LOS ANGELES: It was the best of times: I’d bought a brand-new 1974 Fiat 124 sport coupe the year before for $3,500; gas was only 58 cents a gallon, and I was still so spry that I could drive all night from a weekend trip and somehow report to work on Monday morning fresh and alert and more or less useful to my employers.
It was the worst of times: As an environmental reporter in Washington, I interviewed a maverick geologist, M. King Hubbert, who told me that oil production from the Lower 48 had already peaked and that our days of carefree joyriding were doomed.
I was deflated, but not as deflated as now. In today’s money, gas then cost ‘only’ $1.69 a gallon, and the sticker price for my Fiat was about $11,000. But one thing that has not changed is Hubbert’s prediction that oil production was on the down slope.
Sitting in his comfortable home in the Washington suburbs, the kind of house that said ‘college professor’ and ‘smart geologist’ (Hubbert was both), he told me: “A child born in the middle 1930s will have seen the consumption of 80 per cent of all American oil and gas in his lifetime. A child born about 1970 will see most of the world’s reserves consumed.” Bummer.
Hubbert first arrived at his unpopular conclusions in 1949, a time when the Earth’s wealth seemed limitless and predictions of doom churlish. Seven years later, he devised a mathematical proof — a curve known as Hubbert’s Pimple — to plot the consumption rate of any exhaustible resource.
The Pimple shocked the oil companies, which were blinded by their faulty vision of infinite petroleum.
Hubbert persisted. “Growth, growth, growth,” Hubbert warned in the mid-1970s. “World automobile production is doubling every 10 years; human population growth is like nothing that has happened in all of geologic history. The world will only tolerate so many doublings of anything, whether it’s power plants or grasshoppers.”
Or automobiles. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the US was home to 237 million vehicles in 2004. That’s expected to jump 38 per cent by 2030. The situation worldwide is no better. In 14 years, maybe sooner, the number of cars and light trucks around the planet will climb by 6.5 per cent to one billion — one for every six-and-a-half humans, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
We have yet to grasp what Hubbert was telling us. Maybe we never will. We’re such suckers for our cars, for zipping about hither and yon, that we can’t see beyond the windshield into our future, a future with ever-shrinking oil supplies and ever-sillier assumptions about what we can reasonably expect from our autos.
We deem ourselves eco-diligent when new cars sold in the US in 2030 will get 38 miles per gallon — better than the current 21mpg but scandalous compared with Europe, where new cars have been getting 35mpg since 2003.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service
