The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World by Paul Roberts. 

4/5 rating.

Book #141 of 2019. Read December 15, 2019.

I thought this was an interesting book and I learned a lot about oil and our current energy infrastructure.

Paul does a good job working through info about oil, coal, natural gas, hydrogen, and some other energy options. He seems to be much more realistic on bridging timelines than happens in a lot of books – talking about the importance of factoring in the economic costs as well as environmental for the move from our current, oil- and coal-bloated system to a future one. Unfortunately, I think this also is somewhat related to his shortsightedness on what we could do with good incentives to move to a purely renewable energy infrastructure.

Along with this, he seems to be sold on carbon sequestration – a technology from other books that I have read that seems to have MANY drawbacks, and does not make “clean-coal”. This is probably my biggest concern, but apart from this, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. His talk about re-thinking why we want energy in the first place is especially powerful: i.e. looking at why we want A/C and attacking the wish to not be hot in ways apart from digging up more coal or oil.

I think Paul’s insights on the issue of oil are illuminating and that he realizes the precariousness of our current energy infrastructure as well as anyone that I have read.

It kills me though, as I read more and more books about huge problems in the world and I agree with all of them about how we need to start now – or really we needed to start “now” when this book was written in 2005!! We need to start holding people accountable, and making change on our own. I am optimistic, but boy is that starting to fade as we stray further down the road without a single damn change. Start conversations, start conserving, demand better technologies and better governance. WE the people are the ones who shoulder the burden to spark the change the world needs!

Quotes:

“The cumulative effect of so much unnecessary internal combustion is staggering: since the SUV craze began in 1990, the twenty-year-old trend in the United States toward improving automotive fuel efficiency not only has halted but is now sliding backward, dramatically increasing U.S. demand for oil.”

“Yet even a cursory look reveals that, for all its great successes, our energy economy is fatally flawed, in nearly every respect. The oil industry is among the least stable of all business sectors, tremendously vulnerable to destructive price swings and utterly dependent on corrupt, despotic ‘petrostates’ with uncertain futures. Natural gas, though cleaner than oil, is hugely expensive to transport, while coal, though abundant and easy to get at, produces so much pollution that it is killing millions of people every year.”

“Critics place much of the blame on a political system corrupted by big energy interests – companies desperate to protect billions of dollars in existing technologies and infrastructure. An equal measure of blame, however, must fall on the ‘average’ American consumer, who each year seems to know less, and care less, about how much energy he or she uses, where it comes from, or what its true costs are.”

“Early tribes of hunter-gatherers, for example, probably had no phrase for ‘energy cost-benefit analysis,’ but they knew which roots and berries had the highest caloric content and thus offered the richest energy returns for a given investment of energy.”

“Although early automakers had tried steam engines, and electric motors, by the time Henry Ford introduced his Model A in 1903, the gasoline engine had demonstrated its greater power and range.”

“Or in plain English, remaining undiscovered fields not only will be smaller but are likely to yield ever-smaller volumes of petroleum.”

“In private, auto industry officials admitted that the existing gasoline engine was becoming obsolete. Energy efficiencies were embarrassingly low – less than 20 percent of the energy in the gasoline actually reaches the wheels – and emissions are still higher than they need to be.”

“So embedded has oil become in today’s political and economic spheres that the big industrial governments now watch the oil markets as closely as they once watched the spread of communism – and with good reason: six of the last seven global recessions have been preceded by spikes in the price of oil, and fear is growing among economists and policymakers that, in today’s growth-dependent, energy-intensive global economy, oil price volatility itself may eventually pose more risk to prosperity and stability and simple survival than terrorism or even war.”

“Today, one out of every four barrels of oil produced in the world is burned in America, and this enormous, apparently limitless appetite exerts a ceaseless pull on the rest of the world’s oil players and on the shape of the world political order.”

“Oil policy for both exporters and importers, whether they stated it or not, shifted toward the general goal of stabilizing prices at a level that satisfied all the dominant players within the oil regime: not so low as to harm oil companies and oil states, but not high enough to harm the economies of the major oil consumers – or worse, encourage conservation or alternative energy technologies.”

“The more the United States resists a coherent climate policy, the more it becomes clear that the one country that could make the biggest difference – in reducing emissions but also, and perhaps more important, in using its wealth and technology to lead the way to a postcarbon energy order – has become the biggest obstacle to any meaningful progress.”

“It wasn’t that car technology had stopped improving; compared with the internal-combustion engines of 1970, the new engines generated much more power for the same gallon of gasoline. Yet, instead of using this ‘efficiency dividend’ to save more fuel – that is, instead of keeping power constant and cutting fuel consumption – Detroit, and eventually its rivals in Europe and Japan, went the other way, making larger, heavier, more powerful cars and trucks that could carry bigger loads, accelerate more quickly, and offer more features but that used more fuel in the process.

A quick look at the numbers shows how dramatic the change has been. In 1975, the average new American car got around fifteen miles to the gallon and had enough power to accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour in around fourteen seconds. By 1985, after ten years of oil shocks and government fuel-efficiency mandates, U.S. cars averaged twenty-five miles per gallon, but acceleration had improved only marginally.”

“By 2002, the average American ‘car’ not only was heavier but could go from zero to sixty in less than 10.5 seconds – a huge increase in power. At the same time, though, fuel efficiency had slumped to about half what it could have been had Detroit kept its focus on miles per gallon.”

“Pickup trucks, which for decades had been marketed mainly to farmers, contractors, and other real working types, suddenly became a hot ticket for a burgeoning class of urban cowpokes – city slickers and suburbanites anxious to look tough.”

“In fact, fewer than one in twenty SUV owners ever goes off-road, and only one in ten pickup drivers ever actually carries anything in the back of the truck.”

“The SUV represents the height of conspicuous energy consumption. The extra size, weight, and power of the vehicles are rarely justified by the way their owners drive them. Even though owners and carmakers counter that the SUV’s greater size, weight, and capabilities provide an extra margin of safety, studies indicate that SUV’s not only are more likely to kill people in cars they hit but, because they roll over more easily, are actually more dangerous to their occupants as well.”

“Or as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded recently, if the 2003 vehicle fleet had the same average performance and weight distribution as vehicles made in 1981, the average fuel economy would be a third higher.”

“Coal-fired power is the dirtiest of all power. The plants emit great globs of sulfuric soot, which causes acid rain, and about twice as much carbon dioxide as a gas-fired power plant producing the same number of kilowatts. And coal-fired power is expensive. Although the coal itself is dirt cheap (about a dollar for the equivalent of a million British thermal units, or Btu’s) – and plentiful (world reserves should last about two centuries), a new coal-fired power plant costs two billion dollars to build, faces all kinds of pollution rules, and takes thirty years to pay off. In other words, although the operating costs (the fuel) for a coal-fired power plants are low, the capital (construction) costs are substantial.”

“As John Browne, chief executive of BP, told a reporter, ‘one dollar invested today in gas-fired generation capacity produces three to four times the amount of electricity [as] the same dollar invested in coal-fired generation capacity.’”

“Flavin, for example, argues that the main reason that prospects for alternative energy seem so bleak is that most of the forecasts come from a complacent political culture so accustomed to hydrocarbons that it is unable to believe that alternatives can exist anywhere but in the margins. ‘When you talk about how fast wind is growing, energy industry people will say, “Who cares – you’re starting with such a small base,” ‘ Flavin says. But by that logic, he points out, IBM would still be the dominant force in computers. Just as the IBMs of the world had no way to conceptualize a threat like the personal computer, the energy establishment has no clue where the energy market is going, where the competition is coming from, or how we may be powering ourselves in thirty years, or even twenty. ‘If you had asked the computer industry in the 1970s where it was headed, you would have been told, “Mainframes forever,” ‘ Flavin says. ‘You wouldn’t have heard about Bill Gates. Changes in the basic nature of the technology had already set up a new way to look at computing, but none of the big boys had figured it out. So while it’s important to analyze what the big energy companies are thinking, ultimately, you may be talking to dinosaurs – creatures that are going extinct or that will barely survive, but only by completely changing their business model.’”

“When we talk about energy conservation, we mean not just using less energy, but using energy more efficiently – that is, squeezing more work, more goods and services, more wealth from each kilowatt-hour we consume. In this sense, conservation is less a question of morals or ethics than of sound business practices: maximizing the profit we can make for each dollar we spend on energy.”

“Around the world, at every level of society, we squander an embarrassing volume of energy every day. Less than a quarter of the energy used in the standard stove reaches the food. Power plants in the United States discard more energy in ‘waste’ heat than is needed to run the entire Japanese economy’ – and half the electricity generated in the United States isn’t needed to begin with. Barely 15 percent of the energy in a gallon of gasoline ever reaches the wheels of a car – a missed opportunity that, if exploited, would completely rewrite the geopolitics of oil. As Amory Lovins, one of the world’s most outspoken efficiency advocates, likes to point out, ‘just a 2.7 miles-per-gallon gain in the fuel economy of this country’s light-vehicle fleet could displace Persian Gulf imports entirely.”

“In other words, it is now possible to save more oil than we could possibly find in the ground, and to do so at a per-barrel cost well below the average market price for oil.”

“In the U.S. power sector alone, we could reduce our electricity rates by 40 percent and cut CO2 emissions in half by upgrading power plants and transmission systems. Replacing inefficient household furnaces with high-performance models would, within fifteen years, reduce gas demand in North America by nearly 25 percent. And, as we have seen, automotive fuel efficiency could be doubled through technologies that are already in use, thereby saving vast quantities of oil and, in theory, sparing us endless foreign entanglements.”

“In fact, spending money on energy efficiency can be a lucrative investment. Every dollar spent retrofitting an old office building with more energy-efficient lights, heating and cooling systems, and windows typically nets the owner savings of $1.20 or more – a 20 percent return on investment that easily beats the Wall Street average, but with far less risk.”

“Reversing such disincentives won’t be easy. Governments would need to rewrite everything from building codes to tax laws, in order to encourage investments in efficiency upgrades. Industries would need to rethink the way they do their energy accounting and, in particular, incorporate life-cycle energy costs into the bidding process for capital projects. But the payoff would be enormous. If national governments resumed the aggressive approach toward energy efficiency that was so successful in the 1980s and began reducing energy intensity by 2 percent a year (which is actually less than the United States has been achieving without really trying, over the last decade), world power needs in 2010 would be cut to around half of current demand. If we reduced energy intensity by 3 percent a year, we could meet world demand in 2100 with around a quarter of the energy we use today. In other words, improving efficiency only slightly faster than is already happening ‘spontaneously’ in the United States would mean that within a century ten billion people could be enjoying a modern level of energy services for less than a fourth of the energy used today.”

“All told, whereas the tax rate for non-oil industries is 18 percent on average, the oil industry is effectively taxed at just 11 percent, a sweet deal that amounted to tax savings for oil companies of $1.5 billion in 2000 and more than $140 billion since 1968.”

“In recent years, almost 65 percent of all federal production tax incentives, used to encourage certain energy industries, had gone toward gas production, as compared with 1 percent for renewables.”

“In other words, we no longer have the luxury of simply waiting to see how the energy economy evolves and hoping for the best. From now on, we must take a proactive role in building our energy future, first by understanding why and how our energy system must be transformed, and then by working to ensure that the shift takes place. For, ultimately, the question facing us isn’t whether our energy system will change – indeed, the process is already under way – but whether we can live with the outcome.”

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