INTRODUCTION

Richard Heinberg

a bout th e author
Richard Heinberg is senior fellow-in-residence at the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of
the worlds foremost peak oil educators. He has written scores of essays and articles for a wide range of popular and academic periodicals, and he is the author of ten books including The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, and The Partys Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies.

This publication is an excerpted chapter from The Energy Reader: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2012). The Energy Reader is copyright 2012 by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and published in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute. For other excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visit energy-reality.org or contact Post Carbon Institute. Photo: Brett Cole

Post Ca r bon I nst i tu t e | 613 4t h St r e et, Su i t e 208 | Sa n ta Rosa, Ca li for n i a 95404 USA

We have reached a point of crisis with regard to energy, a point where the contradictions inherent in our growth-based energy system are becoming untenable, quote here lorem ipsum due. The and where Pull its deferred costs are coming dolor sit amet essential problem is not just that we are tapping the wrong energy sources (though we are), or that we are wasteful and inefficient (though we are), but that we are overpowered, and we are overpowering nature.

nergy is at the core of the human predicament in the twenty-first century. Extracting fossil fuels poisons landscapes, fragments habitat, and destroys beauty. Burning those fuels is changing the chemical composition of the global atmosphere and accelerating climate change. At the same time, spiraling fossil fuel pricesresulting from depletion of the highest-grade and most easily accessed hydrocarbon resources have contributed to a worldwide financial crisis that threatens global stability. Not only are transport costs rising, threatening globalized supply chains, but soaring energy prices also drive up food prices, leading to increasing social unrest around the world. As conventional oil and gas deplete, energy companies are forced to spend more and more to search for and produce resources that are farther afield, that are more technically challenging to access, and that pose serious risks to ecosystems. In their increasingly desperate search for extreme energy, oil and gas companies must operate at the margin of their technical capabilities. Under these circumstances, accidents are not only more likely to happen, but are often far more disastrous when they do: Recall the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and imagine a similar or larger accident happening hundreds of miles off the coast of Alaska in rough arctic seas. Indeed, the entire project of globalized industrial civilization which took root and dramatically expanded during the

twentieth century as cheap energy drove production, trade, and population growthnow seems imperiled as energy and ecological limits come into view. Its tempting to take the micro-view and look for ways to target each of our energy problems with a technical fix. Cant we improve the energy efficiency of vehicles, insulate our buildings, and develop renewable energy sources? Yes, of course. Cant we regulate the fossil fuel industry better, and allow the vast, recently unlocked North American reserves of shale gas and shale oil to be produced responsibly? Possibly. We could do all of those things, and many more besides, to lessen the current energy economys impacts on natural and human communitiesand still there would remain serious obstacles ahead. Why? Lets zoom out from the details of our dilemma and take in the big picture. As we do, two fundamental problems become clear: First: We have exceeded global levels of energy consumption that are sustainable. The sheer scale of our energy use today is fantastic when compared with that in any era of history. Today the human population is roughly seven times larger than it was just prior to the Industrial Revolutiona dramatic and dangerous population growth trajectorybut we use 30times as much energy. On average, each human today uses the
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Introduction

energy equivalent of 360 gallons of gasoline annually, which translates to about as much energy as a typical person would expend in ten years of hard labor. On average, each American commands the services of roughly 150energy slaves. (In other words, if all power consumed by each of us had to be supplied by human muscles, it would take 150 people working 24/7 to supply it). And still we want more! We have come to depend on economic growth in order to ensure more jobs and higher profits each year, and economic growth implies increased use of energy. Yet producing incremental additions to global energy supplies has become a task of monumental proportions, requiring soaring amounts of investment capital as well as swelling streams of raw materials (not only coal, oil, and gas, but also water, steel, copper, uranium, neodymium, lithium, gallium, aluminum, etc.) as well as burgeoning armies of trained personnel. In short, we have gotten used to an economy that is overpowered and that demands still more power each and every year. Second: We have created an energy infrastructure that has overpowered natural ecosystems, thereby threatening the future of many speciesour own included. The vast scale of our production of highly concentrated fuels enables us to use tools of a colossal nature. Diesel-powered ocean trawlers overwhelm the ability of commercial fish species to rebound. Dieselpowered shovels rip apart mountains to get at the coal and other minerals buried inside. A billion cars and trucks and tens of thousands of jet aircraft and coaland gas-fired power plants spew carbon into the air, undermining climate stability. Chain saws and bulldozers level 13million hectares of forest per year, while diesel-powered paving machines turn thousands more hectares of agricultural land, forest, and habitat into highways, runways, and parking lots. The United States alone has paved 6.3million kilometers (3.9million miles) of roads, enough to circle the Earth at the equator 157times. All this energy consumption adds to the number of humans that Earth can supportin the short term. We

grow immense amounts of food through fossil fuelpowered industrial agriculture, and we transport goods around the world by airplane, train, truck, and ship to compensate for local scarcity. But over the longer term, as natural ecosystems decline, we are degrading Earths ability to support human beings. Exactly when these two trends will converge, and how, is still a matter for speculationbut evidence suggests the intersection may be years away, not decades or centuries. Currently, our strategy for staving off social and ecological collapse is yet more economic growth. That means still more energy production to fuel more industrialization of agriculture, more transportation, more construction, and more manufacturing. But how do we propose to increase energy supplies? The solutions being put forward by the energy industry and most governments include: applying more advanced technology to the exploitation of marginal fossil fuels (tar sands, deepwater oil, shale oil, shale gas, and others); building more nuclear reactors and developing third- and fourth-generation reactor technologies; and tapping renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and wave power. Nearly everyone agrees that we should also use energy much more efficiently than we do now. But even factoring in realistic efficiency gains, official agencies such as the International Energy Agency and U.S. Department of Energy predict increasing demand for energy for as far into the future as their forecasts can peer. This book argues that, while our choices about which energy resources we use are important, each and every option has costs. Even energy efficiency has costs: It is subject to the law of diminishing returns (each further increase in efficiency tends to cost more than the previous one), while energy saved in one part of the economy will tend to be used in another. And the costs of increasing our energy production are, in more and more instances, exceeding the benefits. We have reached a point of crisis with regard to energy, a point where the contradictions inherent in our growth-based energy system are becoming untenable, and where its deferred costs are coming due. The essential problem is not just that we are tapping the wrong energy sources
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(though we are), or that we are wasteful and inefficient (though we are), but that we are overpowered, and we are overpowering nature. These conclusions have no constituency among the powerful. Politicians and business leaders seem interested only in finding ways to increase energy production and consumption. But if what we are saying in this book is true, the only reasonable path forward is to find ways to use less energy. For the already-industrialized world, energy consumption is at such high levels that substantial reductions would still leave plenty of room for the enjoyment of modern conveniences. For less-industrialized countries, where hundreds of millions live with very little electricity or liquid fuel, it is essential that development be redefined in terms of sufficiency and quality of life, instead of being measured in numbers of cars and highways, and in tons of food, raw materials, and manufactured products exported. In short, our task in the twenty-first century is to scale back the human enterprise until it can be supported with levels of power that can be sustainably supplied, and until it no longer overwhelms natural ecosystems. Undoubtedly, that enterprise will in the end consist of fewer people using less, on a per capita basis, than is currently the case. As we power down, we will find ways to use the technologies and scientific understandings developed during our brief, unsustainable, and probably unrepeatable period of high energy use in order to make the inevitable energy decline survivable and perhaps even salutary. But power down we must. This book is the companion reader to Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, a photographic tour of the world of energy illustrating the costs and trade-offs of constantly expanding efforts to fuel industrial processes. Pictures often tell a story in ways that words cannot, and we the editors felt that the paper and printers ink required for that volume were not only justified but required. It is one thing to describe verbally the results of tar sands mining in Alberta. Its quite another to see the shocking images of

Canadas boreal forest turned to a blasted wasteland by brontosaurus-sized machines clawing ever deeper into a constantly expanding environmental sacrifice zone. Energy (and The Energy Reader ) features essays by a diverse collection of authors who do not necessarily agree with one another on every point. Their contributions were selected to highlight a range of issues related to energy production and consumption, and especially the environmental consequences of energy use, in the twenty-first century. The book is organized to illuminate topics according to a sequential and cumulative logic. However, readers may feel free to dip in anywhere, as their interest leads them. Each essay makes its own case on its own terms. What emerges from this verbal and pictorial mosaic is an impression of a planet and a society in crisisa crisis of overconsumption on one hand, and of overwhelming impacts on increasingly fragile natural systems on the other. Our goal is to help change the national and global conversation about energyto help it evolve quickly from one of how to grow energy production to one of how to shrink our appetites to fit natures ability to sustain itself. Take a good look at what it takes to power our human world of cities and machines. Think about the tens of millions of years worth of fossil fuels we are burning in mere decades; about the billions of tons of geologically stored carbon we are releasing into the atmosphere; about the landscapes we ravage, the water we foul, the air we pollute, and the species we drive into extinction in order to fuel our industrial mega-machine. Then ask yourself: Is all of this really necessary? Couldnt we just use less?

Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth

Edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner
We have reached a point of crisis with regard to energy... The essential problem is not just that we are tapping the wrong energy sources (though we are), or that we are wasteful and inefficient (though we are), but that we are overpowered, and we are overpowering nature. from the Introduction, by Richard Heinberg

ENERGY

In a large-format, image-driven narrative featuring over 150 breathtaking color photographs, ENERGY explores the impacts of the global energy economy: from oil spills and mountaintop-removal coal mining to oversized wind farms and desert-destroying solar power plants. ENERGY lifts the veil on the harsh realities of our pursuit of energy at any price, revealing the true costs, benefits, and limitations of all our energy options.
Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute. 336 pages, 11.75 x 13.4, 152 color photographs, 5 line illustrations. $50.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-0970950086, Fall 2012.

The ENERGY Reader

Edited by Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner What magic, or monster, lurks behind the light switch and the gas pump? Where does the seemingly limitless energy that fuels modern society come from? From oil spills, nuclear accidents, mountaintop removal coal mining, and natural gas fracking to wind power projects and solar power plants, every source of energy has costs. Featuring the essays found in ENERGY plus additional material, The ENERGY Reader takes an unflinching look at the systems that support our insatiable thirst for more power along with their unintended side effects.
Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute. 384 pages, 6 x 9, 7 b/w photographs, 5 line illustrations. $19.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0970950093, Fall 2012.

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