Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN TEN YEARS SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF
my topic
The Party's Over: Oil,
War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
, which has seen two editions and many printings, trans-
lations into eight languages, and sales of roughly fifty thousand copies in North America. The be-
ginning of
The Party's Over'
s second decade has coincided with a widespread reevaluation of what
has come to be known as peak oil theory (which the topic helped popularize). So it's a good time to
take stock of both. The following is part memoir, part reassessment, and part reflection.
Memoir: What a Party It Was
Prior to the publication of
The Party's Over
I was a writer on environmental topics and a teacher
in an innovative college program on “Culture, Ecology, and Sustainable Community.” In 1998, I
happened to read an article in
Scientific American
titled “The End of Cheap Oil?” by two veteran
petroleum geologists, Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère.
1
At that time, oil was trading for roughly
ten dollars a barrel—about the cheapest it has ever been in real terms. The article made the case
that “When the world runs completely out of oil is . . . not directly relevant; what matters is when
production begins to taper off.” The commencement of that tapering, the authors said, could happen
disturbingly soon: “Using several different techniques to estimate the current reserves of conven-
tional oil and the amount still left to be discovered, we conclude that the decline will begin before
2010.” History had already shown (in the 1970s) that a significant constraint to the availability of
oil could have dramatic and widespread economic, financial, and political repercussions.
Around the same time, I began receiving an occasional series of emailed essays titled “Brain
Food” by a retired software engineer named Jay Hanson, which discussed energy's importance in
world events. I also joined an email list called EnergyResources. Hanson and others were discuss-
ing topics like William Catton's
Overshoot
and Walter Youngquist's
GeoDestinies
, which I quickly
devoured. As I began to recognize the central role of energy in human society, big questions I'd had
about economic history—especially ones concerning the origins and significance of the Industrial
Revolution—began to find answers. “The End of Cheap Oil” also led me to realize that, because
humanity was on the cusp of a decline in available, cheap transport fuel, a contraction in trade and
economic activity in general was fairly inevitable.
