Ever since I first learned about peak oil in 2000, the Master Resource that makes all other resources and activities possible, I’ve wondered what The Plan to cope with its decline and eventual disappearance was. So it wouldn’t be just a long emergency plan, but a permanent emergency plan.
There have indeed been plans: Nixon launched “Project Independence” after the oil shock of 1973 to wean the U.S. from its dependence on imported oil by 1980 with kerogen shale oil, hydrogen fuel vehicles, and nuclear power.
When that didn’t pan out, further government attempts were made to find alternatives for fossil fuels, for example (NRC 2009):
- Richard Nixon’s “Project Independence” (1974)
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (1974)
- Gerald Ford’s “Energy Independence Act” (1975)
- Energy Policy & Conservation Act (1975) to restrict exports of coal, petroleum products, natural gas, petrochemical feedstocks, and supplies of materials and equipment for the exploration, production, refining, and transportation of energy.
- Jimmy Carter’s “National Energy Plan” (1977)
- Department of Energy (1977)
- Ronald Reagan’s “Energy Security” report (1987)
- George H.W. Bush’s “National Energy Strategy” (1991)
- Bill Clinton’s “Federal Energy R&D for the Challenges of the 21st Century” report (1997)
- George W. Bush’s “Reliable, Affordable, and Environmentally Sound Energy for America’s Future” report (2001).
- John Kerry’s plan: “Kerry Aims to Reduce Foreign Oil Reliance,” Associated Press (2004).
But Senator Lugar pointed out in 2006 that despite Project Independence and other plans, the world has become more reliant on the three-quarters of reserves concentrated in unstable regions, where the risk of wars over remaining energy supplies will dramatically increase.
Or as Jay Hanson (2004) once wrote: “I am convinced thatafter the PROJECT INDEPENDENCE fiasco, our rulers reached the same conclusion I have: since no solution exists, there is no point in scaring Joe Six-pack. It’s kind of like that movie ON THE BEACH where the radiation cloud is coming and nothing can be done about it. That is why EIA, USGS, Michael Lynch, et al are trying to convince everyone there is plenty of oil and gas”.
And Donella Meadows (2002), lead author of “Limits to Growth”, wrote that “President Nixon’s Project Independence, dreamed up after the 1973 oil embargo, promised that the United States would be free of imported oil by 1980. System dynamicists saw immediately (and later demonstrated with a computer model) that, given the expected lifetime of installed oil-burning furnaces and cars and inevitable delays in finding and gearing up domestic oil wells, that goal was physically impossible. (An amazing amount of political discussion is directed toward goals that are physically impossible.)”
Not to mention my books: When Trucks stop Running explains why heavy-duty transportation can’t run on anything but diesel fuel and why batteries, natural gas, liquefied coal, hydrogen and other alternatives won’t work. Civilization would collapse within a month if diesel ran out… And why the electric grid will eventually fail when natural gas isn’t around to balance intermittent energy, since there’s no way to store weeks of electricity to cope with seasonal shortages, nor would a national grid solve this problem. And Life After fossil fuels explains why manufacturing needs the high heat only fossils can provide, why food needs natural gas fertilizer, and many other reasons why biofuels and other alternatives can not replace fossils.
And yet here it is 2022, with world oil peak production likely having occurred in 2018. Surely there must be some doubts about Plan A: energy independence. Dozens of authors have been writing about why alternatives can’t replace fossils for decades now (i.e. Gever’s 1991 “Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades, Youngquist’s 1997 “Geodestinies”, etc).
So is there a Plan B for the long and permanent emergency?
I looked for plans, and found that most states do have plans for coping with an energy crisis. Since I live in California I looked at their plan first. The 2006 Energy Emergency Response Plan of the California Energy Commission defines its purpose as the state’s strategy for responding to an energy emergency of an actual or potential loss of energy supply that significantly impacts the state. An energy emergency can be caused by natural disasters (such as earthquake, fire, or flood) or geopolitical events such as war, terrorism, civil disturbance, or embargo).
The Plan relies on a free-market approach to control distribution and supply. Government intervention occurs only to the extent necessary to protect the interests of public health, safety, and welfare, along with critical community services and economic operations. During the early stages of an energy emergency, the primary role of state government is fact finding, monitoring, and exchanging information, rather than direct intervention in industry efforts to restore services and satisfy customer requirements.
The state’s response to an emergency will vary depending on the situation. For example, one response to an electricity emergency would involve an appeal to the public to reduce their electricity use. During the early stages of a fuel emergency an appeal for demand reduction will likely escalate the fuel shortage if Californians top off their gasoline tanks in anticipation of an emergency.
Mainly it is many pages of the actions various agencies will take and which agencies they’ll coordinate with. For example:
- Readiness actions: Monitors international and domestic events. Attends periodic exercises to establish and test emergency protocols. Trains appropriate Energy Commission staff. Updates and maintains a network of public and private sector contacts. Prepares Internal Advisory Reports as needed.
- Verify actions: determine nature, extent, and duration of a potential or actually energy emergency. Coordinate with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, the US DOE, and other agencies as well as private industries. Provide a Situation Report. Use the informal fuels set-aside program to be sure that emergency and essential services have adequate fuel.
- EMERGENCY ACTIONS: the Governor must first issue the Proclamation of a State of Emergency and file an Emergency Order with the Office of the Secretary of State.
- OFFICE OF EMERGENCY SERVICES: Inland Region (Sacramento/Mather), Coastal Region (Oakland), Southern Region (Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center If the disaster is localized within a single region, the Regional Emergency Operations Center (REOC) is activated.
If fuel is short there’s a set-aside program for emergency and essential services only. There’s a form to fill out in the California Petroleum Fuels Set-Aside Program Applicant Handbook, and one of the agencies will decide whether to fulfill it or not. And the government is not paying for the fuel, the agency asking for it has to pay the market price if granted. I’d hoped to see the actual services that qualified. Though you can get an idea from the impressive plan to cope with energy shortages after an earthquake in Southern California, it is impossibly difficult, read all about it here.
And here is a Homeland Security 2017 plan called “Guidance for Developing a Fuel Contingency Plan”. Again, it’s SHORT TERM, for some sort of natural disaster like hurricane. And basically advises setting up emergency supplies for private and public entities. Here are their concrete recommendations, but these “solutions” are so temporary, here are a few of them:
- Consider increasing or installing onsite fuel storage capability. However, when pursuing this option, remember that storage of flammable or combustible fuels requires compliance with a variety of safety and environmental regulations and may require permits from State and/or local environmental protection and fire safety authorities. Be sure to consider the impact of onsite fuel storage on your insurance premiums.
- Identify additional retail fuel vendors from whom you might be able to obtain fuel during fuel emergencies, ensuring that each retail vendor is resilient with respect to onsite emergency power.
- If your core functions (and their supporting functions) depend heavily on electric power, consider enhancing onsite emergency power generation capability, either by installing a permanent emergency generator and fuel storage tank or by modifying your facility’s existing electrical infrastructure to facilitate installation of a portable generator. If you perform lifeline functions, you may be eligible for Federal support for such changes. Through a program operated in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) known as the Emergency Power Facility Assessment Tool (EPFAT), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) can evaluate the emergency power requirements for certain private sector businesses, develop specifications for an emergency generator that can support core functions, assist in the installation of appropriate transfer switches that expedite connections to a portable emergency generator, and deploy the appropriately sized portable generator during emergencies. USACE will also register the facility with FEMA, making your facility eligible for priority distribution of fuel to support the emergency generator. Details of the EPFAT program can be found at http://www.usace.army.mil/Portals/2/docs/Emergency%20Ops/National%20Response%20Framework/power/EPFAT_Fact_Sheet_21_April_2015.pdf
- Review the National Petroleum Council’s report, Enhancing Emergency Preparedness for Natural Disasters – Government and Oil and Natural Gas Industry Actions to Prepare, Respond, and Recover, to understand the basic elements of petroleum fuel supply chains and their vulnerabilities to disruption and to identify ways to establish effective working relationships with members of your local Oil and Natural Gas community
The Homeland Security document is worth looking at if you’re curious about the details, and has a four page list in Appendix B of other emergency planning documents.
But what about the Long Emergency, the permanent slide back to a wood world?
These temporary emergency plans will become the long emergency plans if the latter don’t exist.
If there were long emergency plans, we’d already have a massively subsidized program to end pesticides (since they are running out anyhow, like antibiotics), replace natural gas fertilizer with compost and regenerative agriculture, converting industrial to organic agriculture, breeding horses and oxen to replace tractors, teaching how to grow food in schools, building very small homes in the interior of the U.S. because 80% of the calories are grown in the interior, but 80% of the population lives within 200 miles of the coast, and so on. See resilience.org, postcarbon.org, Transition Towns, Permaculture books and websites, local food, Trainer’s simplicity Institute and more for the myriad transition ideas for realistic permanent emergency plans.
But we’re not doing that. So if there are realistic long emergency last minute plans, they’re hidden from public view at Homeland Security and/or within the U.S. military, because they’d be too scary for the public. I’ll let my imagination run wild, perhaps these plans discuss how national guards and the military forces would prevent mass migrations, set up massive tent cities in agricultural regions, evacuate those under 40 who volunteer to harvest crops, breed horses, and transport crops via horse & bicycle to nearby towns and cities once muscle power was more available than petroleum, and to train them in organic farming. Food rationing. Soup kitchens. Breadlines and more…
No, not a chance, the Plan is and always has been War. And to project strength always at all times, that’s why exaggerations of our fossil fuel reserves and the viability of nuclear, wind, and solar power are encouraged and well publicized and criticisms discouraged and ridiculed. We can’t appear to be weak or unable to win a war over resources. Perhaps war planned as early as WWII when FDR befriended Saudi Arabia in anticipation of garnering oil supplies for the future (Rundell 2020). But no one anticipated the rise of China, and their military is larger than ours now. They control rare earth metals from mining to the far more important chain of finished goods – so other nations that mine rare earths often sell them to China where ore refining and the other steps can be done to make the final products. Including weapons and military ships, airplanes, and vehicles of all kinds.
Many nations have nuclear weapons. Even a small war between Pakistan and India would kill billions as the ozone layer grew thin and nuclear winter ruined crop production for ten years on most of the planet. A nuclear WWIII could drive us and millions of species to extinction in that case.
And yet the U.S. is thinking of using small tactical nuclear weapons, despite the risk of escalating the conflict tipping the launch of the big guys, the ICBMs and submarine missiles that can take out whole cities. The U.S. Navy has already deployed an 8 kiloton warhead on a Trident submarine, the big guy missiles on board are 90 to 450 KT in comparison (Kaplan 2020). China and Russia have these too.
Or maybe the plan in the U.S. is for everyone to kill each other to get back to a carrying capacity of 40 to 100 million people (Pimentel 1990). Residents and police departments have at least 20 million assault rifles. And overall there are 393.3 million guns, 120 for every 100 people. Or perhaps 434 million according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s largest trade group. No one knows for sure because the government doesn’t keep track of the number of guns in circulation. Gun ownership is bound to go up. Mass shootings have been a real boon to the gun industry, every time someone goes postal gun sales go way up (Busse 2021, Callcut 2019).
Or let’s get really crazy – perhaps The Plan in a nation, could be any nation, or by the elites, as Jay Hanson speculated in energyresources, to create or allow a pandemic to spread. Jay thought the elites would do this to make oil and other resources available so they could still get around in their private airplanes and yachts to visit their numerous luxury properties.
But what do you think the long emergency plan is, or if there is one?
If not, then it’s time to imagine a new way of living, perhaps derived from the best societies of the past discussed in Graeber & Wengrow’s “Dawn of Everything“.
References
Busse R (2021) Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America. PublicAffairs.
Callcut RA et al (2019) Effect of mass shootings on gun sales—A 20-year perspective. J Trauma Acute Care Surg.
Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
Hanson J (2004) Post 51366 in yahoo group Energy Resources.
Kaplan F (2020) The Senseless Danger of the Military’s New “Low-Yield” Nuclear Warhead. Slate.com
NRC (2009) America’s Energy Future: Technology and Transformation. 2009. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, National Academy of Engineering.
Meadows D (2002) Chicken Little, Cassandra, and the Real Wolf. Formerly at http://www.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/228.html and post 27238 in energyresources.
Pimentel D, Pimentel M (1990) Land, energy, and water: the constraints governing ideal U.S. population size. The NPG forum. PMID: 12178968
Rundell D (2020) Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads. I.B. Taruis.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Friedemann (www.energyskeptic.com) is the author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report.
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