University of Oregon College Democrats

Editors Note: Erik Erlandson is a Political Science major, and sophomore in the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon.

With Powershift coming to campus and the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill slowly pushing through congress with heated debate, alternative fuels, energy uncertainty, and our planet’s future continually ripen as issues demanding time on our national stage. Some end the conversation by citing new energy sources, but innovations do not offer a free ride. Too many people fail to realize this.

Industrial economies rely on the subsidy of cheap energy. For roughly three centuries, human civilization exploited cheap fossil fuels, draining our planet of oil, natural gas, and other petro-chemicals useful to economic operations. Resources that had built up over millennia in our planet’s interior have largely disappeared in a few hundred years. The “low-hanging fruit” were devoured by booming capitalist economies which necessitated an increasingly large flow of energy to propel a growing population, even as oil and natural gas fields peaked in production, and even as oil discoveries exponentially declined. US oil production peaked in 1970, and more and more countries are added to the “post peak” club every year.

Extracting oil has become more and more expensive. Oil is our economic lifeblood, however, so we have been willing to shoulders immense costs to sustain our existing energy infrastructure. But less and less oil in the ground is indisputable, as it is a non-renewable resource. This brings up the issue of EROEI, or Energy Return On Energy Invested. Decreasing supplies mean remaining oil pockets are harder to find. Therefore, the energy required to extract this remaining oil will increase, while the energy we get out of these investments will move in the opposite direction, rendering this non-renewable increasingly uneconomical. If that didn’t make sense, maybe this will; there is no future in oil.

But that is hardly my point. With less and less of our economic lifeblood available and an approaching global oil production peak according to many experts, how will humans deal with a world of energy uncertainty? Millions of people believe whole-heartedly in a future of solar panels, wind turbines, hybrids, hydrogen cars, and nuclear reactors to sustain our current way of life.  And I, as one of the believers, acknowledge that these sources are a part of the solution, although conservation, rather than efficiency, should not be forgotten.

The curse of free energy (aka cheap oil), a phrase coined by scholar Richard Heinberg, has created some of our biggest current problems. Our population explosion and resulting climatic devastation have been propelled by free energy and industrialism.  If we discover another magic commodity for energy usage, more people will be born, more people will consume, more pollution will occur, and economies will continue their expectation of infinite growth in a world of finite resources, exacerbating the problem.  We cannot simply replace our inputs of energy usage, we must scale down our energy usage. Powering-down our economies is where the real solution lies, and conservation, rather than making free markets more efficient, should not be omitted from current talks. In fact, it should be emphasized more than it has been recently.