{"id":3640,"date":"2012-09-06T01:18:10","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T07:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.csj.ualberta.ca\/imaginations\/?p=3640"},"modified":"2017-03-08T10:51:12","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T17:51:12","slug":"unconventional-oil-and-the-gift-of-the-undulating-peak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/?p=3640","title":{"rendered":"Unconventional Oil and the Gift of the Undulating Peak"},"content":{"rendered":"

3-2 | Table of Contents<\/a>\u00a0| http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.17742\/IMAGE.sightoil.3-2.4 |\u00a0<\/span>Stoekl PDF<\/a><\/p>\n

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ABSTRACT
\n<\/strong>In the first part of this essay, I consider why the discussion over the likelihood of imminent \u201cpeak oil\u201d has faded from public view in the last few years. I suggest that, due to the decline in demand (due to the recession) and the development of \u201cunconventional\u201d natural gas and oil sources, the \u201ccost\u201d of fuels has passed from the obvious rise in price<\/em> to that of another dimension: the rise of hidden, \u201cexternal\u201d costs\u2014a recession triggered by too-high prices, pollution, climate change, and so on.\u00a0I argue, moreover, that this externalized cost forever defies precise measurement. This is clear, for example, in the case of the \u201cunconventional\u201d production of gas in the \u201ctar sands\u201d region of Alberta. How can one measure the cost of drifting underground plumes of arsenic that may not show up for hundreds of years? All of this makes a precise calculation of \u201csustainability\u201d just about impossible, while at the same time not absolving us\u2014all of those living in the current fossil-fuel civilization\u2014from attempting to calculate it.\u00a0In the final part of the essay, I suggest that our subjectivity\u2014as consumers, as free agents\u2014is itself an after-effect of the agency of oil: we as subjects are interpellated by oil. Thus one response to the unknowability of externalities\u2014tied to the impossibility of the \u201cclosed economy\u201d of sustainability calculation\u2014may be a different model of agency, in which calculation is replaced, or supplemented, by the act of gift-giving. Most important, perhaps, would be the giving of the gift of oil \u201caddiction\u201d not to any recipient (or agent), but to a necessarily repeated forgetting.<\/div><\/p>\n

R\u00c9SUM\u00c9
\n<\/strong>Dans la premi\u00e8re partie de cet article, j\u2019examine les raisons pour lesquelles les discours sur la probabilit\u00e9 d\u2019un imminent \u00ab\u00a0pic p\u00e9trolier\u00a0\u00bb sont pass\u00e9s depuis peu \u00e0 l\u2019arri\u00e8re-plan. Je sugg\u00e8re que, \u00e0 cause d\u2019une demande en baisse pendant la r\u00e9cession, de m\u00eame qu\u2019en raison du d\u00e9veloppement du gaz naturel et des sources de p\u00e9trole \u00ab\u00a0peu conventionnelles\u00a0\u00bb, le \u00ab\u00a0co\u00fbt\u00a0\u00bb des combustibles connait des augmentations non seulement en mati\u00e8re de prix, mais aussi en mati\u00e8re des co\u00fbts \u00ab\u00a0ext\u00e9rieurs\u00a0\u00bb cach\u00e9s, ce qui implique une autre forme de r\u00e9cession provoqu\u00e9e par des prix trop \u00e9lev\u00e9s, par la pollution, par les changements climatiques, etc. De plus, je soutiens qu\u2019une mesure pr\u00e9cise de ces co\u00fbts ext\u00e9rieurs est peu envisageable. L\u2019exemple de la production \u00ab\u00a0peu conventionnelle\u00a0\u00bb du combustible dans la r\u00e9gion des sables p\u00e9trolif\u00e8res de l\u2019Alberta illustre cette proposition. Comment, par exemple, pr\u00e9voir les cons\u00e9quences d\u2019un nuage mobile d\u2019arsenic souterrain qui pourrait ne remonter \u00e0 la surface que dans une centaine d\u2019ann\u00e9es? Ces facteurs d\u2019ind\u00e9termination rendent impossible toute pr\u00e9vision de la \u00ab\u00a0durabilit\u00e9 de l\u2019environnement \u00bb, sans pourtant nous d\u00e9courager de continuer \u00e0 tenter de telles pr\u00e9visions. En dernier lieu, je propose que notre subjectivit\u00e9 de consommateurs apparemment dou\u00e9s de libre-arbitre est elle-m\u00eame une cons\u00e9quence de l\u2019action du p\u00e9trole\u00a0: celui-ci nous interpelle comme sujets. Face \u00e0 cela une r\u00e9action envisageable pourrait \u00eatre la production d\u2019un mod\u00e8le actantiel diff\u00e8rent, dans lequel on remplacerait le calcul par le don.<\/div>
<\/div><\/p>\n
\n

Allan Stoekl | Pennsylvania State University<\/p>\n

Unconventional Oil and the Gift of the Undulating Peak<\/h4>\n

Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?<\/h4>\n

A funny thing happened on the way to Peak Oil. It has not happened, or so it seems, at first. A few years ago\u2014between 2005 and 2009, to be precise\u2014there was much talk in the public prints (the \u2018mainstream media\u2019) about \u2018oil running out\u2019\u2014this was how \u2018Peak Oil\u2019 was apparently conceived. Kenneth Deffeyes, the author of Hubbert\u2019s Peak<\/em>, declared that Thanksgiving, 2005 was the official date of Peak Oil: after this, presumably, oil would get progressively more expensive, and society would collapse.[1]<\/a> \u2018Peak oilers\u2019 were identified with \u2018doomers,\u2019 those who imagined that very soon we would all be living in caves, surviving as well as we could with early twentieth century implements and weapons (at best). James Howard Kunstler\u2019s novel, World Made By Hand<\/em>, published in 2008, depicted in its rather aimless narrative a society that had somehow reverted either to a nineteenth century mode of existence, or perhaps to a new dark ages, depending on how one wanted to interpret it.<\/p>\n

Facts seemed to bear out the prognostications of the \u2018doomers,\u2019 at least for a while. Oil hit $147 a barrel in July of 2008,[2]<\/a> and yet production did not rise, which it should have, assuming conventional laws of economics (higher price means higher production, and an eventual fall in price). Motorists were not waiting in lines before the gas pumps, as they had during the \u2018energy crisis\u2019 of the 1970s, but they were paying the (then) astounding price of over $4 a gallon for that precious elixir, gasoline. The world seemed to be shifting on its foundations: China was booming, ever more oil was called for, and yet production was stagnant, at best. Would we all be living in caves in a few years?<\/p>\n

Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Prize<\/em> and mainstream go-to guy on oil, was called on to make his pronouncement, and he did so: through CERA (Cambridge Energy Research Association), his high priced (and profitable) think tank, his spokesperson proclaimed: Peak Oil is garbage.[3]<\/a> But which Peak Oil? At this point a careful observer could start to note a problem: Peak Oil was coming to mean different things to different observers. For Yergin, it was indeed the sudden dropoff of production leading to a \u2018primitive\u2019 existence\u2014perhaps the future as foreseen in caricature by Kunstler. But Yergin himself recognized, if not a \u201cpeak\u201d followed by a sudden drop-off in production, then at least a slow rise, an \u201cundulating plateau\u201d (another geological\/topographical metaphor) followed, in, say, forty years by\u2014decline.[4]<\/a> He wasn\u2019t calling it \u2018Peak Oil\u2019\u2014he excoriated the term and those who used it\u2014but it amounted to the same thing: an eventual drop-off in oil production. One had the strange feeling that people were arguing about semantics, for Deffeyes, and any number of other \u2018Peak Oil\u2019 gurus, had already indicated that the issue was not so much a sudden peak followed by apocalypse, but rather the steady falloff in production caused by the decline of returns on energy investment: in other words, energy from oil from here on out would cost more in energy to extract and produce; \u201cEnergy Return on Energy Investment\u201d would tend toward a point of negative returns.[5]<\/a> Oil, in short, would start to cost more. While some people were arguing about apocalypse, and trying to score points, the real problem started to appear: how to calculate the rise in the cost<\/em> of oil (in energy invested), presumably, but not necessarily, reflected in the price<\/em> of oil (as measured in dollars)? But how would high cost manifest itself, if not in high price?<\/p>\n

What happened next served to discredit the peak oil as apocalypse story, but for attentive observers hardly banished Peak Oil in its larger sense to the trash heap of discredited ideas. The price of oil fell dramatically, going as far down as $35 a barrel in February of 2009.[6]<\/a> Suddenly oil was \u2018cheap\u2019 again, but there was a massive recession; car sales fell through the floor, GM was headed for bankruptcy, and it seemed that the American Way of Motoring had finally swerved into a ditch.<\/p>\n

If oil was cheap, its cheapness clearly had something to do with the recession. Cheap oil, coming so soon after peak oil, taught everyone a serious lesson: even if oil production is stagnant, fall in demand will cause prices to fall dramatically. Oil is not or will not be eternally expensive (in price): a recession due precisely to high oil prices will cause demand to fall, and prices along with it.[7]<\/a> One can well imagine that the famous \u201cundulating plateau\u201d would be caused not by continual discoveries of new (often \u2018unconventional\u2019) oil sources and their quick exhaustion, but by the rise and fall of demand as the world entered a roller-coaster phase in which demand gyrated with the onset and alleviation of multiple oil-price induced recessions. Peak Oil, from this perspective, would be associated, precisely not<\/em> with a simple peak but with the undulations of a not so calming and bucolic plateau. The plateau, after all, announces the inevitable fall; thus it is a kind of long drawn out peak (long in media-attention span terms\u2014another few years or even decades\u2014but hardly on a geological or even historical scale). An undulating peak?<\/p>\n

By this time the mainstream media had pretty much lost interest in the whole question: Barack Obama\u2019s election and his standoff with the Republican Party stole media attention not only from energy issues, but from questions of ecology, which had been highlighted in the last few glowing years of prosperity before the crash. Michael Pollan\u2019s locavorism, issues of city structure, food miles, active transportation\u2014all that headed back to the blogs from whence it came.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

And then, starting in late 2009, the real blockbuster: natural gas was no longer in crisis mode (because there had been talk of \u2018Peak Gas\u2019 as well); gas supplies were growing more<\/em> plentiful, and the bottom of gas prices was nowhere to be seen. Oil production too was actually rising; the same technological \u2018breakthrough\u2019 that was enabling the uptick in natural gas production\u2014namely hydraulic fracturing or \u2018fracking\u2019\u2014was having its effect in the oil fields. The era of \u2018unconventional\u2019 oil and gas was finally dawning: these resources were being wrested out of the ground through the injection of steam and a witches\u2019 brew of chemicals, transforming and traumatizing local economies from Montana and North Dakota (the Bakkan fields) to Pennsylvania and New York State (the Marcellus Shale). Moreover, the Athabasca Tar Sands, producing synthetic oil from cooked down tar, were also proving to be a new major source for oil, as \u2018conventional\u2019 oil production inevitably declined (as per Peak Oil theory). Hence the mainstream take on oil, following, as always, Yergin: yes, conventional oil was in decline\u2014as was natural gas\u2014but unconventional sources would make possible not only the replacement of disappearing conventional oil, but would actually provide more oil to the market. The seeming peak of Thanksgiving, 2005 would be forgotten.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

So what is one to make of all this? Will the price of oil and gas continue to drop not because of a terminal recession, but because of ever increasing \u2018unconventional\u2019 production?<\/p>\n

What is interesting, I think, is the fact that at a certain point people lost their ability to understand what the rising cost of oil could mean. The basic, most primary meaning, was obvious: more expensive oil was oil that had a higher price in dollars. So when oil hit $147 a barrel, everyone talked about \u201cPeak Oil.\u201d If oil cost more it was because it was getting scarcer, the specter of \u2018lights out,\u2019 of the decline of empire, hovered over considerations of easily measured price. Of course some skeptics, including President Obama, argued that the price run-up was due to nasty speculators. The latter, for some reason, had never existed before, at least not in the oil markets. But the skeptics\u2019 protests were muted, as long as a general fear of high prices, and the overarching question, \u201cWhere will this end?\u201d, presided over debates. As soon as prices started to fall, however, a surprising thing happened. \u201cPeak Oil,\u201d it turned out, really was garbage, or so it seemed, precisely because prices were falling\u2014it was irrelevant why. Suddenly, a disconnect took place between price and cost: it was generally ignored, at least in the public prints, that the falling price was due to a recession caused in large measure by the preceding rise<\/em> in oil prices. The fall in oil prices, in other words, was now caused by nothing less than their previous rise, and by, yes, increasing scarcity.What was starting to appear, and what subsequently appeared very clearly, was that the price of oil had to be seen in the context of the cost of oil. The cost, moreover, was not always to be measured in dollars\u2014but then how to measure it?<\/p>\n

One could easily answer\u2014perhaps too easily: in recession, in generalized (or more generalized) human misery. As money went to pay for oil, it could no longer pay for other stuff: housing, industrial investments, whatever. The entire growth\/debt economy was threatened. The cost of oil would now be measured in rising joblessness, in political angst, in the rise of a lunatic right, in a not-so charming insouciance pertaining to global climate change. The important thing, though, was that the cost of energy, and the cost of Peak Oil\u2014which is always how Peak Oil will manifest itself, through cost<\/em>\u2014was being \u2018externalized.\u2019[10]<\/a> Costs, in other words, were being passed on, or passed off, in such a way that they did not seem to be a factor in what was happening. Oil seemed to be cheap\u2014$35 a barrel\u2014Peak Oil was dead, but now the rising cost of oil was to be measured in terms that did not lend themselves easily to quantification, uncomplicated pricing, and sudden recognition. In other words, \u2018Peak Oil\u2014the ever-rising cost of conventionally produced oil products\u2014made (and makes) itself felt though externalized costs that may not initially be associated in a direct way with the price of oil at all.<\/p>\n

Peak Oil\u2019s really high cost, then, was not primarily the scary price of $147 a barrel, but the endless \u2018Great Recession,\u2019 and the larger (ecological, social) costs of the production of \u2018unconventional oil.\u2019 The beauty of the recession, though, is that it can be attributed to so many things other than Peak Oil. Similarly, the costs of \u2018unconventional\u2019 production\u2014contaminated water, air, and land, along with the larger effects of global climate change\u2014can be overlooked, or can be dissociated from the actual price of oil, and thus ignored. This difficulty of conceptualizing and quantifying the import and precise impact of external costs was not due, I think, entirely to the obfuscations of pundits on television or in the Times<\/em>. It was due to the inherent and profound difficulty of determining external costs. It is one thing, in other words, to realize that the real cost of things is being passed off and somehow obfuscated. It is another thing to figure out what those real costs are, and locate them.<\/p>\n

The Puzzle of External Costs<\/h4>\n

Externalized cost in the case of the Athabasca Tar Sands can be characterized in a number of ways. The most important, I think, and the most general, is this: it is not fully knowable<\/em>. This is the paradox of external cost: it is extreme, but it plays out in scenarios of the future that resist representation, prediction, calculation, and that, quite clearly, extend over long periods of time into the future. In his excellent book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent<\/em>, Andrew Nikiforuk says this about water use in the production of \u2018unconventional\u2019 oil:<\/p>\n

For nearly a decade, scientists, as well as environmental and Aboriginal groups, have asked the government to study how much these city-scale withdrawals are impacting the [Athabasca] river\u2019s health and instream flows. To date, nobody can say with any certainty whether the province\u2019s promiscuous permission-granting has left enough water in the Athabasca for the fish. In the wintertime, water levels drop so low that by 2015 industry will be withdrawing more than 12 percent of the water\u2019s flow. (Nikiforuk 65)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The non-knowledge of the future of environmental contamination\u2014the externalized cost of unconventional oil (and hence of oil in general)\u2014is in principle never fully knowable because the future is never precisely predictable. Costs will make themselves felt, but may not be recognized as<\/span> costs, and will have to be \u2018paid,\u2019 in one way or another, for periods of time that are beyond the time scale of (modern) civilization as we know it.<\/p>\n

Writing of proposed carbon capture technology\u2014which in principle would store the carbon produced through unconventional production and refining\u2014Nikiforuk notes that<\/p>\n

Once CO2 begins to be injected at carefully chosen sites, the EPA has proposed that regulators track CO2 plumes in salt water, monitor local aquifers above and beyond the storage site to assure protection of drinking water, and sample the air over the site for traces of leaking CO2. And this isn\u2019t something to be done over twenty or fifty years\u2014the EPA believes this oversight needs to be maintained for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. (Nikiforuk 141)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What\u2019s true of the imagined (really science-fiction) technology of \u2018carbon capture\u2019 is true of the very real and present danger of the spread of other kinds of \u2018plumes.\u2019 Nikiforuk writes, for example, of Arsenic plumes that result from SAGD (Stream Assisted Gravity Drainage), a technique used to \u201cmelt [bitumen deposits] into black syrup\u201d (69):<\/p>\n

Arsenic, a potent cancer-maker, poses another challenge. Industry acknowledges that in situ production [\u2026] can warm groundwater and thereby liberate arsenic and other heavy metals from deep sediments. Canadian Natural Resources recently reported that one arsenic plume moved nearly twelve hundred feet over a fifteen-year period but estimated \u201cit would take centuries, if ever,\u201d for that arsenic to affect drinking water. No one, however, knows how much arsenic seventy-eight approved SAGD projects will eventually mobilize into Alberta\u2019s groundwater and from there into the Athabasca River. (Nikiforuk 72)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here again we see unpredictable \u201cmovement\u201d and \u201cleakage\u201d (Nikiforuk 140-141) tied to deep uncertainty and an inconceivable time-frame: \u201ccenturies, if ever\u201d for disaster to happen\u2014or not. My point is not to highlight the dangers of all this plume-movement\u2014Nikiforuk, with his impeccable and detailed research, has already done that\u2014but to note the ways in which this movement is unknowable in at least three ways, at a cost so external in its hiddenness that it becomes inconceivable. Maybe (or maybe not) the arsenic will move (first unknowability); maybe this movement will happen over centuries, or over thousands of years (second unknowability). As with the CO2, one can imagine that it would have to be monitored for millennia, even in the uncertainty of its movement. But by whom, and under what circumstances? (Third unknowability.)<\/p>\n

But at this point the smallness of human calculation collides with the vastness of cost beyond human scale, and certainly beyond the momentary scale of the spasm of capitalism now driving Tar Sands development. What human civilization will be found in Alberta in, say, two thousand years? What sense will it make of our \u2018addiction to oil\u2019? What will be the cost to that civilization of the future of the \u2018plumes\u2019 of \u2018moving\u2019 arsenic? The cost of monitoring it? Of ameliorating it? Of abandoning the region because it is unlivable? All of this is unknowable, and unknowable too, for that reason, are the final, externalized costs of \u2018unconventional\u2019 oil.<\/p>\n

Seeing these costs as \u2018hidden,\u2019 however\u2014and unknowable in their hiddenness\u2014has a corollary: they will leak out. Just as \u2018plumes\u2019 drift, and eventually show up in drinking water, or on the surface, so costs will appear, unpredictably, showing themselves in ways that do not immediately allow us to see them as costs. Just as arsenic might appear far from its initial source, on a completely different geological level, so cost might appear in forms that conceal, rather than reveal, their sources. Leakage, then, is both material and semiotic, and the two are linked, indeed inseparable. The cost of arsenic leakage depends on the movements and directions of that leakage, which can never be fully known and yet will refuse to stay hidden; in the same way cost as a measure and consequence shows up in different places, never fully knowable or definable, coming in different forms or versions, ruining things, leaving issues whose resolution or amelioration seems to have nothing to do with the strata out of which it has emerged. This will (or may) go on for centuries, millennia, forever, for people whose civilization is shrouded in the distant future. External cost, like arsenic plumes, like the fictional CO2 plumes, drifts, appears, disappears\u2014is known, ignored, represented, conjured away. Costs continue, or will continue, to be felt (or reckoned, ignored, displaced) long after what incurred them\u2014\u2018oil\u2019\u2014is forgotten. What is the \u2018origin\u2019 of this (not-so) hidden cost, then, of those plumes? Our \u2018fossil fuel addiction\u2019? This is as difficult to pinpoint as the movement of cost itself, in all its various guises. Just as we will have a hard time indicating the true cost\u2014let alone price\u2014of a barrel of \u2018unconventional\u2019 oil, so too we will have difficulty in accounting for the \u2018need\u2019 for oil that drives its extraction and refinement. We know by now all the arguments: that we could live with the consumption of a lot less energy, of a lot less fuel; that our houses could be more efficient, and our cities too. There is no need to drive so much, heat empty and leaky rooms, waste energy consuming stuff we do not want and that only alienates us from others. We know all that. But still we consume. We consume heedlessly, locked in the semio-material linkage of leakage, of the drift of poison and cost.<\/p>\n

What language can we use to represent cost, what calculus to quantify it? And what psychology, what physiology, what cultural urge or somatic drive to explain, fully reckon, the \u2018need\u2019 for the useless expenditure of energy? Energy that, moreover, comes to us from sources we do not need to know about, cannot know about. Thinking about the fate of the Athabasca river, really understanding its ecology, the movement of all the plumes, even the barest outline of all that, the future of all that to infinity, would ruin a nice drive to McDonald\u2019s. Just as cost and the origin of all those costs is unknowable, ungraspable, we have a motive to keep them unknowable. This, I suppose, is yet another level of unknowability. The unknowable, ungraspable urge to spend, to consume, to burn\u2014by definition irrational, given all the consequences of the act, themselves (or their costs) ultimately unknowable\u2014along with the willful desire, kept hidden no doubt, not to know. We know enough to want not to know. We want to not know all that we know is ultimately unknowable. Denegation to infinity. To blame it all on capitalism is certainly tempting, it could certainly work in an analysis\u2014but that supposes another calculation, one in which all the numbers work out correctly, one in which the future is perfectly mapped and known in all its sustainable glory. Certainly a worthy goal, that, but one fears that sustainability posited in the teeth of the radical unknowability of the cost of the human footprint is just one more example of semiotic leakage: an equalization of material process and the powers of calculation\/representation that is more wish than fulfillment. The river is already endangered, CO2 levels are already elevated, the future cost of all this is already a formidable conundrum. Ultimately the future of \u2018unconventional oil\u2019 may boil down not to precise calculations through which it can be known and controlled\u2014though all that is necessary\u2014but to its role as an agent<\/em> in which our very subjectivities are both constituted and called into question.<\/p>\n

The Agency of Oil<\/h4>\n

To say that the carbon footprint defies simple calculation is not to say that we have a free hand in polluting. It is to say, however, that our response to egregious catastrophes like the Athabasca Tar Sands projects must be nuanced in the sense that simple representation of a clearly identifiable event\u2014an event without leakage, so to speak\u2014by clearly identifiable and singularly responsible subjectivities is no longer sufficient.<\/p>\n

Why, after all, do corporations produce oil from the Tar Sands? Why do legislators and jurists enable them? Why do television and print journalists in the mainstream media affirm their activities? More is at stake, I think, than simple economic pressure, the love of profits, and so on. To be sure, all that is involved, but I think at the same time one must go back and consider, if you will, the genesis of the subjectivity of the agent of unconventional oil.<\/p>\n

As Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp point out in their article \u201cTurfgrass Subjects,\u201d the subject of ideology is itself the result of an interpellation on the part of the other. If, as Althusser has argued, individuals are constituted in ideology through systems of \u201cnatural necessity and immediate practice,\u201d this is possible because they act both as seemingly free agents and as \u201csubjected being[s] who submit[\u2026] to higher authority\u201d (Robbins and Sharp 121). This freedom in submission\u2014one is a responsible subject and one is subject to authority\u2014is characterized by a moment in which the subject recognizes him or herself in free submission: the interpellation of a policemen, followed by the response of the (now guilty, \u2018responsible\u2019) individual, is a moment of the constitution of subjectivity (self-awareness in subjection).<\/p>\n

Robbins and Sharp point out that it may not be a question merely of the agency of the policeman: turfgrass, to which the homeowner is subject, can play exactly the same role. They write:<\/p>\n

Thus, as the turf draws its demands from the culture and the community, it helps to mould the capitalist economy into specific forms, and helps to produce peculiar kinds of people\u2014turfgrass subjects. [\u2026] Industry is not producing desire, but is rather responding to the need for information required for the material practice of lawn care by the turfgrass subject. Neither does community pressure, a clear driver for individual behavior, engage in some simple way through the demands of industry. Rather, it can far more easily be argued that community pressures suit most directly the demands of turfgrass. (Robbins and Sharp 122)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the \u2018demanding\u2019 agent in a case like this need not be animate. To be sure, plants of all sorts \u2018use\u2019 humans to proliferate; as Michael Pollan has pointed out, corn, apples, marijuana and other crops \u201cuse\u201d us to aid them in their genetic quest for dominance, just as much as we \u201cuse\u201d them (Pollan). But what Robbins and Sharp say of turfgrass can be just as easily said of the automobile: virtually all of human society turns around the acquisition, care, development, and disposal of cars. In other words, an extraterrestrial observing earth could be forgiven for thinking that cars are the dominant species, and humans are bred simply to serve them.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to the Tar Sands, sustainability, and Peak Oil. As with turfgrass, oil too \u2018moulds the capitalist economy into certain forms\u2014indeed one could argue that the rise of capitalism itself was a function of ever cheaper and more efficient energy sources, with the energy produced by the burning of oil at the very end of the process (see Heinberg\u00a0 45-84). As subjects, we are interpellated by oil, by its demands and inconsistencies. As with the auto, we care for it, cultivate it, propagate it, rouse it from its slumber by freeing it from shale or melting it from sand, love it, abuse it, waste it. That is what we do, what we are. We are subjects of, and subjected to, the energy slaves provided by oil\u2014we are inconceivable without those slaves, their demands are our demands.[11]<\/a> When they call, we answer. (Indeed if Hegel were alive today, he would rewrite the master-slave dialectic as the confrontation between a subject living under \u2018late\u2019 capitalism and the energy slaves powering her appliances, cars, providing her food, her heat, her leisure.)<\/p>\n

But the demands of those energy slaves\u2014and ultimately of oil, whose agents they are\u2014are as close as we can come to quantifying the external costs of oil, and understanding Peak Oil as a function of those external costs. Just as, when the policeman calls, we can never be sure what he is calling about as we turn around, so too when oil calls we can never know fully what its demands, and its costs, will be. Where will the plumes of its poison reach? What will be the limits of those demands? When will oil go away, leave us without our dear slaves, force us to respond to the demands of ever more costly fuels? We can never be sure of the \u2018other,\u2019 never firmly grasp its position as us only separate from us, the mirror of our subjectivity all the while being a profoundly foreign agency, a profoundly alien and even hostile one. In the face of this anxiety we will leave no stone unturned, spare nothing to provide the apparatus of oil\u2014its vast industrial infrastructure, its energy slaves working in every continent and in every service\u2014with what it wants and needs, despite the obvious risks to the environment and even to our own health. We can never fully and clearly calculate that cost, but we can depict, quite clearly, our dependence on an agency that is unconcerned with all that other stuff, with all the stuff of our subjectivity in (impossible) isolation from a socio-technical \u2018frame\u2019 that brooks no opposition.<\/p>\n

ut another way, to free ourselves from that \u2018other\u2019 agency, as from turfgrass or some other noxious monoculture (corn, for example, itself obviously dependent on an oil infrastructure), we will have to imagine defeating an agency which has called forth, through its interpellation, our very subjectivities\u2014and something to which we are subjected<\/em>. Not an easy task, for we never really know where this agency is coming from or where it will take us; where, in other words, its plumes are drifting, where its leaks are opening, what new demands it will make. If we could draw the line once and for all and be done with it, it would perhaps be easy. But \u2018it\u2019 can never be pinned down: when will Peak Oil \u2018arrive\u2019? How will its external costs be manifested in 30 years, 50, 100? Who will be there to attend to those costs, how can we prepare those people of the future by preparing and attending to our own needs, now and in all the possible futures to come?<\/p>\n

It is not, then, just a matter of \u2018kicking our addiction to oil.\u2019 Or perhaps it is, if we can argue that any addiction\u2014to heroin, food, cigarettes, cars, whatever\u2014is about not just us and what we want, but also what the \u2018other\u2019 wants from us, how its character, makeup, whatever, determines how we go about acting (or not acting) in relation to it. If the heroin addict is called by his drug, finds it to be \u201cmy wife, and my life\u201d (as Lou Reed put it), so we, and the entire civilization, are called by oil. We turn around to face it\u2014with guilt, perhaps, but we turn around. Every other addiction flows (literally) from that of oil.[12]<\/a> To break our enslavement to our energy slaves means literally reformulating our subjectivity: how we constitute ourselves in every way in what we are subjected to. A task a thousand times harder than kicking any specific addiction, because energy enslavement through oil is the necessary condition of all others (it is hard to imagine the current vast army of heroin addicts in a solar-energy economy).<\/p>\n

One can imagine an antidote, after a sort, to this economy of interpellation and indebtedness (I am obliged to the policeman to turn around when he calls me: I owe it to him, to what he represents). It is the gift economy.[13]<\/a> Now there is already a gift giving implied in the Tar Sands developments, but it is not a very happy one. Canada is exporting synthetic crude to the US, and retaining all the environmental destruction that goes along with it. In short, the US gets the oil and Canada gets the devastation. This is the biggest gift one country can give another, dwarfing even the gift giving of the Marshall Plan about which Bataille waxed so enthusiastic.[14]<\/a> But this gifting is nothing more than an affirmation of the supremacy of oil and its agency, through recognizing above all the US\u2019s need<\/em> for oil.<\/p>\n

One could imagine another giving of oil: to give the gift of oil in this case would be to refuse dependence on it. Rather than giving the poisoned gift (to oneself, one\u2019s own country) of ecological devastation, one could give the gift of the agency of the other.[15]<\/a> In this case, the other\u2014here oil\u2014would not be seen as a hostile mirror-image, but rather as a fragile, death-bound agent of finitude (which oil, at its peak, certainly is). In Marguerite Duras\u2019s screenplay for the Alain Resnais film Hiroshima mon amour<\/em>, Duras has her heroine cut herself off from the power of the traumatizing memory of the shooting of her German lover at the end of the war. Speaking to her own 18 year old self in the city of Nevers, she says: \u201cJe te donne \u00e0 l\u2019oubli\u201d\u2014\u201cI give you to forgetting.\u201d[16]<\/a> In this case, the ferocious agency of her other, her double\u2014herself as a traumatized girl, guilty of collaboration\u2014is given<\/em> to forgetting. In this scenario, a lack of remembrance is an agent\u2014it receives something, a memory\u2014but an agent as non-agency. Of course no forgetting is permanent, one is always subjected to the horror of the eternal return, but in this case forgetting can serve as a recipient of a gift whose giving puts in question an economy of demand, need, addiction, and careful calculation of payback (cost). This is, in other words, a movement by which another<\/em> economy is embraced; this one, however, is not one of giving to another clearly defined entity (the US, for example) but to forgetting\u2014the absence of agency\u2014itself. A forgetting as gift.<\/p>\n

This, then, is a relation not of precise calculation but of disengagement. Imagine if one could give turfgrass to forgetting. Just stop watering and mowing it. But how to give oil\u2014now in its imperious agency \u2018unconventional\u2019\u2014to forgetting? That\u2019s a much more difficult question, because oil, as I\u2019ve noted, is in many ways the \u2018root\u2019 of all other addictions.<\/p>\n

This is hard, in the same way that kicking turfgrass is hard. The agency of turfgrass depends not just on what grass wants (water, pesticides, the labor of mowing), but on what a number of socio-technical infrastructures demand: neighbors, friends, communities, industries. Grass\u2019s demands, we could say, are framed by a number of other subjectivizing structures. But the demands of oil, its unknowability\u2014Where is it? Where are the plumes associated with it leaking? How is it to be gotten? What is its finitude and futurity?\u2014is tied to the demands not just of some other people but the gravity of one\u2019s apparent survival. My car interpellates me, but my food keeps me alive.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is the true moment of not-knowing. At a certain point, the gift to forgetting cannot be knowing, anticipating, calculating. Calculation may be only an infinite regress in which the overweening agency of the other\u2014oil\u2019s interpellating power\u2014is recognized and ultimately affirmed: how can we balance accounts, how can oil be mastered, but only to the extent that its use is formatted within a fully sustainable economy? Forget<\/em> by just doing it: stop feeding it. Starve the beast. Consume less. Eat less (especially \u2018cheap\u2019 food). Stop driving. Hell, give up the internet. Do anything to break a dependency in which external costs are seen only as a staggering sublime, a mind-boggling infinite, rather than what they also are: ideological forms to be given away, to the recurring oblivion of forgetting.<\/p>\n

Such a forgetting cannot be permanent, definitive\u2014any more than can be that of Duras\u2019s heroine. The days of the supposed easy measure of efficacy (like the easy measure of externalities) is over. But it is a gesture, the first one to \u2018take,\u2019 or to let go.[17]<\/a><\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/h4>\n

[1]<\/a> See, for example, the prediction of Thanksgiving 2005 as the official date of peak oil, at Kenneth Deffeyes\u2019s website: http:\/\/www.princeton.edu\/hubbert\/current-events-05-11.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> On July 11, 2008, to be precise: http:\/\/afp.google.com\/article\/ALeqM5gsJAY3OhpMxZLy_GSprXLsqqTY2A<\/a><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> \u201c\u2018Peak Oil theory is garbage as far as we\u2019re concerned\u2019, said Robert W. Esser, a geologist by training and CERA\u2019s senior consultant\/director of global oil and gas resources, according to Business Week<\/em> online national correspondent Mark Morrison (Sept 7).\u201d See http:\/\/www.energybulletin.net\/node\/20418<\/a>. HIS-CERA defines itself as a \u201cglobal energy information company,\u201d providing research to corporations. Its website: http:\/\/www.ihs.com\/about\/index.aspx<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> See Yergin\u2019s comments, as reported on The Energy Blog<\/span>: http:\/\/thefraserdomain.typepad.com\/energy\/2006\/11\/cera_the_undula.html<\/a><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> On \u201cEnergy Return on Energy Investment\u201d (EROEI), see Heinberg 125-126.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> See the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, 18 Feb., 2009: \u201cCrude Oil Slides Below Key Threshold of $35 a barrel\u201d: http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2009\/feb\/18\/business\/fi-gas18<\/a><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> See Gail the Actuary, \u201cOil Limits, Recession, and Bumping Against the Growth Ceiling,\u201d for an exhaustive discussion on the relation between the availability of oil and the prosperity of the growth economy.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> See Pollan, \u201cWhy Bother?\u201d on the virtues of confronting global climate change through changes in energy and food policy\u2014this in an open letter addressed to the next president (undecided at the time of the writing of the article). Such idealistic, and inspiring, articles rarely seem to appear in the Times<\/em> any more (at least as of 2012).<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> See Krauss: \u201cThis striking shift in energy started in the 1990s with the first deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil, but it has taken off in the last decade as a result of declining conventional fields, climbing energy prices and swift technological change. [\u2026] The United States may now have the means to reduce its half century of dependence on the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> On external costs, see Laffont.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> On energy slaves, see Heinberg 30-31.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> By this I mean that the flourishing of our \u201clate capitalist\u201d economy is entirely dependent on fossil fuel inputs: agribusiness (monocultures), transportation, the widespread production of delightful commodities and toys, all of this is unthinkable without massive fossil fuel inputs. The cost of every other addiction goes up when the overall cost of oil goes up.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> For the classic analysis of gift economies, see Mauss.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> See, for example, the last chapter of Bataille\u2019s The Accursed Share<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> In German, of course, gift<\/em> means poison. On the poison-gift connection, see Mauss 81.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> The full line is: \u201cPetite tondue de Nevers, je te donne \u00e0 l\u2019oubli\u201d\u2014\u201cLittle shaved-headed girl from Nevers, I give you to forgetting\u201d (Duras 118). Duras\u2019s heroine has had her head shaved by members of the Resistance (or simply by nasty townspeople), as punishment for \u201chorizontal collaboration.\u201d<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Szeman notes the absence of a coherent discourse on the left concerning peak oil and all its consequences. How, precisely, to see that capital will end before nature, and not vice versa? (820-821). Citing Jan Oosthoek and Barry Gills (821), Szeman notes that what\u2019s needed is \u201ca new political economy [that] must take our impact on the planter\u2019s environment fully and realistically into account.\u201d As Szeman also notes, this is \u201ceasy enough to say, but much, much harder to produce when what is called for is a full-scale retraction against the flow of a social whose every element moves toward accumulation and expansion.\u201d I would note here only Oosthoek and Gills\u2019s use of the word \u201crealistic\u201d in the above quote. How does one take one\u2019s impact realistically into account? What is real? I can only suggest here that a gift economy might very well have a different definition of the real\u2014or the Real\u2014than that of a growth\/debt economy.<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/h4>\n

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy<\/em>. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Print.<\/p>\n

Deffeyes, Kenneth S. Hubbert’s Peak : the Impending World Oil Shortage<\/em>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.<\/p>\n

Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon amour<\/em>. Paris: Galllimard, 1960. Print.<\/p>\n

Gail the Actuary. \u201cOil Limits, Recession, and Bumping Against the Growth Ceiling.\u201d The Oil Drum<\/em>. August 17, 2011. Web. Feb. 20, 2012.<\/p>\n

Heinberg, Richard. The Party\u2019s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies<\/em>. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n

Krauss, Clifford. \u201cNew Technologies Redraw the World\u2019s Energy Picture.\u201d The New York Times<\/em>. Oct. 25, 2011. Web. Feb. 20, 2012.<\/p>\n

Kunstler, James Howard. World Made by Hand<\/em>. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n

Laffont, J. J. \u201cExternalities.\u201d In The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics<\/em>. 2nd<\/sup> Edition. Ed. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. London: Pelgrave-Mcmillan, 2008.\u00a0 The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Web. Feb. 20, 2012.<\/p>\n

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies<\/em>. Trans. W. D. Halls. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.<\/p>\n

Nikiforuk, Andrew. Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent<\/em>. Vancouver BC: Greystone Books, 2011. Print.<\/p>\n

Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant\u2019s Eye View of the World<\/em>. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cWhy Bother?\u201d The New York Times<\/em> April 20, 2008. Web. Feb. 20, 2012.<\/p>\n

Robbins, Paul and Julie Sharp. \u201cTurfgrass Subjects: The Political Economy of Urban Monoculture.\u201d In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism<\/em>. Ed. N. Heynen, M Kaika and E. Swyngedow. London: Routledge, 2006. 110-128. Print.<\/p>\n

Szeman, Imre. \u201cSystem Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster.\u201d South Atlantic Quarterly<\/em> 106:4(Fall 2007): 805-823. Print.<\/p>\n

Yergin, Daniel. The Prize : the Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power<\/em>. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Print.<\/p>\n

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Copyright Allan Stoekl. This article is licensed under a <\/span>Creative Commons 3.0 License<\/a> although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing\u00a0under the\u00a0Canadian <\/span>Copyright Act<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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3-2 | Table of Contents\u00a0| http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.17742\/IMAGE.sightoil.3-2.4 |\u00a0Stoekl PDF Allan Stoekl | Pennsylvania State University Unconventional Oil and the Gift of the Undulating Peak Whatever Happened to Peak Oil? A funny thing happened on the way to Peak Oil. It has not happened, or so it seems, at first. A few years ago\u2014between 2005 and 2009, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4062,"featured_media":3870,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[99,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sighting-oil-3-2","category-article","wpautop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/IMG_6240.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p707hj-WI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4062"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3640"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9196,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640\/revisions\/9196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}