Peak Oil and Climate Change

Peak Oil and Climate Change

-- linked issues in global ethics --

Abstract

This paper looks at the ethical implications of peak oil and climate change, viewed as closely interrelated global moral problems. The relation between the two issues is manifold; the burning of oil and other fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change, strategies to mitigate both problems often overlap and sometimes conflict, and both are problems of overshoot resulting from crossing ‘limits to growth’. There is good reason, therefore, to look at the ways in which climate change and peak oil interact.

The first paragraph is an introduction into the scientific and empirical side to peak oil, necessary for understanding the moral problem it poses. In the second paragraph I explore the moral problem both issues pose in terms of global ethics. The most important aspects I discuss are that both problems are world scale, involve long chains of causality, draw on principles of fairness and therefore involve cooperation schemes, and provide additional arguments in favour of distributive justice. Finally, peak oil lessens the importance of the issue of future generations in environmental ethics.

The conclusion I draw in this paper is that we need a truly flexible and interdisciplinary approach to meet the harsh realities of the 21st century. This applies to both ideological frameworks of policy and scientific approaches to societies, economies and ecosystems. The necessary political and economic change of course must be informed by a proper scientific understanding of limits to growth interact with each other and affect societies. Only in this way can politics provide real solutions and mitigation strategies to the different problems posed by limits to growth.

18-1-2009

Freek Blauwhof

Bachelor student of philosophy at the Universityof Amsterdam

+31 6 53359138

Contents

Introduction: Two ‘Limits to Growth’3

Short Introduction to Peak Oil5

What Kind of Moral Problems?9

2.1 World scale9

2.2 Coordination problems: schemes of fairness10

2.3 Where peak oil changes things12

Green Values: Sustainable Progress?15

References16

Introduction: Two ‘Limits to Growth’

Most of the time climate change, the rise in global temperature and the problems this will likely result in get discussed on their own merits. This is understandable, since the extent of the problem is enormous, and the ways in which climate change will have an effect on the global ecosystem and the people living in it are complex and many. To name just a few consequences, climate change will cause sea levels to rise and countless hectares of arable land to turn to desert, it will interrupt supplies to critical water reservoirs, increase the frequency of natural disasters, and force countless species to disappear, while the lion’s share of all the risks will be endured by the worlds’ poor. All these things should be good reasons for moral concern. They force people across the planet in a vague but profound moral relationship, because actions of people all around the world contribute to global climate change by which everyone will be affected in the future. As the well known moral philosopher Peter Singer argued in his book ‘One World’, man-made climate change binds the whole world together as one moral community; there can be no clearer illustration of the need for human beings to act globally than the issues raised by the impact of human activities on our atmosphere.[1]While we may not act like a global community (yet), the need for serious global cooperation seems quite evident.

But there are other problems the world as a single moral community has to come to terms with. One of these, the progressive depletion of conventional oil or ‘peak oil’, is especially relevant to the discussion of climate change. There are at least four reasons for thinking so. First, the two topics are causally related; after all, the burning of oil is the foremost cause of climate change. Second, the solutions that help alleviatepeak oil and climate change often overlap, but sometimes clash.[2] Third, both problems will likely not be solved or meaningfully mitigated if they are not dealt with in a coordinated manner. Richard Heinberg makes this argument forcefully in his book ‘The Oil Depletion Protocol’.[3] He argues for an international agreement to reduce oil consumption and production. Without it, Heinberg writes,“many nations would be tempted to replace their reliance on oil with an increased use of coal.” This would vastly increase emissions, even though the world economy would have been forced by nature to use less oil. Implementation of Kyoto would also be undermined by increasing international competition for remaining reserves, which would “weaken the spirit of international cooperation required for the Kyoto Protocol to function.”And fourth, like the authors of the Limits to Growth suggest, both peak oil and climate change look like problems of overshoot:

“The three causes of overshoot are always the same, at any scale from personal to planetary. First, there is growth, acceleration, rapid change. Second, there is some form of limit or barrier, beyond which the moving system cannot safely go. Third, there is a delay or mistake in the perceptions and the responses that strive to keep the system within its limits. These are necessary and sufficient to produce an overshoot.”[4]

Quite obviously all three conditions apply. Both population and industrial production/consumption have grown exponentially, which has been made possible to a large extent by the discovery of fossil fuels and their uses. People, especially in the West, became accustomed to the idea of steady growth. Now the population-economy system, as the LtG authors call it, is growing so large we are experiencing limits that the nature of fossil fuels imposes on it. There is one ‘hard’ limit, laid down by the finity of oil[5] that we cannotphysically cross, and there is a ‘soft’ limit, formed by climate change, that we cannot cross without doing immense damage. The two correspond neatly with the earth’s ‘sources and sinks’:

“The physical limits to growth [of population and the economy] are limits to the ability of planetary sources to provide materials and energy and to the ability of planetary sinks to absorb pollution and waste.”[6]

The delays that will make us feel these limits are also quite apparent. Of course there are ideological and political delays to real energy transition, required for dealing with both climate change and peak oil. Most politicians see proposing a serious programme of economic self-restraint as either undesirable or a risk to popularity. And many corporations lobby to soften legislation forcing them to reduce emissions.[7] But there are also physical delays.

The physical delays of climate change are disastrous. There is a considerable time lag between the emission of greenhouse gases and a resulting effect on the world’s climate. Therefore we are experiencing the effects of the emissions of the past, and people in the future will experience the consequences of the greenhouse gases emitted right now. A central controversy among climate scientists makes this delay even worse; a study done by James Hansen et al. implies that natural positive feedback loops might make for a point of no return sooner than the IPCC suspects.[8]

For the economic consequences of peak oil, the delay is also considerable. To replace the energy sources that the world economy relies on will take a long time. A study done by energy consultant Robert Hirsch[9] gives us an idea as to how much. He concluded governments will need to start with serious efforts 20 years ahead of peak oil to avoid economic damage, or 10 years ahead to avoid serious and major shortages. And since most serious studies forecast the peak date to fall in the coming decade, we have long passed the best opportunity to deal with the many problems peak oil will cause.

Clearly it’s worthwhile to understand the concept of oil depletion. Peak oil poses a huge problem on its own. But we have already seen that peak oil has many implications for and similarities with climate change. And the same goes for the practical strategies that could mitigate these problems. Because of these reasons I want to argue in this paper that it is a central challenge and duty for green thinkers and politics to formulate an integral vision on how to make the transition to a truly sustainable[10] economy possible. We need to avoid as much ecological and economic damage and international conflict as possible, while striving to hold on to social justice. To succeed, it will not do to just concentrate on one particular problem, perspective or theoretical framework; rather we need a truly flexible and interdisciplinary approach to meet the harsh realities of the 21st century.

To show this I will first briefly introduce the basics of peak oil in §1, because not every reader might be familiar with the issue. I’ll assume that the basic discussion of climate change is clear, however. §2 will offer a reflection on what kind of moral problem peak oil and climate change pose to the world community. Finally, §3 I will draw conclusions about the challenges for green politics and ideology.

Short Introduction to Peak Oil

While there is much controversy around the topic of oil depletion, understanding that the production of oil will peak sooner or later is relatively easy. The state of world conventional oil production is made visible at once in figure 1:

Figure 1: Oil Discovery vs. Oil Production (ASPO 2004)

The columns represent yearly discovery of new oil fields. The biggest and easily accessible oil fields were found first, and the 1960s were to be the decade in which the most oil was found. But since that time the new discoveries have declined, and the world economy started to use more oil every year than is found since 1981. In this decade, the world started to use four barrels of oil for every barrel exploration can find. So if the word ‘unsustainable’ is to have any meaning, it applies to continued growth of consumption of oil. The production of oil is going to fall inevitably, and probably not much after half of the total oil is produced.

The relevance of all this is revealed by all the evidence that oil plays an enormous role in the world economy. There were the oil shocks of the ‘70s, which caused considerable stagflation and long recessions in the West. Following those oil shocks, studies done by professor Reiner Kümmel and Robert Ayres[11] refined the standard model explaining economic growth. They suggest the actual work that energy sources do in the real economy accounts for 55-70% of GDP growth in the USA, Germany, and Japan, between 1945 and 2000, with oil being the prime source of energy.

So far I have only written about the quantity of normal easy oil. A complete account of our energy situation would refer to all the new energy sources and technologies; deepwater oil, heavy oil including tar sands, oil from the north pole, oil shale, natural gas liquids and coal-to-liquids, ethanol, first and second generation, oil from algae, electrical cars and hydrogen.

Figure 2: Jean Laherrère's model (as presented at the ASPO Conference in Lisbon 2005)[12]

I don’t have time to discuss all these in detail. Some are good ideas, some are bad; some are small contributions to mitigation of peak oil and climate change, some bigger, for different reasons open to discussion. But they are very unlikely to keep economic growth going much longer the way we got used to it.

A precise discussion of alternative sources of fuel may not even be that crucial for the bigger picture. One reason for this is explained in the next graph, made by one of the students of the oil peak who forecasts the peak the latest. Jean Laherrère, former head of exploration at Total, suggests that even if there would be 1 trillion more barrels of oil available than is assumed by many others, the peaking of production will not happen much further in the future. In figure 2 he assumes there will be 1 trillion barrels of oil worth of unconventional oil, itself peaking after 2050, but these additions lead to an ‘All Liquids Peak’ around 2015.

Another critical aspect of the peak oil debate concerns not the quantity, but the quality of oil. As is the case with the exploitation of any resource, oil extraction begins with the biggest and most easily accessible fields. As those deplete extraction moves on to the more difficult resources. The implications of this are often described in terms of Energy Investment on Return, or EROI. The following graph illustrates this concept; the physical process of oil extraction in 1930s America cost one barrel of oil for every hundred extracted. Nowadays, the process takes one barrel for every ten to twenty barrels extracted; the oil in smaller and less accessible fields requires much more energy to produce.

Figure 3: EROI versus energy resource size (Charles Hall et al.[13])

Declining trends in EROI means that more and more energy is being consumed by the industry that supplies the energy to broader society. This means that the decline in net energy, which is the energy available to society, is likely to decline steeper than total production. So in the case of oil and other liquids, the net energy production curve might look something like figure 4:

Figure 4: ASPO 2004 Total Liquids Scenario updated by Colin Campbell[14]

In short, peak oil poses a problem that one can only describe at the risk of sounding melodramatic. But I will not tone down my conclusions for the sake of appearances. As the bulk of economic growth has relied on cheap and abundant energy, peak oil (and gas) will very likely curb the trend of sustained growth the world economy has maintained in the course of the last century and a half. For that to continue until some next natural limits are in view, much more preparation should already have been done. Furthermore, a lack of preparation for the oil peak means the crises of the ‘70s will be relived. Only this time no one can open the pipelines again, and countries will be forced to use scarce non-renewable energy to make their energy transitions happen.

Oil shortages would have many effects on our consumer societies. Just make a list of products made using oil and this will become evident. But the most striking are the consequences for agriculture’s green revolution that has relied on petrochemicals. Peak oil combined with soil fertility decline and water problems aggravated by climate change can lead to serious shortages of food in the longer term. One would begin to wonder how relevant Thomas Malthus might be for the 21st century, and remember discussions about population growth control (at the risk of losing all credibility in the marketplace of ideas!).

But this is not to say there is nothing that can be done. From the individual to the international level, there are ways to fairly organise reduction and replacement of oil consumption. However, the 20-year head start that Robert Hirsch proposed to is not possible any more. No respectable expert looks further than 2020[15] for the oil peak, and even this would leave 11 years. So the conclusion must be that people should have listened to the Club of Rome long before. What is realistically possible now, and what therefore should be our moral goal, is damage control.

§2: What Kind of Moral Problem?

Now we have a sufficient understanding of the physical aspects of peak oil and climate change, I want to analyse in this paragraph what kind of moral problems peak oil and climate change pose. This is not an easy matter, because neither problems look like the clear-cut moral cases we are used to.

This has to do with the long chains of causality in global problems like climate change and peak oil. If Joe steals Rose’s car, Joe directly violates Rose’s particular right of property to her car. Because of the direct causality, is very intuitive that Joe did something wrong, and giving back the car would be the obvious way to right the wrong.

But when Joe contributes to the overall level of CO2 in the global atmosphere, which might harm Rose’s children in one way or another in the future, the moral problem looks quite different; there is only very mediated causality, a long time lag exists between cause and effect, and a huge coordination problem for game theorists to study. In no way could one say that Joe has a direct moral duty to stop driving, for example. Given the absence of clear moral duties to do this or that, how can climate change and peak oil be addressed as moral problems? In this paper I can only be brief, and this paper can by no means be called a conclusive analysis. But meaningful things can be said about the form of the problem, which give some idea about fair solutions. I’ll start with climate change, and arrive at how peak oil comes into play later.