What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #3

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collapse, still seemed far away.

It would come one day. But not now.

There was time. There was hope.

Somewhere, there were

people taking care of it all.

And that's how it was for me, year after year.

I lived the middle class American life.

I lived the stories I had learned as a child

and tried as best I could to ignore the

rumblings of fear that haunted my depths.

And then I started to work

on this documentary. . .

Three years later, having chewed our way

through a mountain of books, articles, websites,

magazines, newspapers, and documentaries,

having attended lectures and

meetings and salons and rallies,

and having intervals with friends and neighbors,

scientists and researchers and writers and

activity and thinkers and feelers and more,

and having talked and written and laughed and

cried and worried and despaired and regained

our power to plunge ahead again,

one thing seems clear.:

the global environmental, political and economic

predicament we live in today is critical,

the possible scenarios range

into the highly disturbing,

and the timeframe seems. . . well. . . imminent.

It's as though we've awakened

to find ourselves on a runaway train,

hurtling wildly down the tracks, held

in place by powerful cultural stories

and fueled by our desperate consumption of the

very heart, blood, bones and flesh of this planet.

If we don't find some way to stop this train soon,

we're going to reach the end of the line.

So what do you see when you wake up

on the train? I can tell you what I saw.

I saw the ground beneath the pavement,

the man behind the curtain, the monster

under the bed, the real below the ralls.

The culture of Empire works every

moment of every day to distract my attention,

like a magician using sleight-of-hand.

What happens when I look where

the conjurer does not want me to look?

I see the trick.

I see the reality behind the illusion.

I see, if I look long enough,

that the Empire has no clothes.

Ride with me a while.

Look more closely at the train, and the tracks,

and the terrain through which we're speeding.

If we are to respond effectively, we'll need a

clear understanding of the whole of the situation.

For me, four aspects of our

predicament stand out.:

Peak oil, climate change, mass

extinction and population overshoot.

In the fall of 2005, Sally Erickson

and I circled the country by train,

meeting with people to talk

about these issue, and many others.

At some point you reach the place

where you can't get it out any faster.

Sy, when you get to that point you've reached

the peak. Then we start downhill.

And once we start downhill that's when

economic collapse will occur.

That's my friend Tom, talking about oll.

Peak Oil. And Economic Collapse.

At first I didn't get it. So I started reading.

And on our trip I met with some people

who knew more about the situation.

Over the last 1 50 years we've

created a society that runs on oil.

And it's inevitable that we would have done sy,

because it's just such incredible inexpensive,

convenient, energy-dense stuff.

I spoke with Richard Heinberg, a core

faculty member of New College of Callfornla

and author of three books on Peak Oil.

The problem, of course, is that oil is a

non-renewable resource. So even

when we first started using the stuff

we knew that eventually we'd run out.

I met with the journalist Paul Roberts,

who wrote a book about oil depletion in 2004.

At some point, since oil is a finite resource,

you can't keep raising production.

Usually this is about the halfway point.

When you've depleted half of the resource

it becomes harder and harder to raise

production. Doesn't mean you run out.

And a great deal of oil is still

coming out of the ground.

If we were to peak tomorrow we'd still have

eighty-two and a half million barrels

coming out of the ground every day.

But it would be really hard to get

eighty-three and a half million barrels.

Gerald Cecil, a professor of Astrophysics at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has

been so taken by the oil situation that he's now

writing a book about it.

The rate with which oil has been

coming out of the ground has stagnated.

It's stagnated at eighty four

million barrels of oil a day,

which sounds like an incredible number.

But that's what we use to power

ourselves at today's rate of use.

And as the world population continues to grow,

and as prosperity presumably continues to grow

and people power up in their energy use,

we get to a station where there isn't any

excess capacity to keep that powering going.

And at some point you end up with a

flat supple and a growing demand

and you have serious problems.

And that's the nature of peak oil.

Are we at or near the peak of oil extraction?

There are many signs that we are.

Discoveries of new oil peaked

right around 1963, '64.

That was a long time ago.

So we're not talking about a couple

years of bad luck in exploration.

This is a long-established trend.

We've been discovering less oil with every

passing year, to the point now where we're

extracting and using about four or five barrels of

oil for everyone that we discover.

Now the oil industry responded in a number of

ways. But one of the things it did was begin

developing some amazing new technologies to

help it find more oil faster.

And despite this huge investment in technology,

and these great leaps forward, the rates of

discovery are still declining.

Country after country is reaching its own

national all-time oil production peak

and going into decline.

The US was one of the first to do it back

in 1970. And now something like

30 or 33 countries are past their peak.

And so it's inevitable that within the

very next few years we'll see the

global peak in oil production.

Nobody's ready for that.

Not ready for what, exactly? What will

the end of cheap oil mean for the world?

I went to speak with the writer

and activist Jerry Mander.

I'd let myself believe that the real problems

were decades away. Turns out they're

probably right around the corner.

All the structures that now exist -

our urban formations,

our transportation systems,

our means of getting food,

globalization as an economic model,

capitalism as an economic model,

which depends on constant expansion and

growth and ever-more resources -

cannot possibly continue to exist.

Because they're all based on - the root base of

all of it - is the existence of cheap energy.

In order to avoid a deflationary

depression we have to have continual

growth in the money supply,

which has to be based on continual

growth in economic activity,

which must be based on the continual

growth in available energy and raw materials.

We've built an economy based on the idea that

It has to grow every year or else collapse.

So, soon, the economy won't be able to grow.

And all signs are that we may be facing a kind of

global economic collapse because of peak oil.

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