Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Northern California's wealth—derived largely from globalization—draws people to live here.
As a result, this area has some of the highest land prices and rents in the nation. That's not a problem
if you're a high-flying tech baron or vintner; but if you work in the service industry, or are trying to
make a living growing anything other than grapes, it's tough to get by.
Taking cost of living into account, California has the highest poverty rate in the country. The
state is home to about 12 percent of the total US population, but a full third of US welfare recip-
ients. Income inequality is already higher here than in almost any other state, and it's increasing
fast: according to
The Economist
, in the last five years the number of Californians earning between
$50,000 and $100,000 fell by almost 75,000, while income brackets above and below grew.
Project these trends a couple of decades into the future and you arrive at some version of hell—a
society that is socially and ecologically ruined. A lot of Californians have already done that visual-
ization exercise, and that's what drives them to want more local manufacturing jobs, more locally
grown food, and stronger communities comprised of skilled, motivated, engaged, and decently paid
people.
But the argument for localism is actually much stronger than this: even if we desperately want
more cheap foreign-made goods and are happy to trade away economic equity and ecological sus-
tainability in order to get them, globalization is a self-limiting game that has nearly run its course.
Fueling the Engine of Globalism
Without cheap transport fuel, globalization as we know it would not have been possible. True, Bri-
tain and Spain managed to build trans-oceanic empires using sails, but today's vastly larger global
trade empire requires oil-fueled container ships, diesel-powered trucks and trains, and kerosene-
guzzling jets and rockets (the latter to thrust communications satellites into orbit). High mobility
means oil.
California is no stranger to the oil business, and the state serves as a useful case study for what's
happening more broadly in the petroleum world. In the early 20th century, rows of oil derricks dot-
ted Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Huntington Beach. Indeed, in the 1920s Standard Oil Company
of California was the largest individual producer of crude oil in the United States, supplying fuel
throughout the Americas.
While petroleum was California's main export throughout most of the last century, production
peaked in 1985 and slowly declined. Today a pump jack still quietly sips crude behind a fence
on South Mountain View Avenue in Los Angeles, while colorfully camouflaged drilling rigs bore
downward on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. More drilling and production rigs are vis-
ible to drivers on Interstate 5 near Bakersfield, and on Highway 101 north of Santa Barbara. The
industry still extracts half a million barrels of oil per day from beneath California's soil, but the
state's current production level is less than half of what it was 30 years ago.
This is a common problem in the petroleum world: most oil-producing countries are past their
prime. The ongoing depletion of giant legacy oilfields compels companies to explore in hazardous
regions (such as the Arctic) or in deep water (the Gulf of Mexico), and they must rely increasingly
on unconventional resources like Canada's tar sands and on technologies like hydraulic fracturing
(“fracking”) and horizontal drilling.
North Dakota and Texas are epicenters of the new tight oil fracking boom, but deposits amen-
able to fracking are present in California, too. Indeed, in 2011 the US Government's Energy Inform-
ation Administration (EIA) estimated the Monterey shale formation, which underlies more than
