To this end, the most recent edition of the Ted Radio Hour is dedicated to understanding the Anthropocene and considering our responsibilities. The discussion begins with a paleontologist's perspective on the evidence we are leaving future geologists, and then turns to several discussions of our impact on biodiversity, including the potential of landscape ecology to reduce further harm.


Lagniappe

For more on the basics that drive the climate part of our epochal impact, see my earlier posts Frosty Denial and Early Warning. For beautifully written, nuanced discussion of the localized impacts of climate change throughout the world, please see my various blog posts referencing the works of Carl Safina and read his book The View from Lazy Point.

Peak Whale

In January, I wrote about Tom Ashbrook's interview with Carl Safina, author of The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World. We are reading the book together now; it is a beautiful telling of some ugly truths. For example:

"Formerly, whales were the world's wells, civilization's chief source of oil, and we pumped the sea nearly dry of them. Now many wish to pump it dry of petroleum, incurring deeper risks at deeper depths (and not just in the Gulf of Mexico). We appear to have leanred little of whales and nothing of oil. Japan, Norway, and Iceland cannot get beyond their blood thirst, nor we our oil addiction. The average Yank uses twice as much fossil fuel as the average Brit. Compared to 1970, we in the United States use half again as much energy, have increased our paved-road miles by half again, upped our vehicle miles driven by more than 175 percent, and increased the size of our new homes by half again. In 2007 the United States was burning over twenty million barrels of oil a day, about the same as the industrial behemoths Japan, Germany, Russia, China, and India -- combined. God bless us indeed." (p. 83)

We have the advantage of hindsight with regard to the decimated stocks of whales and their oil. Sadly, as Safina indicates, our oil addiction has made the most obvious explanations suspect. Peak oil is denied, while people blame high fuel prices on every short-term cause that comes to mind. Clearly, just as regional oil fields have reached their peak and entered decline in many places, so too has the global oil supply.

See humpback whales at NGS.

Lagniappe

ROCK OIL vs WHALE OIL (courtesy of New Bedford Whaling Museum, August 27, 2014)- 155 yrs ago today, Col. Edwin Drake struck oil at 69 ft. in a well he was drilling near Titusville, PA for a group of Connecticut investors who had hired him to prospect for petroleum, then called 'mineral oil' or 'rock oil' because it flowed from the earth and not from whales. Drake's well proved prospect drilling successful. It was the beginning of the end for whale oil. This 1861 cartoon depicts whales celebrating the new era, which changed the world and made countless fortunes. But Drake died a poor man, living on a small pension in later years.