1. The Energy of Slaves

Before: oil, civilization ran on a two cycle engine: the energy of solar-fed crops in the energy of slaves. [3]

The Roman Empire was based on the energy of slaves. While the Roman Empire was growing it waged endless wars of conquest that brought it hundreds of thousands of slaves from the Mediterranean and Africa. "With large supplies of slaves flooding the marketplace, the average Roman paid no domestic taxes. Stolen gold and a tax on slaves even kept the state running. But soon the Empire ran out of easy geography to annex and encountered increasingly belligerent slaves (the Germans and the Celts). As a consequence the Empire's energy returns and economic surpluses gradually dwindled. Guarding borders and provisioning a large army depleted state coffers." [10]

The European empires were also based on the energy of slaves. "[B]y the 17th century the British were easily dominating the [slave] business. As many as 90 wind-powered slave ships carried 35,000 slaves across the Atlantic in the late 1750s alone.With millions of imported slaves, the Europeans mined gold and established vast sugar, indigo, rice, coffee, tobacco, and cotton plantations. The concept of free labour made as much sense to the rich and powerful in the Age of Empire as renewable energy and reduced energy consumption do to elites today." [11-12]

2. Slaves to Energy

3. The Oil Pioneer

Modern industrial societies are built on the energy of oil. John D Rockefeller "established a new business model for the country's economy. Business was no longer about making a living. It was about making a killing, and the surplus capital created by oil made that possible." [34]

"Rockefeller introduced an abiding code of secrecy into the industry. "And he committed his firm to the outright destruction of all competitors. Rockefeller's monopolistic tools included espionage, bribery, bullying, blackmail, sabotage, and drawbacks. By controlling costs for tankers, barrels, and other parts of the business, he systematically undercut the competition. Whenever independent refiners refused to sell, Standard drop the price in the marketplace to create a 'good sweating'." [35]

"By 1920, oil had saturated every aspect of American life."[43] Geologists began to worry about the depletion of oil fields and urge the US government to encourage oil companies to acquire foreign sources of supply wherever available.[44] Thus the American Empire was born.

As well as foreign policy, oil also changed the American landscape. With the growth of the car culture, Southern California provided the template for suburban sprawl. Oil-based companies - General Motors, Standard Oil, Firestone Tire and others - bought and destroyed trolley and electric railroad systems in cities all over the US. "In 1949, they were convicted of criminal conspiracy, and their ringleader, General Motors Treasurer, HC Grossman, was fined one dollar. [46]

In the 1950s President Eisenhower, impressed by Hitler's idea of a national superhighway system, began construction of the US interstate highway system. Meanwhile, returned veterans flocked to cookie-cutter suburbs. Herbert Gans a sociologist who shilled for the Levittown (the archetypal suburban development) dismissed the disappearance of farmland near big cities as "irrelevant now that food is produced on huge industrialized farms, and the destruction of raw land and private upper class golf courses seems a small price to pay for extending the benefits of suburban life to more people."

In 1957 Admiral Hyman Rickover urged a gathering of doctors "to consider soberly their responsibilities to 'our descendents - those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.' Responsible living, he said, meant energy conservation, excellent education for all citizens, a new culture of self-denial, and higher taxes to fund a larger, more complex United States. The alternative was doubt, indecision, chaos, and collapse." [57]

4. The New Servitude

Oil contains a fantastic amount of energy. One person on a bicycle or treadmill would need 3.8 years of constant effort, with no breaks, to produce the amount of energy contained in one barrel of oil. "Given that the average North American now consumes 23.6 barrels of oil a year, every citizen employs about 89 virtual slaves. A family of five commands nearly 500 slaves. A nation of 300 million controls an incredible phalanx of 27 billion largely mechanical and oil fed workers." [65] A US Midwest grain farmer sitting in a giant air-conditioned vehicle can produce in two hours the amount of grain that the best Roman farmer took 350 hours to produce. [66]

But Nikiforuk argues that the owners of mechanical slaves have themselves become enslaved to their servants. In 1974, Ivan Illich calculated that the full annual cost of car ownership, including insurance payments, hospital visits, traffic tickets, road congestion, and the like, was the equivalent of 1600 hours. Since the typical male drove only 7500 miles per year that worked out to 4.7 miles an hour, the speed of a very brisk walk. [67]

In 1969, Buckminster Fuller asked a petroleum geologist to figure out what it cost Mother Nature to make 1 gallon of petroleum, including the cost of photosynthesis as well as the slow cooking by heat and pressure into crude over millions of years. He estimated the price at more than $1 million per gallon. That meant that each American burned through $300 million worth of natural capital every year. Jeffrey Dukes, an ecologist, calculated that in 1997 US coal and petroleum consumption amounted to 97 million billion pounds of carbon, a number that translates into more than 400 times all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year. [69]

The First Principle of Energy Consumption is that the wealthiest people use the most energy. "Human and petrol-based slave systems share other similarities. In the human slave world, scarcity bred respectful use; cheap abundance fostered contemptuous waste… Over time, the concentration of energy required to consistently deliver... creature comforts constructs social pyramids that crumble when slaves - or petroleum - get too expensive… [A]ny dominant energy system thrives on its own inertia and creates a cognitive dissonance that causes good and often very smart people to rationalize shocking behaviour… Just like slavery numbed Brazil, oil-based machines have locked decision-making and thwarted innovation in the United States… Last but not least every energy system creates its own startling dependencies and unpredictable dynamics.' If you put a chain around the neck of the slave,' Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked,' the other end fastens itself around your own.'" [70]

"One of the remarkable characteristics of slaveholders as a class of people is their indebtedness… The average North American... must pay rising fuel bills to sustain an army of 89 energy slaves..." [71]

In Debt: the First 5000 Years [which is a very interesting book] David Graeber notes that people often sold themselves to pay their debts in ancient times. He doesn't think Americans behave much differently. 'The great social evil in antiquity, the thing that Sharia law and medieval canon law were trying to ensure never happened again, was the scenario in which a family gets so deep in debt that they are forced to sell themselves, or sell their children, into slavery,' says Graeber. North Americans now live on credit to support their own energy slaves and to buy largely unnecessary goods created by other energy slaves. 'You have a population all of whom are in debt, and who are essentially renting themselves to employers to do jobs that they almost certainly wouldn't want to do otherwise, to be able to pay those debts. If Aristotle were magically transported to the US he would conclude that most of the American population is enslaved, because for him the distinction between selling yourself in renting yourself is at best a legalism… We managed to take a situation which most people in the ancient world would've recognized as a form of slavery and turned it into the definition of freedom." [71-72]

5. The Unsettling of Agriculture

Oil has also taken over agriculture, driving people off the land and into cities, and replacing family farms with vast industrial factory farms. These agricultural factories are very efficient in terms of human labour and yield per acre but only at the cost of massive and unsustainable energy inputs. In the 1960s, the food system made up 12 percent of the nation's energy budget; in 2007, it gobbled up 16 percent. Raw food now travels an average of 1,500 miles. [84 - 86].

Petroleum-based farming has put more power into fewer hands. Three firms now control the entire US meatpacking business. Four firms manufacture 60 percent of the nation's chicken in factories. One company, Monsanto, controls most of the world sales of corn and soybean seed. Four firms control most of the dairy processing in the United States. Walmart has monopolized 30 to 50 percent of all US retail food sales. [87]

Standardization, another petroleum trait, has turned farming into highly socialized and fragile monocultures. [87] It has also vastly increased the waste of food. 27 percent of edible fruits, vegetables, oils, and dairy products in North America spoil in transport, rot in the fridge, age in a grocery store, or get thrown out at home. In England food waste may be as high as 50 percent. The amount of energy lost through rotting or uneaten food it accounts for 2 percent of annual oil and electricity spending in the United States. [88-89]

Factory farming has done something even more unprecedented: it has fattened the poor most of all. Modern grains are much higher in carbohydrates than previous grain varieties, and too many carbohydrates affect insulin production in the body the way fertilizers impact the nitrogen cycle. Carbohydrate consumption has made insulin levels go haywire. "Every culture in the world that has adopted US style farming practices and processed foods has also grown big and unhealthy. Some critics call a phenomenon 'peak health.'" Wherever aboriginal populations have returned to traditional diets low in carbohydrates, people have not only lost weight but who shed such health problems as diabetes. [90-92]

The industrial food system, which enslaves nearly 90% of all cultivable global land to the production of grains for export, has provoked a growing rebellion around the world. As oil prices increase, many peasants and small farmers are abandoning the so-called green revolution for old-fashioned husbandry. In the United States, the sustainable farm movement is challenged Big Ag by cultivating smaller and more diverse plots with natural manures and fewer machines. [94]

No one knows for certain what the future will bring but Cuba has given us a glimpse of the possibilities. The USSR once provided Cuba with 90 percent of its oil and nearly 60% of its food, but the Soviet state fell in 1991 and the US embargoed the island. The two events left Cuba with no fuel for its tractors and no fertilizer or pesticides for sugar and tobacco crops. The calorie intake of the average Cuban dropped from a healthy 2,600 a day to a lean 1,000. Thousands went blind from malnutrition, while pregnant women suffered and anemia. [95-96]

"In response the Cuban state turned to small farmers and entrepreneurial small urban plots to fill the food gap. Today, 81,000 acres of these urban plots employ thousands of people. A typical 1.7 acre lot might employ 25 people full-time.' What happened in Cuba was remarkable,' says Laura Enriquez, a US sociologist. 'The Cubans went for food security and part of that was prioritizing small farms.' With no petroleum-based fertilizers or pesticides at hand, the Cubans created 170 compost centers where wriggling worms now make 9,300 tons of soil year. The country also set up centers to make natural pesticides… Oxen replaced tractors, and people raised rabbits and chickens on rooftops. In short order, the small enterprises ended the food crisis, providing a rich stream of organic spinach, onions, chrives, garlic, and tomatoes. Historian J.R. McNeill says that about 80 billion hominids have lived and died on the earth over the last 4 million years. 28 percent of those hominid-years were lived after 1750; 20 percent since 1900; and 13% after 1950. Although the 20th century accounts for only 0.00025 of human history it has hosted about a fifth of all human-years. [101]

Humans capture 40 percent of the Earth's plant-energy flow for food production and 35 percent of all biological productivity in the ocean. We have also dammed, diverted, or monopolized 65 percent of the world's freshwater runoff. [107] On average each human has an ecological footprint of 5.4 acres; high-energy Americans average 24 acres, people in Madagascar only 1.2. In an equitable world, everyone would be entitled to 4.4 acres. Only Cuba occupies that spot. If we wanted to live sustainably like Cubans we would need to reduce our numbers by 20 percent to 5 billion. Only 1 billion of us could live sustainably like Americans. [109]

7. The Urban Fire

8. The Economist's Delusion

Nassem Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, warned that University economics textbooks were as unreliable and inaccurate as 15th-century medical treatises. Earlier cultures feared debt and valued the importance of redundancy ( having two bakers in the community), praised inefficiency (the source of quality), and appreciated robustness (waste not, want not). He says a modern economist would find it inefficient to carry two lungs and two kidneys since we do not need them all the time. [151]

In the first half of the 20th century oil was cheap. By 1960 the real price of oil had fallen to a level that was one third of its value in 1900, but the real price rose eightfold from 1972 to 2010, while US production fell by 43 percent. Even with energy and capital intensive shale oil from North Dakota, US well production is 25 percent below 1970 levels. As oil prices rise and become more volatile citizens will spend more dollars buying fewer mechanical slaves. [156]

9. Peak Science

Fossil fuels have powered scientific innovation but just like gasoline in cars a lot of the energy consumed has been wasted producing heat and other byproducts rather than forward progress. After the initial, largely coal-powered spurt in the 19th century, fundamental scientific progress has slowed dramatically. A vast amount of scientific research has been squandered in finding better ways for humans to kill each other, and the technological advances of the 20th century have also led to immense concentration of power in the hands of big governments and big corporations. [158-162]

French social critic Jacques Ellul points out that technology has a highly ambivalent record. The discovery of penicillin does not compensate for the devastation of Hiroshima by nuclear technology, or the destruction of the Niger Delta by scientific oil-drilling practices. Computers provide many conveniences but also make it possible for corporations, charlatans, and governments to monitor people 24 hours a day. A typical car requires less fuel to build it than it consumes during its lifetime on the road; the semiconductor industry requires 800 pounds of fossil fuels to make 1 pound of microchips. And "Each new extreme oil technique, from oil sands to oil shale, seems to cost more, takes longer to develop, and typically exceeds predicted costs, only to deliver less volume and even lower energy returns." Diminishing returns in science are now quantifiable. Fraud and plagiarism in scientific literature is on the increase. In the field of health, US life expectancy grew from 47 to 68 years between 1919 and 1950 and during that time, industry and government spent less than $300 million a year on health research. Between 1950 and today, life expectancy increased only nine years, yet in 2005 alone the US spent nearly $30 billion on health and science research while pharmaceutical companies spent another $30 billion. [164-170]

Canada and Norway have invested billions of dollars in carbon capture and storage (CCS) without producing a viable method for doing it. At best, CCS is extremely energy intensive. Nikiforuk concludes that CCS embodies the classic thinking of Big Science: it offers an energy solution that requires even more energy in an already high-energy society. It would be far more economical and effective to reduce emissions than to try to sequester them. But just as ancient Rome supported slavery, Big Science champions tools that strengthen its energy and power monopolies. [171-174]

10. The Petrostate

Perhaps the most devastating part of Nikiforuk's book is his chapter on the Petrostate. The oil industry is the most profitable enterprise on the planet. Every year it extracts more than $2.3 trillion worth of oil and gas from the ground. It represents not only the largest flow of energy but also the single greatest transfer of wealth. Together with "an oily cult of Divine Providence", the petrostate has divided the United States, as well as the world's nations, into three uneasy categories: Masters, traders, and slaves. [179]

The term petrostate was coined by political scientist Terry Lynn Karl. Her research shows that resource-poor countries generally perform better than commodity-rich ones, because scarcity breeds innovation and resilience, while oil-opulence fosters waste, corruption, consumption, and the demise of public services. [181]

In the 1930s, Canadian economist Harold Innis observed that one-crop economies such as Canada's fur or forestry trades tend to monopolize the interests and behaviour of the state. Karl took things further. She found that black gold concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few elites. Once oil accounts for 30 percent of a nations exports, the money petrolizes the place the same way human slavery changed Rome, Brazil, and the US South. [182]

All Petrostates display similar traits including poor statecraft, ineffectual tax regimes, political extremism, and long periods of authoritarian rule. There are very few exceptions, the most notable being Norway [and Libya] but even it is not entirely immune. [182]

In petrostates such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Texas, Wyoming, Alaska, and Alberta citizens pay little or no direct income or sales tax. Their citizens demonstrate startling apathy and indifference to political affairs and a disconcerting loyalty to their petro-Masters. This type of tax structure minimizes the opportunity for citizens to protest against their government because they simply haven't paid for anything. Wherever petroleum pays government's bills, governments serve oil's development and ultimately stop representing their citizens. [183] [Under Christie Clark, BC is clearly hurtling down that road.]

During booms, oil states spend like gamblers, but quickly become miserly when oil prices fall. They make so much money from oil that corruption is rife. Oily nation-states devote a huge share of the petro pie to their military - anywhere from 20 to 36 percent of their budget, 2 to 10 times as much as non-petrostates. [184]

Another characteristic shared by petrostates is the "Dutch disease." It starts with a hollowing out of the economy by devaluing manufacturing and agriculture. Next comes the employment of vast armies of foreign workers to do the dirty work. A full blown petrostate grows nothing and imports everything. [185]

From Texas to Mexico, Iran, and Iraq, from Indonesia and Venezuela to Texas, Alabama, and Alberta, oil money allows political parties, tribes, and families to concentrate power, buy loyalty, and marginalize dissidents. From Nigeria to England, oil fosters pirate capitalism, vacuous acquisition, and an obsession with celebrity. [186-187]

Norway remains the great exception, ironically thanks largely to an Iraqi oil executive, Farouk Al-Kasim, who moved to Norway and set up and headed an independent regulator that mandated moderate oil development and cleaner extraction standards. Unlike other petrostates that typically squandered their wealth on corruption and foolish extravagance, Norway kept the country going largely on domestic taxes and used oil revenues to creat a pension fund for the day when the country runs out of oil. Yet even in Norway the publicly owned oil company Statoil has subverted the wise policy of moderate development, draining all of Norway's largest oilfields when prices were low. [188-189]

Petrostates tend to be strongly patriarchal. They consolidate their political power by bribing citizens with cheap oil. [190]

Religious and political extremism are frequent features of petrostates, not only in the Middle East where Saudi Arabia's petro dollars emboldened the once obscure fundamentalist Wahabist sect to create Al Quaeda, but also in the US where oil magnates have bankrolled both fundamentalist religious enterprises and extreme right wing political organizations like the John Birch Society and the Tea Party, and also Senator Joe. McCarthy. They have been strong supporters of economic libertarianism and of a brand of religious fundamentalism that claims that God gave man dominion over nature and established government only for very limited purposes such as providing for the common defense. [194-198]

Ten percent of global GDP now flows to the oil sector, which provides highly specialized jobs for less than 0.1 percent of the world's population [199]

With few exceptions (notably Norway) oil exporters spend very little on science research and education. [200]

11. The Surplus Devolution

A net excess of energy is what enables social and cultural progress. This has been recognized for centuries, but was quantified by Charles Hall in the 1980s when he came up with the formula for energy return on investment (EROI). It says that EROI equals energy gained, divided by the energy required to get that energy. A high EROI means that a species or a society has a large surplus to use for discretionary spending like science, education, and play. An EROI of less than one means a net loss of energy.

Both the petroleum industry and fisheries have experienced rapidly declining EROIs since 1900, but fisheries mine the current energy of sunshine while oil exhausts ancient capital, accumulated over millions of years.

Hall estimates that it took only one barrel of oil to find 1,200 more barrels in 1919. Today the ratio is just 1 to 5. The energy return from producing oil has also dropped. One barrel of oil put 24 barrels in a pipeline in 1954; today the yield is just 11. The oceans once made salmon for free, but now it takes 5 pounds of oil to fatten a single pound of farmed salmon. [204-212]

Cheap oil with returns greater than 20 EROI built modern civilization, big science, and even bigger government. Charles Hall estimates that business as usual today probably requires an EROI of at least five, perhaps as much as 10. [212]

An energy return of 10 is a significant number. Most hunter-gatherers lived on surpluses greater than that. With plummeting EROI, you already see economic constriction in the US. 46 of 50 states are broke. Universities are broke. There has been little or no increase in GDP, and no increase in energy use for six years. [214]

EROI also provides a reality check on renewable energy. Today the EROI of petroleum produced by algae is less than one. Ethanol yields a slightly positive EROI -- until you take account of climate change, soil erosion, and the rising price of food; then it go...