Published on Saturday, April 17, 2004 by ZNet Venezuala

Plan War and the Hubbert Oil Curve, An Interview with Richard Heinberg
By David Ross

Richard Heinberg is a professor at the Santa Rosa branch of the New College of California, where he teaches courses on Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community. In 1994, his monthly on-line newsletter, called MuseLetter (www.museletter.com), received an Alternative Press Award from Utne Reader. He is the author of five books including, A New Covenant with Nature: Notes on the End of Civilization and the Renewal of Culture and Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology. His latest book is titled, The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003).



David Ross: How important is oil to industrial societies?



Richard Heinberg: It’s about as important to industrial societies as water is to fish. We wouldn’t be talking right now if it weren’t for oil. The industrial revolution was, basically, all about fossil fuels. Coal came first, but when oil was harnessed things really heated up. With oil humankind discovered the cheapest, most abundant source of energy ever.







Energy is everything. Literally. I happen to teach ecology, and in my field we study population and resource balances in nature—which is really just another way of talking about energy. Human societies, like ecosystems, are fundamentally just energy processing systems. With the industrial revolution, human beings discovered an energy subsidy like no species has ever found before in the history of our planet.



As a result, we’ve increased our human population from just a few hundred million, at the start of the industrial revolution, to over six billion, three hundred million now. And of course the total is still growing: we’re adding about a billion people every twelve years at current rates. This is something that’s never been seen before. We’ve added more people just since 1999 than even existed in the world just a few hundred years ago. This is an indication of the incredible impact that fossil fuels have had on human societies.



Additionally, we’ve invented all sorts of technologies to take advantage of this energy subsidy through transportation, communications, manufacturing, etc. Machines now do things that were formally done by human or animal muscle power. We also do all sorts of things with machines that we didn’t do at all before. So fossil fuels have changed our way of life, our view of the world, how many of us live on the planet, how we live, and where we live.



Think of the Arizona desert, for example. How many people could live there without fossil fuels? Not many. But with the enlarged scope and speed of transportation resulting from oil, we can transport materials and resources from where they’re abundant to where they’re scarce and support a city like Phoenix. We can cut down forests in British Columbia and use the wood in Southern California, or transport water over long distances, wherever we need it. So, we end up with cites in places where nature ordinarily would not permit very many people to live. All these things together have created our way of life as we know it today, and oil is central to that way of life.


excerpted from:

http://energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=73