The reduction of contemporary debates about the future to
ritual theater, the theme of last week’s post here on The Archdruid
Report, isn’t limited to the specific technological issues I
discussed in that essay—the increasingly dubious quest for fusion power, on the
one hand, and the prospects for the internet’s survival in an age of economic
contraction and resource scarcity, on the other. Across the landscape of contemporary
(mis)understandings of the future, just about every issue you care to name has
been turned into yet another modern morality play in which progress gets to act
out one more symbolic triumph over its eternal enemies.
To describe that habit as unhelpful is to understate the
case considerably. Modern industrial
civilization faces serious challenges in the years immediately before us, as
the paired jaws of resource depletion and environmental disruption clamp down
ever more tightly on it, and the consequences of decades of bad decisions come
home to roost. In order to deal with those challenges, hard questions need to
be asked and realistic answers considered—and this isn’t furthered at all by
the tendency on the part of so many people these days to lapse into
cheerleading instead. It’s rather as though you were trying to have a serious
discussion about educational policy with someone whose only response to
anything you said was to shout, “Central High, Central High, rah, rah, rah!”
Any number of examples of this could be quoted, but the one
I’d like to discuss here is the way that
fracking—hydrofracturing of oil and gas-bearing shales, to give it its more
precise moniker—has been transformed, at least in the popular imagination, into
the conclusive answer to those annoying little worries about the impossibility
of extracting an infinite amount of petroleum from a finite planet. That’s
worth discussing just now for at least two reasons.
The first of these is that the public debate over fracking
is almost certainly about to become a good deal more heated than it’s already
gotten, due to the publication of a lively and eminently readable little book
on the subject—Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty
Imperils Our Future by Richard Heinberg, which you can order from the
publisher here.
Those of my readers who have been following the peak oil story since its
reemergence early in the last decade will recall Heinberg’s The Party’s
Over; that and James Howard Kunstler’s memorably edgy The
Long Emergency were the books that launched peak oil into the
collective conversation of our time.
Snake Oil may just accomplish the same
thing with the side of the fracking debate that’s getting no attention from the
mainstream media. Heinberg makes four points in the book, each of which could
usefully be put on the business end of a branding iron and applied to the
tender backsides of pundits and politicians alike. First, the loudly ballyhooed claims that
fracking promises a new age of limitless cheap energy for Americans are pure
malarkey, based on a patchwork of unjustifiable assumptions and outright
fabrications that wildly overstate potential production and tacitly ignore all
the downsides of a far from flawless technology. Second, in the usual fashion
of today’s American economy, fracking piles up short term profits for a few by
loading immense long term costs on local communities, natural systems, and
future generations.
Third, a significant proportion of the hoopla over fracking
is being orchestrated by those wonderful folks on Wall Street who brought you
last decade’s housing bubble and bust, and the same kind of financial
shenanigans that nearly capsized the global economy in 2008 and 2009 are being
applied with gusto to a burgeoning bubble in shale leases and the like. Fourth,
and most critically, the increasingly frantic cheerleading being devoted to the
fracking industry these days is simply one more delay in the process of coming
to grips with the real crisis of our time—the need to decouple as much as
possible of industrial society from its current dependence on fossil fuels. As
Heinberg points out, there aren’t enough economically recoverable fossil fuels
left in the planet’s crust to keep the world chugging ahead on a
business-as-usual track of economic growth for much longer, but there’s more
than enough to finish the job of destabilizing the Earth’s climate and pitching
us face first into a very difficult future.
None of these points will be news to regular readers of
The Archdruid Report, but then regular readers of
The Archdruid Report are not this book’s primary audience.
(You won’t find any of my peak oil writings in the bibliography, either, and
for very good reason—a book meant to influence policymakers and the general
public does itself no favors by citing archdruids.) Those of my regular readers who need facts
and figures to argue against fracking-industry shills, or who want a short and
highly readable book to press into the hands of the uninformed or undecided,
will certainly want a copy, and those who have just stumbled across this blog
and are still trying to figure out what all the fuss about peak oil means could
do much worse than to get a copy of Snake Oil and read
it—the absurd media blather about “limitless fossil fuels” and similar
oxymorons gets a well-earned hiding at Heinberg’s capable hands.
The publication of Snake Oil, then, is
one of the reasons why a discussion of fracking is particularly relevant at the
moment. The other? That comes from an
even more unanswerable critique of fracking—this one written by the impersonal
forces of geology and economics. This will come as no surprise to this blog’s
regular readers, either; as I suggested in a
post earlier this year, with the approach of autumn, the fracking
juggernaut is running on fumes.
Consider this
story from the financial media—tip of the archdruidical hat to Ron
Patterson’s blog Peak Oil
Barrel, one of the rising stars of the post-Oil Drum peak oil scene,
for the link. Big oil names Shell and BHP Billiton are writing down the value
of their shale assets by billions of dollars. Meanwhile the value of oil and
gas-related transactions, among the top profit centers for Wall Street every year
since 2005, has dropped like a rock and, unless something changes drastically,
won’t even make the top five list this year.
Nor is this happening solely on Wall Street; out in shale
country, too, the boom is grinding to a halt. The
pace of drilling in the Fayetteville shale has dropped precipitously
this year; in Texas, meanwhile, gas
production from the Barnett Shale has dropped more than a billion
cubic feet a day, to levels last seen in 2009; while in the Marcellus Shale
country of Pennsylvania, insurance companies are starting to cancel
homeowners insurance and home mortgages are becoming unavailable as
the health and environmental toll of reckless shale development piles up.
Headlines of this sort are becoming increasingly common in
the financial press as one month gives way to another. With utter
predictability, so have articles and essays in the mainstream media crowing
about the supposed end of peak oil, and financial-advice columns urging the
general public to get out there and invest their life’s savings in shale oil
and gas. Those who recall the way the housing bubble played out over its last
year or two will recall this same phenomenon: as the fundamentals turned sour,
the chorus of pundits praising the arrival of a new age of prosperity for all
got louder and louder, until the crash of collapsing prices finally drowned it
out.
Exactly how long it will take for the shale bubble to tip
over into full-scale bust probably can’t be known except in hindsight. The same
principle probably applies just as well to another question that may be even
more explosive: just how much of Wall Street and the broader US financial
industry depends on income skimmed off the shale bubble for its economic
survival. It’s when the tide goes out, as Warren Buffet famously said, that you
find out who’s been swimming naked; when the bubble bursts and companies with
heavy exposure to the fracking industry can no longer cover their day to day
costs by tapping into the money flows any speculative boom attracts, the
consequences could fall anywhere along the spectrum from sharp regional
recessions in shale country all the way to panic selling on global markets and
a reprise of 2008’s economic turmoil.
I suppose it counts as belaboring the obvious to point out
that these aren’t the consequences that were supposed to flow from the
so-called shale revolution, according to the pundits and politicians and
industry shills that filled the media with proclamations of good times to come.
Still, the point needs to be made, because it’s a safe bet that the same
promises of abundant energy and prosperity for all will be made in regard to
any number of equally dubious revolutions and breakthroughs and great leaps
forward in the years ahead., with equally unsatisfactory results.
The rhetoric that surrounded the fracking bubble from its
inception, after all, was exactly the sort of ritual theater of progress I
discussed in last week’s post. Read any discussion of fracking in the US
mainstream media and you’ll find every one of the standard cliches present and
accounted for: the imaginary barriers that are there solely to be overcome, the
innovative new technology hot off the lab bench, the lucky discoveries that
show up just in time for the new technology to exploit, the ceremonial debate
in which the opponents of progress raise doleful cries about the timeless order
of rural life that’s about to be destroyed while the protagonists proclaim the
dawn of a new day of prosperity and abundance for all, and so on.
None of this has any relevance to the facts on the
ground. Outside the realm of ritual
theater, the limits are real, the technology isn’t new and neither are the
discoveries, the destruction announced by the opponents of fracking has turned
out to be quite tangible, and the new day of prosperity and abundance has gone
missing in action. Still, you won’t hear
that from the media, not until long after the boom has gone bust, the hardware
has been sold to the Chinese for scrap, and the sole remaining legacy of the
shale bubble consists of county-sized areas where the groundwater is too toxic
to drink.
This is what happens when a culture’s traditions get fatally
out of step with its circumstances. Not that long ago in America, the ritual
theater of progress was adaptive, to borrow a bit of jargon from ecology: more
often than not, those who extracted more resources, burnt more energy, built
more infrastructure, and produced more goods and services prospered, and so did
their communities. Every disagreement about
economic development, as I showed last week, was therefore forced into what
amounts to a ceremonial pattern that guaranteed that the proponents of progress
would win every round. When the limits to growth were still far off, when it
was still possible to pretend that resources were infinite and the
environment’s capacity to absorb pollutants was just as limitless, that was a
successful strategy.
The problem with that strategy was that it was unable to
adapt when the hard limits to resource reserves and the biosphere’s tolerance
for pollution came within sight. In terms of our culture’s faith in progress
and the ritual theater that unfolded from that faith, those limits could only
be interpreted as another set of imaginary barriers to be overcome, and another
set of doleful cries for the opponents of progress to utter in the ceremonial
debate they were supposed to lose.
That’s why every response to the crisis of our time that gets favorable
attention from the US media is framed as an overcoming of imaginary limits by
way of some innovative new technology, and quickly gets its chorus of opponents
of progress uttering doleful cries, so that the heroes of progress have the
appropriate ritual setting against which the can sing their praises of the
shining new day about to dawn. Those are our traditions and our rituals, handed
down to us by our tribal elders, and it’s simply our bad luck that those
traditions and rituals have left us hopelessly unprepared to deal with the real
world.
In the real world, the most important task facing each of us
right now is that of grasping that the absurd abundance of energy and resources
that Americans enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century was anything but
normal. A cascade of fortuitous events
handed the American people of that period a huge surplus of energy and
resources, orders of magnitude greater than any comparable example in history.
Of course we squandered most of it, and picked up habits of extravagance and
waste that will have to be unlearnt painfully as the last of the surplus fades
away.
To accept that task, though, is to abandon habits of thought
and action that have pervaded American culture throughout living memory. The
habits of thrift and self-discipline that our forebears learned in the school
of hard necessity—“use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”—drowned
in the flood of mostly unearned wealth that saturated American society during
this nation’s age of empire, and every detail of contemporary American culture
militates against a return to those sane but unwelcome standards. At this
point, as I’ve argued more than once in the past, any response to the challenge
of our time that doesn’t start with using much less energy and other resources
simply isn’t serious; still, our culture being what it is, unserious responses
remain the order of the day.
Still, there’s at least one good reason to think that this
latter may be a distinctly temporary condition.
The fracking bubble, after all, was not the first such response to the
twilight of cheap abundant petroleum. In the wake of the 1970s energy crises,
it bears remembering, the same sort of rhetoric currently being deployed on
behalf of fracking was much in evidence, as the reckless pumping of the North
Sea and Alaskan North Slope oilfields crashed the price of oil and convinced a
great many people that the great god Progress was still soundly ensconced in
his temple. Then as now, an increasingly
frantic effort to scrape the barrel was treated as proof that the barrel was
still full, and allowed politicians, the press, and the public at large to put
off necessary changes for a little while.
Notice the difference, though: the scrape-the-barrel efforts launched by the
Reagan counterrevolution of the 1980s kept oil production propped up for more
than twenty years, while the equivalent efforts this time around barely managed
the thing for five. The available reserves in 1980 were large enough to crash
the price of oil and pay for one last spectacular era of prosperity; the
reserves tapped by fracking weren’t enough to keep the price of oil from rising
up into triple digits, or give the economy more than a brief and localized
boost. We really are getting near the bottom of the barrel—less metaphorically,
the point at which petroleum production worldwide tips over from its current
unsteady plateau into the long ragged decline that marks the twilight of every
resource.
