The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  Stuffed in my briefcase as I drove to Pithole were reports from scientists, oil companies, and international agencies, a paper blizzard of charts and graphs projecting how much energy the world would want tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. Still more estimates clogged the hard drive on my computer. A 37 percent rise between 2013 and 2035. A 37 percent rise between 2014 and 2040. A 61 percent rise by 2050. A 100 percent rise by 2050. The numbers differed from one forecast to the next, but in every single one the demand for energy went up—sometimes fast, sometimes faster.

  What would happen if the requisite supply failed to appear? If, instead, the world of 10 billion abruptly ran short? The answer is easy to picture: industrial civilization, imploding in an awful smash. Pithole’s citizens, wannabe wildcatters all, had been certain they were creating a prosperous, long-lasting tomorrow. Centuries from now, will our descendants look back in scorn at our equally feckless view of the future?

  Strange Forests

  Fossil fuels are ancient light. Three hundred million years ago, in the Carboniferous epoch, strange forests covered the world. Many were ruled by giant, shaggy lepidodendrons: scaly, hundred-foot-high poles topped with grass-like leaves. Others were dominated by horsetails the size of trucks and ferns as tall as an apartment building. Although these creatures resembled no trees on Earth in our time, they were, like modern trees, the product of photosynthesis, which is to say that they were organic batteries, storing energy from the sun. During the Carboniferous, the world’s landmasses were shifting to form a single vast supercontinent cut by mountain ranges and huge, boggy basins that ran alongside them. Entire forests fell into the basins’ airless muck. When plants die today, fungi decompose them, releasing their trapped solar energy. In the Carboniferous, most fungi apparently had not yet evolved the ability to break down lignin, the tough compound that gives plant stems their strength and bulk. Buried in almost oxygen-free sludge, attacked only slowly or not at all by fungi, the lepidodendrons, horsetails, and giant ferns decayed at an infinitesimal rate, creating layers of peat. Over the eons, crushed and heated by the slow churning of the earth, the peat became coal. All the while, in a parallel process, the earth was crushing and heating ocean-floor layers of dead plankton, algae, and other marine organisms to form the sticky gumbo of oil, gas, and other compounds known collectively as petroleum. In these smashed jungles and seabeds, glossy and black, solar energy waited, frozen in time, ready to be tapped.

  The first known human use of fossil fuels—burning coal for heating and cooking—occurred in China, probably around 3400 B.C. Coal didn’t catch on quickly. People found it easier to cut down nearby forests for fuel, and even burn grass and dung, than to dig for coal in faraway mines. Because Britain was among the first areas to be thoroughly deforested and had shallow, easily accessible coal deposits, Britons were early coal adopters. Records show that the black stuff has been powering iron foundries, lime kilns, and brewery boilers since at least the days of Henry III, who ruled in the thirteenth century. The coal, mostly low-quality and rich with impurities, released so much toxic smoke that Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, fled coal-crazy Nottingham, unable to tolerate the fumes. Despite the pollution, Britain and the rest of northern Europe kept using fossil fuels; having little wood, they had little alternative. The choice paid off in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the invention of the steam engine, the blast furnace, and the cement kiln vastly increased the demand for energy—new coal beds to begin with, then oil and natural gas.

  The impact of fossil fuels exhausts hyperbole. Energy has any number of sources (solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal), but for all of the modern era the overwhelming majority has been derived from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), and it was fossil fuels that transformed daily existence. Take any variable of human well-being—longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population—and draw a graph of its value over time. In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil, and natural gas. “The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C.,” writes the economic historian Gregory Clark of the University of California at Davis. “Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world’s population was poorer than their distant ancestors.” The Industrial Revolution, driven by fossil fuels, changed that, possibly until the end of days.

  Before fossil fuels, even the wealthiest houses were cold when temperatures dropped. A visitor to the palace of Versailles observed in February 1695 that guests wore furs to dinner with the king; at the king’s table, the royal water glasses were filmed with ice. A century later, Thomas Jefferson had a magnificent home (Monticello), the nation’s finest wine collection, and one of the world’s great private libraries, which would become the foundation for the Library of Congress. But Monticello was so frigid in winter (12°F indoors!) that Jefferson’s ink froze in his inkwell, preventing him from writing to complain about the cold.

  A century after Jefferson’s death, these fundamental aspects of life were being transformed, at least in the upper- and middle-class West. For the first time in history people in large numbers could heat their entire residence, bedrooms included; for the first time they could, if they wished, illuminate every room in the house. Central plumbing suddenly became more feasible, because the temperature inside buildings was less likely to be below freezing, and pipes were less likely to burst. On a larger scale, fossil fuels lighted city streets, drove railroads and steamships, and allowed for the mass production of steel and cement, the physical underpinning of every industrial society. “Coal is a portable climate,” Ralph Waldo Emerson marveled in 1860. “Every basket is power and civilization.”

  None of this was hidden from view. Educated nineteenth-century Westerners like Emerson knew that they were living in a time of unparalleled prosperity. Their twenty-first-century descendants are richer than any dream of Solomon. To ward off cold, people used to chop down trees, then stack the wood in enormous piles; today billions of people can flick a switch and feel hot air gush into the room. The average American car engine is, unthinkably, more than two hundred horsepower—as if every suburban Mom and Dad had two hundred ponies at their disposal, but without the need to feed the animals, take them to the veterinarian, or shovel their manure.

  Those educated Westerners also understood that their wealth and well-being was tied to the lavish use of fossil fuels—which is why Western politicians and businesspeople have worried for more than a century about whether the supply would last. The apprehension came out in the open as early as 1886, when Pennsylvania state geologist J. P. Lesley declared in a widely publicized speech that the “amazing exhibition of oil and gas” begun at Pithole was “a temporary and vanishing phenomenon.” Within a few years, he proclaimed, “our children will merely, and with difficulty, drain the dregs.” One of the first and most enduring products of the age of fossil fuels was the fear that the age would rapidly end.

  The last two chapters discussed two related subjects, food and water, showing how Borlaugian Wizards and Vogtian Prophets approach the task of providing them for a world of 10 billion. This chapter and the next also treat two related subjects, but the relationship between them is different. The first of the two chapters concerns energy supply: Will there be enough energy in the world of 10 billion to provide everyone with the comforts of modern existence? The next chapter is about what might be called energy by-products—the environmental effects of using large amounts of energy. By far the biggest of these, at least in potential, is climate change. The reason for splitting the discussion in this way is that the world looks different depending on whether one focuses primarily on energy supply or energy by-products.

  Wizards and Prophets disagree about energy, as they do about food and water. Wizards support big, high-tech, centralized power plants based on concentrated energy sources (coal, oil, natural gas, uranium); Prop
hets place their hopes in small-scale, distributed, low-impact, neighborhood- and household-level facilities that harness diffuse forms of energy (sunlight, wind, geothermal heat). Prophets have proclaimed their bottom-up vision for a century and a half, and enthusiastically envisioned its triumph. Nonetheless, big, Wizard-style utilities have been so economically advantageous that until recently the other view has never had a chance. With few exceptions, distributed sun and wind power gains viability only in situations where people consider the by-products of massive energy consumption.

  More than 80 percent of the world’s energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth.*1 That is another way of saying that all the fossil fuels humankind will ever have are already here, waiting to be extracted from the ground—in contrast to food, which is grown every season from the soil, and freshwater, which is drawn in constant but limited amounts from rivers, lakes, and aquifers. In theory one could mine every ounce of coal the world will ever use and put it in a huge warehouse; the same applies for oil and natural gas. Nobody could do that for food—imagine trying to grow a hundred-year supply of food in a single season. And because the great majority of the world’s freshwater is either in the atmosphere as water vapor or being filtered and stored by Earth, it also can’t be mined—not, at least, without wrecking the natural systems that sustain it, which would make life impossible.

  In economic terms, as I said in the last chapter, food and water can be thought of as a flow—or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good. Few dispute that the flow of food and water could be interrupted, with terrible effects. But people have disagreed for a century and a half—since the days of Pithole—about whether the world has an adequate stock of fossil fuels.

  Today the notion that the stock of fossil fuels will run out is called “peak oil,” after the idea that global petroleum output will soon peak, then fall. Coursing through history like waves of panic, the conviction that civilization was hurtling toward an energy disaster has become embedded in the culture. Time after time, decade after decade, presidents, prime ministers, and politicians of every party have predicted that the world will soon run out of oil and gas. Time after time, decade after decade, new supplies have been found and old reservoirs extended. People forgot their apprehensions until the next alarm, the next prophecies of catastrophe.

  None of this would matter if the fears had no cost. But that is not the case. Fear of running out has been a malign presence for more than a century, driving imperialist forays, stoking hatred among nations, fueling war and rebellion. It has cost countless lives. Equally problematic, peak oil helped establish a set of wholly mistaken beliefs about natural systems—beliefs that have repeatedly impeded environmental progress. It laid out a narrative that has led activists astray for years. Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.

  Fear of Oil

  If Andrew Carnegie didn’t think of himself as the smartest person in the room, he certainly acted as if he did. Canny and ruthless, a cross-grain mix of avarice and generosity, Carnegie prided himself on his ability to see ahead farther than other people. In his later years he would become one of the richest people who ever lived. But he was merely a successful twenty-six-year-old railroad executive when he became one of the first to envision the consequences of peak oil.

  In 1862 Carnegie toured the Pennsylvania oil patch and was taken aback. This frenzy, he in effect said, cannot possibly last. With a friend, Carnegie decided to set up a company that would profit from the coming collapse. As Carnegie recalled in his autobiography, his partner “proposed to make a lake of oil by excavating a pool sufficient to hold a hundred thousand barrels…and to hold it for the not far distant day when, as we then expected, the oil supply would cease.” When that happened, Carnegie and his friend would be sitting pretty.

  The two men raised $40,000 (about a million dollars in today’s money) to lease an oil field, dug a pit the size of six Olympic swimming pools, filled it with their oil, and waited for the apocalypse. Meanwhile, the reservoir leaked—a lot. Carnegie and his partner realized that if they waited for the end of oil it would be the end of their oil. They were forced to sell. Contrary to their expectations, the wells in their field kept producing oil, which they sold at a high profit. The two men made several million dollars from their $40,000 investment. It was, Carnegie said later, the best investment he ever made.

  Undeterred by Carnegie’s blunder, other oil entrepreneurs continued to expect the day of reckoning. At the time, Pennsylvania contained the Western world’s only big, proven oil field. Geologists at Standard Oil, the largest firm in the industry, reported to headquarters that the odds of finding another like it were a hundred to one. The looming end of easy oil became common wisdom at energy firms. Told in 1885 that oil might be found in Oklahoma, Standard’s John D. Archbold, one of the first U.S. petroleum refiners, scoffed, “Are you crazy?”

  Standard’s beliefs were both prescient and misguided. Pennsylvania oil indeed hit a peak in 1890 and thereafter fell, though the wells never quite ran dry. But new fields were emerging in Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and, especially, Texas. In 1901 a crew in East Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico, struck black gold. Oil shot 150 feet in the air at a rate of 100,000 barrels a day, a gusher bigger than any seen in Pennsylvania. Flailing about in the surreal black rain, workers took nine days to control the spout, by which time a new Pithole—Beaumont, Texas—was already forming. Unlike Pithole, Beaumont produced oil for decades.

  Two years after the first oil strike at Beaumont, the landscape had been transformed from a sparsely populated mix of cattle ranches and rice farms into a forest of closely packed oil derricks. Credit 55

  Each new discovery was bigger than the last, but each seemed only to enhance the feeling of vulnerability. Even as oil poured out of Texas, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the “imminent exhaustion” of fossil fuels and other natural resources—“the weightiest problem now before the nation.” Afterward Roosevelt asked the U.S. Geological Survey to assay domestic oil reserves, the first such analysis ever undertaken. Its conclusions, released in 1909, were emphatic: if the nation continued “the present rate of increase in production,” a “marked decline” would begin “within a very few years.” Output would hit zero about 1935—a prophecy the survey repeated, annual report after annual report, for almost twenty years.

  The survey didn’t know it, but its geologists were echoing admonishments from across the Atlantic. Great Britain, the first nation to industrialize, was also the first to realize its dependence on fossil fuel—coal in this case—and dread its depletion. As far back as 1789, when the country had only a few hundred coal-fired steam engines, the Welsh engineer John Williams warned that the coal supply would soon come to an end—and, with it, “the prosperity and glory of this flourishing and fortunate island.”

  Williams’s dire projections set off a decades-long dispute. On one side were wide-eyed optimists, most of them scientists. Prominent among them was Robert Bakewell, one of Britain’s best-known geologists, who claimed in 1828 that the nation’s coal deposits would last for two thousand years. On the other side were pessimists, most of them economists, none gloomier than the young British savant William Stanley Jevons, who devoted the 380 pages of The Coal Question (1865) to detailing why “we cannot long maintain our present rate of increase of consumption” of coal.

  Bakewell had argued that companies were using coal with ever-increasing efficiency, which would make the national coal supply last longer. Wrong, Jevons said. In what is now called the “Jevons paradox,” he reasoned that improvements in efficiency would reduce the cost of energy from coal. Lower cost would encourage people to use more, draining Britain’s reserves faster. Luminaries from t
he philosopher John Stuart Mill to future prime minister William Gladstone endorsed these cheerless views and called for conserving coal. The Jevons paradox was true, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, announced in 1891: the “coal-stores of the world are becoming exhausted surely, and not slowly.”

  Britain’s coal output peaked in 1913, as Jevons had warned, but global reserves continued to climb, and no shortages occurred. The pleasing outcome made little difference. London was again beset by fossil-fuel nightmares—but about oil, rather than coal. Sounding the alarm was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. Appointed in 1911, the preternaturally vigorous Churchill set about modernizing the Royal Navy. Britain had just converted its entire fleet from the unsteady power of wind to the constant force provided by coal. Now, Churchill declared, Britain had to transform its navy a second time. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. An oil-fueled ship could thus travel roughly twice as far as a coal-fueled ship of similar size. Oil’s greater energy density meant that it, rather than coal, was the fossil fuel of choice.

  Because Britain had little oil, British officials worried that converting would make the fleet dependent on foreign entities, a frightful prospect. The obvious solution, Churchill told Parliament in 1913, was for Britons to become “the owners, or at any rate, the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the supply of natural oil which we require.” The government soon bought 51 percent of what is now British Petroleum, which had rights to oil “at the source”: Iran (then known as Persia).

  The initial oil concession with Iran, negotiated in 1901, had been on terms so favorable to London that the Iranians showed signs of seller’s remorse. To forestall protests, Britain temporarily seized control of the Iranian government. An attempt in 1919 to make the arrangement permanent led to uprisings. Two years later Britain coordinated a coup d’état that led to the installation of a new shah. He swore publicly to protect Iran from foreign influence while privately assuring the same foreigners he would never interrupt the flow of oil.