Optimism for a Post-Peak Oil Society

Can you feel the mood shifting? I can. A year of spiking speculation about peak oil and the death of suburbia has rattled lots of Americans. Plenty of people suddenly feel that real, civilization-shaking change might be around the next corner. And plenty of them also feel frozen in the headlights, unsure what, if anything, to do about it. Other than wait.

It reminds me a little of the very early days in the fight over global warming. Appalled at the forecasts of global destruction, some of us demanded immediate and strong action--high taxes on carbon emissions, for instance, and never mind the pain. Others -- more moderate or more politically realistic -- advocated a suite of what they called "no regrets" policies. They suggested, say, gradual rises in gas mileage, higher efficiency standards for appliances. Even if climate change proved to be overblown hooey, they pointed out, such rational and easy measures would still save us money, reduce conventional pollution, and so on. These steps were like taking out a modest amount of insurance; whatever happened we'd have no regrets about having adopted them.

In actual fact, of course, we took neither the urgent nor the more relaxed steps. Instead we bought Ford Explorers. Now everything that was frozen is melting and soon we will have ... regrets.

Who knows if we're actually going to see oil production peak sometime soon? Not me. I've read persuasive arguments that we will from writers like Michael Klare and James Howard Kunstler and Paul Roberts. I've also read confident counterarguments from people who've been right in the past, like Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Oil depletion is not a straightforward physical law, like the fact that the molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. Instead it's a detective story that turns on questions like, are the Saudis lying about how fast oil is being depleted in their giant field at Ghawar? My suspicion had always been that we'd run out of sinks before sources -- that is, run out of atmosphere before oil wells -- but it's beginning to look like the race will be tight.

In any event, the real question is what to do in the face of uncertainty. In policy terms, the answer is easy, since cushioning the end of oil would require precisely the same steps as slowing down climate change: raising gas mileage, converting to hybrid cars, building trains, imposing carbon taxes, giving tax breaks for insulation.

But in personal terms? That's how peak oil affects the imagination, after all. You can't hear about it without starting to wonder, what's my life going to be like? Authors have provided helpful guesses about which regions of the country to move to (New England good, suburban Atlanta bad) or what items to install on your homestead. The trouble with such advice, however, is that it's altogether too personal, too private. If the nightmare of a globally warmed world is, say, a storm-raked, mosquito-ridden, sea-besieged city on a tropical shore, then the nightmare of a post-oil world is a lone family holed up on its new farm using its cache of firearms to guard its stockpile of food. You can imagine it coming to that -- Mad Max meets American Gothic. It's hard to underestimate the degree of rage that might accompany the end of the cheap-fuel culture in a country as entitled as ours. But the loner option is full of unhappiness, no matter what. At best it offers survival.

The no-regrets options are different, and seductive. They all involve communities learning to fend more powerfully for themselves -- communities ratcheting down their dependence on the overstretched and oil-dependent lines of supply that mark a globalized economy, and ratcheting up the semiforgotten, close-to-home economies that might prove more stable in an energy-starved world. Some of this work is already underway, but it will be given a new urgency if the price of oil just keeps on leaping.