Michael McCarthy’ cover story Out of Gas for Friday, June 27, 2008 is a long overdue story. The issue of global oil peak has been spuriously overlooked, suppressed, ignored, and/or misunderstood for a long time.

McCarthy’s hypothesis that “EcoDensity may not be enough to save our oil-dependent society” is an understatement. EcoDensity targets middle to low-income earners and impacts in no substantial way the wealthiest of our society. The large homes in Shaughnessy are going to remain so, with relatively sparse occupancy in comparison to the density numbers EcoDensity proponents would like to see. EcoDensity principles will not apply to the wealthiest of neighbourhoods. (I’m convinced that proponents will argue the contrary.)

But EcoDensity in a world without the energy utility of petroleum will be one of the least of our social problems. By “us” I’m specifically referring to Canada and North America where we consume 25% of the world’s daily energy expenditure. Once our advantage is gone, we will plunge into a deep economic slump that will be difficult if not impossible to rectify.

There are many reasons this issue has been buried by government and media. Most importantly, the science behind oil-peak seems not only to elude the commoner, but confounds those charged with providing information. Peak Oil was not well explained by McCarthy.

It is estimated that the world has about 2 Trillion barrels of oil; half, 1 Trillion barrels, have already been expended to this point in time. If you understand the nature of oil extraction, you know that it takes energy to mine oil from the ground and energy to make it usable. The important point McCarthy overlooks is the “energy input to energy output” equation. It’s one of the most basic principles of all life forms. To harvest energy for life, some amount of energy must be expended; for life to continue, the amount of energy you harvest must be greater than that expended.

In 1940 the expenditure of one barrel of oil energy to extract oil yielded 100 barrels of oil – the ratio was 1 to 100. Today, the ratio globally ranges from .8 to 13 (or 14, maybe). That means, in some cases, such as our disingenuous Tar Sands extraction, there is a net energy loss to acquire useable petroleum product. As the energy input to energy output reaches 1 to 1, it does not matter how much oil remains in the ground, there will be no logical reason to input any more energy to extract oil. That’s Oil Peak.

We’re not running out, we’ve run out of sensible energy extraction. By sensible, I mean, you would be foolish to bother extracting oil when the result is a net energy loss. Remember, energy is life and without it, you do not breathe, walk, wake, drink, etc. We can do nothing without it. All the sweet light crude that requires less processing to package in usable form has disappeared already. One would have to understand the nature of how petroleum was created, but the nature of oil is such that there are gradients of oil, even in its natural form. All the good stuff is gone, and now we’re reverting to the poor quality stuff because we really need energy and lots of it to retain the status quo.

The reason the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta can currently produce oil at a net energy loss is because of the market – the market is based on money, not on energy. Under NAFTA, Canada is obliged to provide a certain amount of oil to the US in a certain useable form. That’s why we can use enormous amounts of relatively clean energy, natural gas, to produce an inferior product. Essentially, we’re bound by agreement to do as much and that means Canada is wasting good energy and producing a large amount of green house gas pollution at the same time. Not a single practical currency on the globe is intrinsically tied to an energy index, or energy standard. That means, if we account for our resources relative to money, the energy input for energy output equation is not tabulated. The movement to institute real-cost accounting comes close to recognizing the essence of economics.

All the money in the world is no going to feed the human population – it’s the availability of useable energy that will feed the human population. The world has exploded in population (and devastation) as a result of hydrocarbon energy being transformed into biomass (food) and the infrastructure that ensures food is edible: plastics, sanitation procedures, transportation, storage, refrigeration, cooking, processing, etc. There are a myriad of steps that consume energy in the chain of events that feed billions of people on our planet. In Canada, it requires 11 calories of hydrocarbon energy to put one calorie of useable energy into the mouth of an individual. This number does not include packaging, shipping, and cooking. On average, a calorie of food in Canada travels 3000 kilometres. That’s a massive relative expenditure of hydrocarbon energy to eat. And eat well we do! Globally, the number of obese people on the planet has recently surpassed those whom are malnourished. We are consuming too much energy as food, so much so that our body retains that energy (in the form of fat) as a function of millennia of evolution. In the past, humanity did not have enough energy and so the body adapted to retain energy as stored fat—an ironic miracle of life that only nature and life on Earth can provide.

This leads into a secondary problem that has befallen the planet: global warming. The laws of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, and when energy is transformed from one form to another, there is always some amount of “waste” such as light, heat, sound, etc. Much of the waste from the combustion of petroleum-derived products is incompatible with human, wild, and plant life. While plants need carbon dioxide for the process of photosynthesis, it can be lethal to humans in high concentrations. The world no longer has enough plant life to absorb the amount of carbon dioxide filling the atmosphere at a rate that is acceptable to avert climate catastrophe for the human population.

It’s only been within the last few years that governments have generally begun to consider carbon emissions a pollutant. Because carbon dioxide — one “waste” produced by the transformation of energy from petroleum form to the millions of other forms (or things) we transform petroleum energy into — is absorbed by plants in the process of photosynthesis, that particular by-product (while lethal in large quantities to humans) was not worrisome. By-products from the combustion of hydrocarbon energy like mercury are worrisome. The new worry is high concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not because humans are going to die from such increases in concentration, but because carbon dioxide is only the first layer of an every accelerating process of greenhouse effect temperature rise. Nature can adapt to certain stresses, but once a stress reaches a threshold point, the resulting rebounds can be unpredictable and extensive.

So the more energy you expend, even to get more energy, means you create more waste, and one of the greatest wastes we need less of is carbon dioxide because of its significance to the temperature of our plant. This is why carbon sequestering has become a popular solution. The methods now in place to sequester carbon are not fool-proof and require large energy inputs to affect. The snake biting its own tail is an apt analogy. Moreover, the feeble attempts to institute carbon sequestering are truly a pittance in comparison to the extent of the problem and the massive volume of both carbon dioxide and heat we dump into the atmosphere.

We’ve converted 1 Trillion barrels of oil energy to food, heat, transportation, wars, cars, plastic bottles, pharmaceuticals, guns, planes, roads, cities, etc. Almost all the energy we expend comes from petroleum. Only a percentage of that energy conversion is applicable the human use. In fact, only 1% of the gas used in today’s automobiles is directly applicable to moving a single human body in the car – the rest of the energy is consumed by the weight of the car, friction on the outer layer of the car, heat generated by moving all those parts, heat generated by combustion, the noise the motor makes, the noise the tires make on the road, etc. Energy-wise, walking is an enormously efficient form of transportation because the energy you expend to move yourself also keeps you healthy and strong, exercises other vital functions of the human body, like lungs and heart, forces your bones to do what they were designed by nature to do, etc.

To understand the reasons why the media ignores the Oil Peak issue, aside from scientific complexity, one must return to the reason why the Athabasca Tar Sands can produce petroleum at a net energy loss and not be taken to task for the waste of valuable energy and the acceleration of humanity’s common global warming problem. Once anyone understands the gravity of global warming and the threat Oil Peak poses to the loss of life of millions of people, one immediately realizes that the economic order that mainstream media operates within and depends upon is a falsification, if not an outright fraud. Since the financial world, in all matter of speaking, is a misrepresentation of what is universal to all humanity, energy and the life it makes possible, to sustain one’s advantaged position in this system is to perpetuate the fraud. This concept alone is going to be difficult for most people to swallow because it implies that most of what we’ve been doing our entire lives is actually a grave injustice to the future of humanity and the continuation of life on the planet. It is no small realization.

Broad and poignant reporting by the main stream media on this issue might possibly instigate a man-made economic slump; not one that’s based upon the devaluation of the American dollar. Once the general population sees the damage that expending energy in any form means to the basic constructs of life, you take away the power of the media to attract your attention, attention that they hope will also verge into the advertising that goes hand-in-hand with issues that are so-called, need-to-know. The media as it is currently structured gains its existence by way of advertising dollars. Without this, the media would cease to exist in its current form. An informed media does not necessarily want an informed readership. Granted, what I’m implying here tends toward broad generalizations (it first has to assume that those running the media are actually “smart” in any way whatsoever… a notion that is entirely debatable considering the amount of print that is devoted to Hollywood actors and the like), but it does not smack of generalization. Thank goodness that the internet, for the moment, has offered to society the chance to gain need-do-know information from each other through blogs and alternative media outlets that can operate at a fraction of the cost the mainstream media requires. That being said, anyone with a vague understanding of net neutrality knows that media conglomerates want to control the internet too. If that takes place, society is potentially doomed and any hope for a common front against things that kill us slowly will be left to blind hope and delusional utopian thinking.

Which brings me to ask the question, why would The Courier, a division of Canwest Publishing Inc., run a story that is somewhat accurate about Oil Peak? How did this article slip under the radar of knowledgeable money masters and get front page exposure at the same time? However it happened, I commend McCarthy and the editors of The Courier. It may however be too little too late. We’ve known about Oil Peak and environmental destruction for a long time. We’ve known for a long time that the environment and the peoples who lived in harmony with the laws of nature have been forced to alter their relationship to nature in a negative way by colonizers, be those colonizers invading Islamic armies, Mongols, or Europeans colonizing North and South America. How much longer will it take for the system to readjust itself? How much longer will it take to realize that in fact the Earth is a Utopia and should be respected for what it is? How much longer will the media believe that the current system, something I consider and hope can be typified as late-stage capitalism, is going to support their advantage over the general population while boasting to be the champions of truth at the same time? Did any other Canwest Publishing Inc. outlet publish McCarthy’s story, even it if appears only at this moment to constitute a “local” story? Telling the truth means giving the future of humanity a chance, and that can’t necessarily be a bad thing.

Brennan Wauters, Vancouver.