Peak Experience

The Age Of Oil Is Coming To An End: An Interview With Richard Heinberg

Depending on which experts you talk to, the world’s production of petroleum either has already started to decline or will do so sometime within the next thirty years. The point at which the decline begins — which is also the highest point production will ever reach — is known as “peak oil.” Because worldwide oil shortages will follow the peak, concern about the issue is rapidly growing.

Richard Heinberg is the author of three books on peak oil. His latest, The Oil Depletion Protocol (New Society Publishers), outlines a plan to ease the planet’s transition from fossil fuels by decreasing production in advance of the peak. Listening to Heinberg rattle off statistics about extraction rates and renewable energy sources, you’d swear he was a geologist, but until eight years ago Heinberg was an established author of books about spirituality and ecology.

Born in 1950, Heinberg grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri. His father, a high-school physics and chemistry teacher and later a quality-control chemist, inspired Heinberg’s interest in the scientific method. Heinberg also loved music, and in college he studied the violin. Having rejected his parents’ rigid Christian fundamentalism, he looked for spiritual alternatives. For a time he lived in Colorado’s Sunrise Ranch, an intentional community that served as the headquarters for an organization called “Emissaries of the Divine Light.” It was “a sort of benign cult,” he says.

In the late eighties Heinberg started reading the works of historian Lewis Mumford, who helped him understand the history of technology from an ecological and humanistic perspective. Another inspiration was M.K. Hubbard, the late geophysicist who accurately predicted the decline of U.S. oil production in 1970. Heinberg found a mentor in Colin J. Campbell, a British Petroleum geologist and godfather of the modern peak-oil movement. It was a 1998 Scientific American article Campbell coauthored, titled “The End of Cheap Oil,” that led Heinberg to begin digging into U.S. Department of Energy databases. Just five years later, Heinberg’s book The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society Publishers) became a bestseller.

The changes Heinberg advocates to address the impending decline in oil production are, by any standard, monumental, but he believes anything less will fail, and business as usual will result in catastrophe. The situation is not hopeless, however. In his book Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (New Society Publishers), he writes, “We can preserve the best of what we have achieved, while at the same time easing our way as peacefully and equitably as possible back down the steep ramp of increasing scale and complexity our society has been climbing for the past couple of centuries.”

In addition to writing books, Heinberg has been covering global politics, religion, and the “origin of humanity’s antipathy toward nature” in his monthly MuseLetter (www.museletter.com). He also lectures nationally and internationally and teaches courses on energy, ecology, and sustainable communities at the progressive New College of California in San Francisco. And somehow he still manages to devote at least an hour a day to the violin, which he plays professionally.

Heinberg lives in Santa Rosa, California, in a home powered by solar panels, and drives a biodiesel car. He and his wife, Janet Barocco, a horticulturalist and massage therapist, tend a dozen garden beds and twenty-five fruit and nut trees. They have no children by choice.

I spoke to Heinberg last February at a coffee shop in Santa Cruz, California, just before he was scheduled to give a talk for the Santa Cruz Permaculture Guild. Though he is soft-spoken in person, his passion and eloquence are undeniable.

Cooper: You say that the problems caused by oil depletion will start not when we run out of oil, but when we reach peak global production. Why is that?

Heinberg: Because the peak is the point at which production starts to decline, and we’ve become so dependent on cheap, abundant fossil fuels — especially oil — that we’re not prepared to have less of them each year rather than more. Oil is the most energy-dense and convenient fuel to use. More than 90 percent of the world’s transportation is fueled by oil. In the United States it’s close to 100 percent. So we’re not talking about something that’s easy to replace. We’re using on the order of 85 million barrels a day worldwide.

Over the decades we’ve watched individual oil wells and fields go into terminal decline, and we’ve seen declining production in whole nations, starting with the U.S. in 1970. Since then around thirty other countries have gone into production decline. This will eventually occur for the world as a whole, though there is some dispute as to exactly when it will happen. Some say it already happened in 2005. Others say it won’t be until sometime in the 2030s. But everyone agrees it’s going to happen within most of our lifetimes.

Cooper: What’s your best estimate?

Heinberg: Within the next four years, based on the studies being done by people who are on the ground, surveying the oil fields themselves, and also on meta-analyses, such as the ones done by M.K. Hubbert, who understood the process of oil depletion before anyone else and correctly predicted the U.S. production peak. His prediction of the global oil peak was off, but only because he didn’t foresee the oil shocks of the 1970s and their effects on consumption.

Cooper: Why is the start of the decline such a problem? Won’t supplies taper off gradually?

Heinberg: The problem is that we have created an industrial economy based on growth. A certain percentage of growth is needed each year to stave off economic collapse. So once transportation becomes more expensive — and once it becomes clear that this is not just a temporary problem of supply and demand — it’s going to lead to panic. The relentless decline in availability of fuel will cause a crisis unlike any we’ve seen in the history of the industrial or information ages.

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