The Bruce Report

While the leader of the free world relentlessly pursues every last drop of black gold on earth to quench the thirst of his nation’s military-industrial complex, hundreds of liberal urbanites are meeting in cafes across the United States to contemplate, even prepare for, a future without oil.

a marvelous essay in the August edition of Harper’s magazine, writer Bryant Urstadt describes his close encounter with a New York clatch of these early 21^st Century back-to-the-landers. “Richard Heinberg is the unofficial leader of the movement, bearing the bad news to the world. As for what will happen when the oil runs out, he presents an unnerving outline. The economy will begin an endless contraction, a prelude to ‘grid crash’. Cars will revert to being a luxury item, isolating the suburban millions from food and goods.”

And that, apparently, is just the beginning. “Industrial agriculture will wither, addicted as it is to natural gas for fertilizer and to crude oil for flying, shipping, and trucking its produce,” Bryant reports on the future according to Heinberg. “International trade will halt, leaving the Wal-Marts empty. In the U.S., northern homes will be too expensive to heat and southern homes will roast. Dirty alternatives such as coal and tar sands will act as a bellows to the furnace of global warming.”

Counting down to catastrophe, “extreme political movements will form, and the world will devolve into a fight to control the last of the resources. Whom the wars do not kill starvation will. Man, if he survives, will do so in agrarian villages.”

Even worse (if that’s possible), any effort today to avert the coming disaster will meet with utter failure, or so say the doomsday scenarists. In 2004, the United States consumed more than 6.9 billion barrels of oil to run its cars, factories, small businesses and homes. Meanwhile, the nation’s 103 nuclear power plants produced the equivalent of 1.4 billion barrels in energy; hydro generated the equivalent of 439 million barrels; and so-called green alternatives, such as wind, solar and biomass, met a mere six per cent of country’s overall power needs. To cover this deficit, our neighbours to the south would have to build another 427 nuclear plants, hand over a chunk the size of Texas to biomass farming, and transform 26,000 square kilometers (think Massachusetts) into a solar array.

Back in the 1970s, we used to talk about the energy crisis and blame rich oil sheiks for our woes. How quaint that all seems now as we talk about the impending energy apocalypse and reluctantly face the fact we have only ourselves to blame.

Still, I’m no more convinced that humanity’s future is located in the root cellars of Frodoland as I am that the current President of the United States, in his campaign to buttress American interests abroad, will ever stop provoking global oil conflicts. Despite our interconnectivity within the North American energy grid, and the monolithic stature of petroleum at the center of our economy, we can mould the shape of things to come by acting locally, provincially and regionally. We don’t have to remake the world, just our corner of it. And if enough corners tackle the problem of dependence, in their own jurisdictions, the world will look after itself and all of our places in it.

In New Brunswick, that means energy conservation and diversification: a personal commitment to reducing our consumption combined with an institutional and industrial dedication to alternative technologies, including wind, tidal, biomass and, yes, nuclear. We are past due for these initiatives, and we are running out of time.

Some say the world oil peak is only years away. Others believe we’re already on the downward slope. It doesn’t really matter anymore. We have only two choices: embrace the desecration of civilization as we trundle down hell’s highway, or change

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