Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D. is a scientist at the Institute on Energy and Man. His Olduvai Theory predicts the fossil fuel energy crisis.
Richard Pelto
I would like to report a rare opportunity. Most of us realize that gaining an education was one of the most enriching aspects of life. Most of us invested much money to that process. Yesterday, I had the opportunity of gaining an education by sitting in front of Dr. Richard Duncan’s computer and having him guide me through a metaphorical view of Mankind’s most enriching period of time on this spaceship Earth. And it is hard to express the wonder of seeing that period of mankind’s greatest achievement at the approximate apogee of its existence.
First, it was interesting to see that a third of his home reflects years of study and thought of what he thinks is most important. Neatly filling one of his largest rooms are many boxes neatly laid out near the computer filled with files and clearly marked headings. And all the information contained in them has been translated into visual representations on his computer screen.
It quickly became clear to me that the history of oil on this spaceship is similar to my own history of making and accumulating money. Through Vanguard I run through computerized representations of what I have earned, saved, invested, and then I plug in a variety of variables like inflation and varying spending plans, and I look into the future at what security I may have. That security merits much time and energy.
Dr. Duncan has programmed the past, present and future of what underlies my capacity to have and spend money. Oil.
Space here only allows a partial view of the wonders I saw on that screen that catharticized into a sense of wonder.
First, it was a view of history. The first country to primitively tap oil as a resource in the 1850s was Romania. The graphs showed the amounts tapped to basically fuel lamps, brought to the surface by pumping oxygen to a man underground who used primitive means to bring it to the surface. Soon after, the United States began tapping this messy substance.
The period from 1910 to 1920 leaps from the computer and resonates. The first mass-production plants rose from the human landscape fueled by oil that moved people away from the land and into impersonal urban centers. The screen shows a huge spike in oil consumption, and it was clear what lubricated and energized the machines that antiquitized social patterns. Social commentators like Walter Lippman saw the change, and the Great War, and wrote about the move from personal simplicity to social complexity and wondered how mankind would hold his bearings. This new-found “collectivism” brought new definitions, including that of God. As Edmund Wilson wrote, “For God is the supreme symbol in which man expresses his destiny, and if that symbol is confused, his life is confused.” Confusion was probably bearable because it was accompanied by unprecedented affluence.
So the oil consumption pattern of mankind illustrates the rise of power along with an underlying confusion of meaning.
And then I could see Dr. Duncan’s computer screen wrestling with formulas and data tracking the rise and potential fall of all that power and capability oil created. Most teachers today got their advanced degrees in the 60s and 70s, when the bell curve dominated the search for validity and reliability of information. But as Dr. Duncan plotted the relationship between known and speculative reserves, his graphs revealed a multitude of variables that showed that on a year-to-year scale economics and technology require tracking a meandering line of consumption skewing the representation of known and speculative reserves of oil.
For example, in the last year OPEC was able to increase the production of oil by leveraging the price to around $30 a barrel. But now the price has slipped into the teens, and it is no longer feasible for small suppliers to tap the resource. So consumption and supply are constantly buffeted by varying economic and social variables. But the inevitability of reaching a limit—the ironic scepter underlying all human aspiration–is omnipresent.
But the formulas and the data provide relatively good representation of what the present and past consumption has been. For example, Dr. Duncan’s graphs show where each country’s oil production “peaked.” That the former Soviet Union has produced 142 billion barrels of oil, and when it reaches 292 billion barrels it will no longer be economically feasible for it to produce a supply of it for the marketplace. The graphs also show that in the area immediately around Afghanistan there is “only” about 20 billion barrels of speculative supply.
The graphs show the leveling off of the line of consumption in North America that came with the opening of the Prudhoe Bay discovery following the peaking that occurred in Mexico, U.S. and Canada.
Dr. Duncan and Dr. Walter Youngquist have even created a convergent peak graph. It shows early predictions of a peak that jumped back and forth over about an eight-year period but is now relatively locked into 2006.
Then looking at the graphs again hits me. Remembering the literature and the history of the advent of the Industrial Revolution and its jarring shake-up of the human consciousness makes me feel the same shock I would feel looking into the future and seeing my inevitable death and decay into rotting bones when I see the approximately three percent per year decline in oil availability–and I see a vision of a dependent Russian lifestyle that crumbles as it staggers to that 292 billion barrel limit of economic availability.
Luckily for Russia disease and emigration have already established a pattern of diminished population. But the United States continues to push policies that are rapidly increasing its population (latest is President Bush opening facilitation of refugee status for 10,000 Somalians, and for everyone admitted in this next year, seven more will come within seven years through family-reunification) which means the transition from industrial affluence to land-dependent subsistence will be like a growing wave hitting a rising piece of land.
Remember when I mentioned earlier that “unease” that may always underlie man’s capacity to create change like the Industrial Revolution brought. Well there is irony in what country Dr. Duncan’s graphs show will be the last to be depleted of that magic elixir of power and quality of life: Iraq! Why? Because we have been “punishing” that country now for ten years because it posed a serious threat to Israel’s ambitions, and we will limit its ability to market its oil for probably another 10 years.
So the story of Dr. Duncan’s charts is a story of many dimensions: of human folly, and the rise and fall of human manipulation on this lonely and fortuitous spaceship. Like any reading of Shakespeare, it is a “story well-told.” And it provides rich insight into what it means to be a human.