The big Peak Oil conference of the year took place in Houston last week – but before we get to the substance of that, a few words about where we were. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying urban construct than this anti-city in the malarial swamps just off the Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and depressing urban district, even of such an anti-city, than the utter wasteland around Houston’s convention center.
Luckily, we didn’t have to enter the convention center itself across the street — a baleful megastructure the size of three aircraft carriers, adorned with massive air-conditioning ducts to counter Houston’s gym-sock-like climate. And when I say “street” you understand we are talking about four or six-laners, with no curbside parking, which is the norm for this town. The effect is that every street behaves like an extension of the freeway at the expense of pedestrians – but pedestrians have been eliminated anyway because in ninety percent of Houston’s so-called downtown of glass towers there are no shops or restaurants at the ground-floor level, only blank walls, air-conditioning vents, parking ramps, and landscaping fantasias. We were informed that in parts of downtown there existed a network of air-conditioned underground corridors with shopping, but that everything in it closed at 7 p.m. when the last office workers straggled home. Anyway, none of it extended as far as the convention center. The rest of district was devoted to surface parking.
It has often been stated that Houston’s ghastly development pattern comes from having no official zoning laws. But all it really proves is that you can achieve the same miserable results of typical American boneheaded zoning with no zoning – as long as your don’t give a shit how people feel in their daily environments.
The convention center itself, though, demonstrated something beyond even that degree of thoughtlessness. Its pharaonic hugeness was a metaphor for the fatal grandiosity at the heart of contemporary life in American today, the utter disregard for a scale of human activity consistent with what the planet has to offer within its ecological limits – and of course the oil issue was at the center of that story.
Oh, one final thing about Houston life per se'. Judging by the local
items in the daily newspaper, the so-called city enjoys a level of
mayhem that makes Baghdad look like a Sussex garden party. Sample
headlines: “10 Charged in Burglary Spree,” “Pit Bull Shot Dead After
Pony Attack,” “Jury Gives Man Life in Carjacking Death,” “Two Killed in
Home Invasion.” One particularly insane story told of a man who shot
and stabbed a visiting friend who “dissed” his dog. We didn’t see any
of that action around the convention center's Hilton Americas, where
the ASPO conference actually took place, but the news didn’t exactly
make you want to venture out beyond the lobby. Anyway, you couldn’t buy
a stick of gum within a mile walk of the place, and the thought of
traipsing past all those surface parking lots in 90-degree heat was
like an invitation to reenact the Bataan Death March.
It was a sublime coincidence of fate and history that throughout the
ASPO conference, the price of a barrel of oil surged up through the
high eighty-dollars range and briefly touched $90-a-barrel on Friday
(just as the stock market was tanking by 360-odd points). It was also
interesting that as all this action was unfolding, MSNBC was running an
interview with Senator Larry Craig (R. Idaho), lately accused of
soliciting sex from a policeman in an airport toilet. Apparently what
the nation really wants to know about is the Senator’s self-described
“wide stance” in bathroom technique. Perhaps when Craig is finally
forced from his senate seat, he can get a job as a “personal toilet
coach,” and become the pioneer in a whole new realm of self-improvement
science, teaching others how to assume the manly “wide stance” and
become more effective leaders.
So, while the price of oil ratcheted up hour by hour, the ASPO
conference members heard from an impressive range of experts who have
been leading the public conversation on the Peak Oil story – with no
help from the mainstream media or the political sector. Among them were
Robert Hirsch, co-author of the now-famous 2005 Hirsch Report,
commissioned by the US Department of Energy, which, much to the
consternation of its sponsor, first told the nation in no uncertain
terms that it was heading for a catastrophic set of disruptions in
“normal” American life if we heedlessly continued energy
business-as-usual. Hirsch went a little further now, two years on, than
he had in his famous report, predicting a future of “oil export
withholding,” panicked markets, and allocation disturbances that would
make the 1973 OPEC embargo look like a golden age.
Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, who
has worked tirelessly to lift public awareness of Peak Oil, also raised
the specter of shortages, telling the audience that market allocation
problems in the near future would almost certainly induce “hoarding
behavior” among the public that would cripple the economy, lead to
enforced rationing, and shock the nation. Simmons compared the current
public mood over energy issues to a “fog of war.” He also repeated his
oft-stated opinion that the drilling rigs and other equipment used
around the world to pump oil out of the ground are so uniformly old and
decrepit that they pose a problem every bit as dire as peak oil itself.
In the meantime, he said, to offset climbing prices, the developed
nations have lately dipped so deeply into their accumulated stocks of
crude and “refined product” that some countries may breach what is
called their “minimum operating levels.” Offstage, he told me, “We’re
too preoccupied trying to figure out the exact date of the peak.
Meanwhile, we’ll drain the gasoline pool and it will be gone forever.”
The other most significant contribution came from Texas geologist
Jeffrey Brown who presented a full-blown version of his theory that
world export rates from the countries with oil to sell are liable to
decline so much more sharply than their actual production decline rates
that the world would be thrust into an oil export crisis within the
next five years – and that this export crisis would turn out to be the
defining condition of the Peak Oil story.
There were plenty of other fruitful contributions on subjects ranging
from the future of the airline industry to reviving passenger rail
service, to the question of nuclear power. And there was one real
clunker presentation by a shill from the Toyota corporation, designed
to blow green smoke up the audience’s ass about the future of happy
motoring (Toyota’s products will save it from Peak Oil).
For coverage of the particulars, visit TheOilDrum.com, the nation's best energy discussion website.
If there were reporters from the mainstream media present at this
event, I didn’t run into of them. They are apparently uninterested in
the fate of industrial economies, at least as long as Senator Larry
Craig is out there on the frontiers of toilet coaching science, and
Britney Spears is still sparring with K-Fed, and Diddy is beating
people up in nightclubs, and others are murdering their friends for
dissing their dogs.
in our current suburan situation, it seems plausible that soon the wealthy inhabitants in mcansions will be competing with the poor for mcjobs. it may be easy for them considering the increasngly expensive commute poor folks would have to take to an ever distant suburb 50 miles out of the city to sell gas to those who can afford it or make coffee or those who still find it nessessary to show the world how incredibly lazy we are to make our own. yes i can see the white collars snatching up local retail jobs in the more wealthy parts of town because they cant stand the thought of having their h3 repoed or being forced to live in a town with whom they consider lessers because they couldnt keep up on mortgage payments. i think expensive oil will hurt the rich more than the poor in this respect because they never put that big a value n status as do the rich.
1
October 23, 2007
AaronG: Replying to the above comment
...miss the point much?
2
October 23, 2007
bill: clearing
I notice my little redneck community is vacating. Most settled here because no one would complain about their, Work truck, boat or backhoe in the side yard. The kids ride their motorcylces, golf garts and 4wheelers without any interference whatsoever.
Now that there is less work for backhoes and rednecks, this n.hood on the sprawl is de-populating. Bass boats, Monster trucks, Harleys and Heavy equipment are at the highway entrance with for sale signs, and one third of the homes are For Sale or For Rent.
I was completely wrong. I thought these types would persevere, so I settled amongst them. I did not understand that they were stretching to get here, and without a strong construction economy they could not remain.
The average house payment in this area is $800 My guesstimate is that the Avererage household vehicle payments are $1100 (Big pickup little car, & boat or motorcyle.) It's 7 miles to fastfood or groceries. 15 miles to real shopping. 5 miles to nearest gas station.
I would have been better off in my McMansion community. They're still working.
3
October 24, 2007
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