FINGERS IN THE DIKE - Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels - page 37

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FINGERS IN THE DIKE

THE 19 TH - CENTURY NOVEL H ANS B RINKER , OR T HE S ILVER Skates by American author Mary

Mapes Dodge features a brief story-within-a-story that has become better known in popular
culture than the topic itself. It's the tale of a Dutch boy (in the novel he's called simply “The Hero of
Haarlem”) who saves his community by jamming his finger into a leaking levee. The boy stays put,
enduring the elements, until villagers find him and fix the leak. His courageous action in holding
back potential floodwaters has become celebrated in children's literature and art, to the point where
it serves as a convenient metaphor.
Here in the early 21st century there are three dams about to break, and in each case a calamity
is being postponed—though not, in these cases, by the heroic digits of fictitious Dutch children.
A grasp of the status of these three delayed disasters, and what's putting them off, may help us
to navigate waters that now rise slowly, though soon perhaps in torrents.

1. Unconventional Fuels and Production Methods
I've written so much on the subject of peak oil, and some of it so recently, 1 that it would be re-
dundant to go into much detail here on that score. Suffice it to say that world conventional crude
oil production has been flat-to-declining since about 2005. Declines of output from the world's su-
pergiant oilfields will steepen in the years ahead. Petroleum is essential to the world economy and
there is no ready and sufficient substitute. The potential consequences of peak oil include prolonged
economic crisis and resource wars.
Producers of unconventional liquid fuels—tar sands, tight oil, and deepwater oil—are playing
the role of the Dutch boy in the energy world, though their motives may not be quite so altruistic.
With unconventional sources included in the total, world petroleum production has grown some-
what in recent years, but oil prices are hovering at near-record levels because unconventionals are
expensive to produce. The oil industry has successfully used this meager success as a public re-
lations tool, arguing that it can continue pulling rabbits out of hats for as long as needed and that
policy makers therefore need do nothing to prepare society for a peak-oil future. In fact, world
oil markets are depending almost entirely on continued increases in production from the United
States—all of which must come from fracked, horizontally drilled wells that decline rapidly—to
keep supplies steady. 2 Even the US Energy Information Administration recognizes that the US tight