The Party’s Over:

Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies

By Richard Heinberg

Report by David Waugh

 Introduction
• In the future,“it may be impossible for even
a single nation to sustain industrialism as
we have known it in the twentieth century.”
• “What causes one group of people to live in
air-conditioned skyscrapers and shop at
supermarkets, while another genetically
similar group lives in bark huts and gathers
wild foods?”
 Chapter 1
• Energy described: The capacity of a physical
system to do work
• Energy in Ecosystems: Eating and Being Eaten
– Carrying Capacity: The maximum population of a
particular organism that a given environment can
support without detrimental effects
– Colonizers: Such as invasive species, able to spread
out and survive, taking over the colonized areas
– Overshoot: To pass a limit, such as a carrying
capacity using surplus energy
 Social Leveraging Strategies
Such strategies expand the human carrying capacity of the
environment:
– Takeover: Move into a new area and colonize
– Tool Use: Help to make tasks easier
– Specialization: To become specialized in a specific area;
to depend on others to do work in an area one is not
specialized in
– Scope Enlargement: To look to new areas for expansion
– Drawdown: The act, process, or result of depleting – to
put more energy into work and to receive less
 The Process of Human Takeover
• Moving to a new area and colonizing (like an
invasive species)
• Mutual adjustment process in which the native
species adjusts to the colonizers and vice versa
• Extinction of (native) species
• New balance with nature (a second adjustment)
• Agriculture – simplification of ecosystem
• Animal domestication (to do work)
 Human Tool Use
• 100,000 (+?) years of human tool making
• “…assist in the harvesting or leveraging of
ever greater amounts of energy from the
environment.”
• Human-tool complex (we adapt to using tools,
specialize, and increase reliance on them)
 Specialization
• Division of labor in which one becomes cut
off from other areas of specialization and
becomes reliant on a distribution system
 Scope Enlargement
• “…carrying capacity of a region is limited by
whatever indispensable substance or circumstance is
in shortest supply.”
• Tools help mitigate limiting factors of land
• Trade (a form of scope enlargement, to bring in
things from other places, to increase carrying
capacity)
• Globalization – world trade system (what we have
now)
 Drawdown
• Drawing down nature’s energy stocks to help
human population
• Class D tools (use external energy to make, and
use or harness external energy – a major form of
energy drawdown)
• Humans have been successful (large population
increase since Industrial Revolution – 1 billion
people in 1820 and 6.5 billion today)
• Factors include environmental degradation,
climate change, increasing dependency*
 *
• “When the flow of fuels begins to diminish,
everyone might actually be worse off than
they would have been had those fuels never
been discovered because our pre-industrial
survival skills will have been lost and there
will be an intense competition for food and
water among members of the now-
unsupportable population.”

• Between two and five billion people probably

would not exist if not for fossil fuels
 Complexity and Collapse
• Strategy for energy capture is subject to the
law of diminishing returns
 American Success
• Land had resources (Europe)
• Europe had domesticable grains and traction animals
• Humans successfully expanded the carrying capacity
and depleted land of resources – motivated to apply
takeover and scope enlargement strategies in new
places
• Europeans viewed Natives (in the Americas) as
unproductive savages
• 90% of Natives die of diseases which Europeans were
immune to (from regular contact with domestic
animals in Europe)
 American Success
• Natives made for bad slaves (they were less
specialized and less complex)
• Africans imported as slaves to help extract resources
(from the land)
• Resources were no good if not useful
• Industrial Revolution in England – North America
had abundant resources (resources become useful)
• U.S. was formed and was free to exploit for their own
benefit (no longer serving England)
• Wealth lay in extraction and use of fuels than on the
reliance of slaves (machines outperform slaves)
 American Success
• Became world power in unique position
(with so many resources)
• Started to become more reliant on foreign
resources (limited local resources were
being used up)
 Party Time
• Industrial Bubble (time period we live in is
not worth calling an “age” or “era” such as
the “Iron Age” since this age we live in will
not last very long in comparison)
 Energy in Medieval Europe
• Wood used for nearly everything
• Forests were revered (by the people through
religion, superstition, etc.)
• Christianity (destroys the old ideas)
• Motive power came from humans or animals
• Watermills and windmills (harness energy from
nature) – wind motive (sailing ships)
• Trees cut (since wood was only fuel) – land becomes
saturated
• Wood shortages common in 12th and 13th centuries
 Coal Revolution
• Had been used, but disliked until 13th century (coal is
dirty)
• By the 16th and 17th centuries, even the rich were forced
to use coal
• Advantages are found (hotter fires possible than with
wood), coke (a product of coal to burn even hotter)
• Lead to inventions (steam engine invented to pump water
from mines, then used for transportation)
• Less localized dependence (coal is not everywhere)
• U.S. used mostly wood until 1880’s
 Petroleum, Part 1
• Beginning in the late 19th/Early 20th century
• Vegetable oil and whale oil had been used for many jobs,
but these were inadequate, and becoming expensive
(being used up)
• 1859, Pennsylvania, first commercial oil well drilled
• Oil is cheap, more available (than those mentioned
above), kerosene a product (fuel for lights)
• Oil is discovered around the world
• Demand for kerosene decreases with electric lights
• Internal combustion engine invented
• Natural gas used for heating and cooking
 Electrifying the World
• 1878, Edison invents the electric light with DC designs
• Nikola Tesla had AC designs
• AC takes over DC as a better design
• Electricity spreads and becomes more widely used
• Opportunities arise for automation such as Ford’s
assembly line, household appliances become available
(vacuum cleaners, toasters, etc. to “make life easier”)
• Oil used most for transportation, coal used most for
electricity generation
 Petroleum, Part 2
• U.S. was largest producer
• When U.S. production started to decline
(1970 peak), production in Middle East
increased
• By 1930 gas was the most refined product
of petroleum
• Major changes occur in agriculture,
transportation, war, etc.
 Lights Out
• Hubbert’s peak – Original peak oil theory and
predictions (predicted the U.S. peak many years
before the fact)
• Hubbert has followers with refined predictions
(many placing a world peak between 2005 and 2010)
• Arguments by others (Cornucopian – that the current
way of life can continue, that technology will save us
from the energy crisis)
 Can the Party Continue?
• Natural gas (already dependent/cannot expand)
• Coal (can’t expect much more)
• Nuclear (low energy return, mainly possible because of fossil fuels)
• Wind (possible, though fossil fuels still needed)
• Solar (possible, though fossil fuels still needed)
• Hydrogen (better off with natural gas/photovoltaic, the extra step
in conversion makes it a net energy loser)
• Hydroelectric (significant source, but exhausted)
• Geothermal (possible, but local to certain locations)
 Can the Party Continue?
• Tides/Waves (not significant, local)
• Biomass (not much potential growth)
• Biodiesel (boutique fuel)
• Ethanol (food, environment, and ERoEI issues)
• Fusion, Free Energy (not at all)
 Can the Party Continue?
• Conservation: Curtailment/Efficiency –
difference between the two
– Curtailment is to, for example, turn off a light
when leaving the room/when it’s not needed.
– Efficiency is to use less energy to do the same
job (for example, a fluorescent light bulb over
an incandescent)
 Consequences After the Peak
• Economic crash (system was built in a period of
consistent energy growth)
• Transportation (fewer cars to be built, air travel may
disappear, trade will be heavily damaged)
• Food (with no fertilizers, etc., less productivity, around
2 billion people as a sustainable world population)
• Heating/Cooling (will become more expensive as
prices rise; refrigeration and food systems damaged)
• Environment (with less fossil fuels, we may return to
biomass/wood, requiring less pollution controls)
 Consequences
• Public Health (global warming, disease spread,
modern medicine is energy/fossil fuels intensive…)
• Information Storage, etc. (net energy decrease,
resources for electric grids become more costly,
supply/demand creates problems, computerized
information lost)
• Politics (resource wars)
 Managing the Collapse
• Begin personal/local (efficiency, reduce energy
usage)
• Community Plan (community gardens, control
water use, better community design)
• National (carbon tax, population control, train
transportation (vs. highways), etc.)
• Worldwide (agreements, goals to be met, etc.)
 Already Too Late?
• Preparations should be made 30 years in advance
• We don’t have 30 years; world may have peaked
already, and if not, will very soon
• It is never too late to make future better if we try
(no matter what scale we try on, ranging from
personal to global)