The Vanished but Inevitable Return of Reality

Reality is going to make a comeback

A “favela” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a “working class” neighborhood, but in reality a densely packed slum symbolic of our inability to take care of 8 billion people.

When I was a boy, everything in the world was right. I ran in the woods from dawn to dusk, breathing hard and sweating heavily. I studied crawdaddies in the creek because they were creepy and alien, became caked with dirt, and chased the elusive flashes of fireflies. I was alive in the moment, every moment, all day long. Waking in the morning was joy and every bedtime sorrow. My dream was to live in a never ending day.

When I dreamed at night, often I dreamed of flying. I soared a hundred feet over the trees without fear, gazing down over my home, and hills I had never seen. I circled the sky with effortless joy, swooping, soaring, aware my dreams were magic. I could be a bird! Who wouldn’t want to be able to fly? My imagination was alive and unbounded.

My spirit was connected to something greater than what we see as reality, an ancient memory infused in our genes. This thought fascinates me, because there’s a stage in fetal development, a process that mimics evolution in miniature remarkably, when our genetic code decides if we are to have fins, wings, or limbs, because we all come from the same original source billions of years ago. A few chromosomes give or take, make the decision. Everything is connected. When the wind blew in my bedroom window, it carried dreams and endless possibility. That was before the artificial world we have created disconnected us from the Earth, life on it, and more recently much of our connection to each other. It was before the world led me down the false path of valuing personal possessions over time and experience, made me a slave to others for their profit, and stole my innocence and animal spirit.

At that time, my family lived in the Appalachian region of southeastern Ohio in the small town of Athens. We moved there when I was four and one half and when we moved away I was eight and one half. The moving itself was an expression of a mean world, forced on us by bad people. My father, a young instructor, taught fine art and graphic design at the University of Ohio. My parents were just babies themselves, getting their start in life. They bought their first house, a new one-story ranch with a carport that had a huge backyard leading to the woods. My father built a treehouse on the edge of those woods with scrap lumber from a construction site. My parent’s lives were vibrant with friends. Artists and art students are interesting people who perhaps hang onto their child imagination longer than most.

Appalachian Mountains

I was in formation at that time, lucky to have that big backyard, a hill to sled on, and woods to run in. I was lucky to know a gentle man named Happy Howell who I followed around as he worked the landscape and once said, “Remember Geoff, every living thing needs to be loved,” as I pet his friendly furry dog, such simple and true words forgotten by so many.

My little boy heart even fell in love with a beautiful lady named Lexi. Yes, little boys can fall in love. I remember her long hair and the tall laced boots she wore, such a signature of the late 60s.

My heart and values were being formed. And school. What excitement.

My mother drove me to my first day of first grade and offered to walk me to the door. I was scared to death, but wanted to be brave, so I turned her down. I was so excited I tripped on the sidewalk running for the door, skinning my knees badly.

Learning to read was exciting beyond belief. The whole world opened to me. The first book I remember was a biography of Nathan Hale, the brave school teacher caught by the British and hung for spying. His words still resonate. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” That courage moved me.

We need that courage today. We need to take risk and action or lose our future. We must fight for our dreams and recover being human. There are storms on many fronts, and unfortunately, I have to tell you about another one today that seems to be unspoken of.

The end of oil

During the time I was dreaming of flying, I was unaware of Stanford biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich's sensational and controversial 1968 book, The Population Bomb. It went through twenty reprints, sold two million copies by 1971, and landed Paul on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson twenty times. This was of course a moment of great tumult in the country with the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War and growing consciousness of devastating, uncontrolled pollution of our air, land and water. The Ohio River caught fire and soon after Richard Nixon initiated formation of the EPA. Imagine the Republican Party doing something so reasonable today.

The book was understandably derided by critics when many of the Ehrlich's dire predictions didn’t come to pass, such as hundreds of millions of people starving to death in the 1970s and all major marine wildlife dying by 1980. The book also identified runaway population growth as a primary problem, which stirred deep controversy, but considering population has grown from 3.63 billion in 1968 to over 8 billion today this is an issue. We avoided mass starvation (with some terrible exceptions) by using massive amounts of inorganic fertilizers, chemical weedkillers, bioengineering crops, and clear-cutting carbon capturing forests to grow them. We foolishly used much of that land to grow soy to feed and graze cattle, destruction on multiple levels with increased methane and the waste of grain that could feed people, not livestock.

We avoided addressing the fundamentals of our dilemma — overconsumption, overpopulation, and increasing longevity in wealthy nations (more consumption by the biggest consumers) — because of the advent of fracking. Peak oil was predicted correctly by oil company geologists for around the turn of the century, but fracking technology extended us past the peak of traditional oil drilling. When The Population Bomb was written, followed by the Arab oil embargo of 1973 which held the country over the barrel and had Americans fighting at gas pumps, it was simply unimaginable that the US was destined to become the number one oil producer in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia. It was also unforgivingly short-sighted we see, as our planet heats up by the day and we wittingly cause the 6th extinction. It’s age-old greed and selfishness as usual.

Fracking, as you may know, harvests oil from layered shale rock. It involves drilling vertically then horizontally, and injecting massive amounts of water to break the rock and flow oil out of it. This method has been known to create earthquakes and ruin private water wells, but more importantly to know, it’s running out.

This is the storm to which I refer. We’re running out of oil. And oil is necessary to build our so-called green new way of life, wind turbines, EVs, batteries, and massive solar fields. And by the way, energy demands continue to soar. The insanity of artificial intelligence alone threatens not just more jobs, the last vestige of human reality, connection to the Earth or truth about much of anything, but also consumes energy at a scale we can’t afford, spent on massive warehouses of computer servers. It’s crazy.

Fracking in the Permian Basin

In November 2018 the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced identification of the largest potential continuous oil and gas reserve ever. Continuous means “unconventional,” in this case fracking. The estimate included an astonishing 46.3 billion barrels of oil, 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. Somehow, concerns about global warming cooled down. Huh.

Straddling New Mexico and West Texas the Permian Basin and has provided most of America’s oil boom, As the name implies, its resources go back to the Permian era some 250 plus million years ago.

It remained largely untapped until about 2018, because as described, extraction was far more difficult than simply punching a hole in the ground and pumping a geyser. New technology was required, and those horizontal drilling runs to extract oil are getting longer and longer as the oil runs out. In fact, they can run to 15,000 feet, nearly three miles. Extracting oil from the Permian Basin is getting harder.

Horizontal drilling is growing ever longer as Permian Basin wells reach the end of their commercially viable lives.

Goehring & Rozencwajg Associates LLC bill themselves as Global Natural Resources Investors. From their description:

“A fundamental research firm focused exclusively on contrarian natural resource investments with a team with over 49 years of combined resource experience.” They believe “the best way to find value in global commodity and natural resource markets is when prices are depressed, investors are discouraged, and financial measurements are cheap.”

This article on their website, The Permian Basin Is Depleting Faster Than We Thought, is recommended reading if you want more detailed evidence of the near immediate anticipated decline of oil in the Permian Basin. These are the kinds of guys who get paid by knowing the real score, not politicians scraping for PAC money and votes. Following are a few graphics from their article.

Also, extremely alarming is water usage. Our insatiable search for oil and gas is running the country’s aquifers dry in competition with industrial farming (problematic in itself), and cities in search of drinking water (arrogantly built in places where water was scarce before climate change).

This New York Times article on “monster” fracks goes into the astonishing amount of water needed in far greater detail than I can here. Recommended.

Together, oil and gas operators reported using about 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011, much of it from aquifers, the Times found. Fracking a single oil or gas well can now use as much as 40 million gallons of water or more.

Furthermore, no oil well is good to the last drop. At some point, the amount of energy needed for extraction exceeds the amount of energy that can be obtained and remain economically viable. As we approach that moment, those difficulties will fuel inflation across every sector as expenses increase. That time is growing close. Although climate change is becoming clear to all but the most steadfastly stupid or money grubbing deniers, the question may be what’s going to take the economy and security down first? Climate change, or energy shortages?

I’m seeing a one two punch here. Which crisis will tear societies apart first?

Paul and Anne Ehrlich are still with us today, 91 and 90 respectively. They continue to devote themselves to defending their work. Yes, they were premature in some of their predictions, but the integrity of the message that population is a key problem holds true. Agriculture is in danger from ever more unpredictable weather patterns and our oceans are overheated with CO2, killing critical reefs and causing the fish that can to flee the hottest regions. Both are critical to our food supply, the foundation of civilization. In drought stricken regions we continue to frack for oil, and are now embarking on lithium mining in Thacker Pass, Nevada, also a drought stricken region in our ceaseless quest for energy. Our plan to continue our lives as we have is insane, it’s not possible. This is why I am a proponent for degrowth, the only chance we have. The robber barons are insatiable and our politicians bought, cowardly and stupid. They won’t even be able to achieve a plan doomed to fail, The Green New Deal, with the infighting in politics today. Those LNG terminals Biden paused? Don’t hold your breath. That investment already well under way is to get massive amounts of natural gas onto the market. That Permian gas is bottle necked without new infrastructure. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars, and we have ample lessons in human history to know how money plays out.