Unidentified Projects

Erik Lindberg of Transition Milwaukee wrote an insightful post this week about the establishment's denial of the implications of peak oil for our society's future.  In it, he brought back a graph from a few years ago that made me laugh.  It's a rich enough image that it deserves a little post of its own.

This is from the US Dept. of Energy's Energy Information Administration's annual report from 2009 as parsed in a presentation (pdf warning) given in Washington, DC in April 2009.  They were trying to square known sources of liquid fuels with known depletion curves and the projected demand growth of a business-as-usual global economy.  Starting at the bottom of the graph, the projects go from the most secure (OPEC and Non-OPEC existing conventional oil fields) to the most speculative (Non-OPEC Unconventional and, my favorite, Non-Petroleum Unconventional Liquids). 

Here we are in 2014, and according to this chart, we should be looking forward to an unrelenting decline in petroleum (and apparently Non-Petroleum Unconventional Liquids) supply for the foreseeable future.  The EIA of course does not officially project this type of future, as their 2013 International Energy Outlook shows global oil extraction rising to 115 million barrels per day by 2040.  Apparently these "Unidentified Projects," which represent the equivalent of official hand-waving, will somehow bring four Saudi Arabias' worth of oil to market to save the day.

That requires quite a suspension of disbelief, especially in the face of declining investment in oil extraction projects by just about every publicly traded oil company in the world.  How does more oil appear if no one invests the money to find it, drill for it, pump it out, and transport it to refineries?  Apparently by Unidentified Projects, which Unidentified Parties are investing billions of dollars to bring to market, at prices that cannot make profits for Exxon, BP, or Shell.

The most likely outcome is that those Unidentified Projects will remain unidentified, undrilled, and unexploited.  That's because they either do not exist or are too small/poor quality/inaccessible to bring to market at a profit for the most aggressive profit-seeking organizations in the world.  That means that each year going forward will yield a bit less energy for a society that has only known more and more energy every year since the industrial revolution some 250 years ago.

What does the lived experience of that feel like to the average person in the US?  Rising gasoline prices, higher heating oil and propane prices, rising costs for asphalt, fertilizers, and other things made from oil are just the beginning.  Because our government is desperate to keep the illusion of happy motoring alive, we've subsidized the burning of food in our cars (that's what 10% ethanol in your tank means), so food prices go up while packages of chips get smaller and more filled with air each year.  More broadly it means that people have a harder time finding decent-paying jobs anywhere but the oil industry, because it takes more and more resources to bring ever-crappier oil deposits to market.  Now that the oil majors are cutting investment, though, it would seem that even those jobs are likely to be harder to come by.  It also means that the general standard of living in the US is declining, and that much of our infrastructure that was designed around a cheap energy economy has no future but as a far-flung salvage heap piled atop what used to be prime farmland. 

Looking for a way to avoid such a troubling future?  Trying to claw your way out of long-term unemployment in a stagnant economy that's increasingly offering only part-time or temporary employment?  Struggling with student loan debt after going 5-figures in hock to have a shot at a career like your parents or grandparents might've had?  If you find yourself in need of a decent-paying job in the coming years, it would seem that the EIA recommends looking for work on an Unidentified Project that will keep the national gas tank miraculously full.

The Crappening?

For most of my life, things in America have generally not been going in the right direction.  At least, that's what all of the polls have said when people are asked about the economy, quality of life, and the like.  Author and blogger John Michael Greer refers to the process of the decline of our country as the Long Descent, which is appropriate.  Much in the way that Global Warming as a phrase accurately reflects the impacts of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, but misses the lived experience that most people understand (Climate Weirding is much more useful), the Long Descent accurately captures the impact of the decline of industrial civilization in the face of resource limits, environmental degradation, and cultural sclerosis.  At the same time, as a phrase, it misses the daily experience for most people who will live through it (or not). 

That sense of an accurate but misleading phrase to describe a lived phenomenon was nicely summed up by one of the regular commenters on Mr. Greer's blog on this post.  "team10tim" wrote:

"We are living in the beginning of the long descent (though I call it The Crappening, the process of things getting gradually crappier, but it basically means the same thing: peak oil, over population, degraded environment, decline and fall of industrial civilization, coming dark age, overshoot, die-off, and bottleneck. People tend to have a poor ability to handle the verbose explanation, but my friends and family, peers and coworkers seem better able to handle the scope and scale and time frame when I call it The Crappening)."

That's the point of this blog: to discuss the trends that are shaping our future on the road down from the peak of oil extraction 8 years ago.  People may not get that oil extraction rates have been essentially flat since late 2005, especially with all the hype in the news about the shale boom in the US, but everybody understands that oil prices have gone up and a lot of people can't afford to use as much as we used to.  People may not know that real wages have declined for most working people since 1973, but everybody understands that by and large we're working harder but still falling behind economically.  People may see official unemployment numbers dropping and wonder why so many people they know still can't find a good job, and plenty of people in their 20s and early 30s are still (or once again) living with their parents, postponing marriage and childbirth, or working part-time or low wage jobs because there just aren't that many "middle class" jobs available these days.  People may not understand the impacts of ethanol grain diversion, rising affluence in all the countries where our factory jobs got sent, rising population, and climate change-driven weather extremes on crop failures, but everyone notices when food prices go up or the same $2 bag of chips or cereal has a lot more air and a lot less food in it.

All of these trends are signs of the Crappening, and they all stem from the same fundamental disconnect between our way of life and the inability of the Earth to provide all of the things we want from it.