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The Book of the Week is “The Oracle of Oil, A Maverick Geologist’s Quest For A Sustainable Future” by Mason Inman, published in 2016.
The author– a journalist rather than a historian or academic– described redundantly in great detail, certain issues and historical events (perhaps those from sources to which he had easy access), and omitted or provided scant coverage on a bunch of others that were equally important.
The text was like Swiss cheese. He failed to mention the geopolitical issues of oil refining, oil spills, mergers of oil companies, nuclear disasters, and lawsuits and scandals that were game-changers in the energy arena.
If this volume was meant to be a career biography, the author should have simply said there were numerous issues and historical events that affected the subject’s career, but they were beyond the scope of the book. He could have simply named them without giving extensive depth to some and omitting others altogether.
Anyway, King Hubbert was born in 1903 in central Texas. He attended the University of Chicago, a focal point of intellectual ferment back in the day. He became a geologist and began working in the oil industry, which was in its infancy. He alternately worked and returned to school to earn higher academic degrees, during which he met theorists such as himself.
One was Howard Scott, whose early 1920’s vision consisted of a Communist society (all industries would be government-owned) which, through certificates rather than currency, would fulfill all of its citizens’ basic needs; food, clothing, housing, etc., pursuant to the amount of energy required to manufacture those goods. The people would work only sixteen hours a week, and have lots of leisure time.
By the early twentieth century, academics were spending untold amounts of time debating the merits of political, social and cultural systems– their own, and other nations’. In the 1920’s, they despaired that automation was putting people out of work, and monster-sized corporations manufactured their durable goods with “planned obsolescence” in mind. Propaganda even then, was persuading consumers to throw out old cars, machines and material goods (instead of repairing them), and buy new ones. In 1930, the nation was gobsmacked by the Great Depression.
In early 1932, Hubbert, Howard, and a few other engineers and scientists, included their aforementioned utopian fantasy in the theory of Technocracy, generating a report. Hubbert wrote the portion covering chemistry and physics. Engineers and scientists, rather than greedy capitalists, would direct their economy.
Two of their ideas have somewhat come to pass in modern society (a century later!):
- Scientists and engineers (who are also greedy capitalists, from Silicon Valley) are controlling the world’s communications systems (and the U.S. government and economy); and
- money has not altogether been eliminated, but two kinds of Socialistic means of exchange have been introduced in recent decades– the Euro and electronic currencies.
On the other hand, capitalism and consumerism have produced an abundance of material goods in the United States–to which other nations have aspired– lifting worldwide living standards. Yet, there is still extreme poverty, even in the United States. The overall cause of this paradox, is human nature– greed, guilt, fear and exclusivity.
Back in the 1940’s and for the next few decades, Hubbert and others made projections as to the amount of the earth’s fossil fuels still to be exploited by humans for their energy needs. His predictions were the most cautious. He truly cared about accurately analyzing data to publicize the truth.
In the early 1960’s, the newly elected president John F. Kennedy tasked committees with doing studies. There was interagency rivalry between the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Academy of Sciences. There were conflicts of interest, of course. Federal agency employees were clinging to their jobs and therefore trying to maximize their budgets. Oil-industry employees were hoping to get the government to pass legislation favorable to themselves.
The Atomic Energy Council (AEC) was a federal agency that approved the sites on which nuclear power plants were built. In 1966, the AEC refused to release a report critical of its nuclear waste disposal practices in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, salt mines in Kansas, Hanford in Washington state, and the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station in Idaho. Written by Hubbert’s committee, that report basically stated that the sites were cancer clusters. Nevertheless, by the mid-1980’s, approximately ninety nuclear power plants had become operational in the United States.
The author did mention that fracking is extremely damaging to the earth but didn’t mention how extremely damaging it is to people. Besides, it is extremely expensive, so shale gas drillers must take on crushing debt load.
In sum, there are no easy, simple solutions to the current fragmented, complex energy crises that plague the world. At the dawn of the 1970’s, Hubbert was proven correct in his assessments, but unsurprisingly, all the energy stakeholders in America clouded the issues with excessive propaganda. Read the book anyhow, to learn of Hubbert’s trials and tribulations in his trying to tell people what they didn’t want to hear.