To be sure, the solar dream staggered along for a while. An Ericsson-inspired inventor provided solar power in 1901 to an ostrich farm in Pasadena, California. A Massachusetts schoolteacher wrote a solar-power textbook, probably the world’s first, in 1903. A Philadelphia engineer built a solar irrigation plant in Cairo in 1906. But the last and greatest descendant of Mouchot and Ericsson was an uncompromising Portuguese priest, Manuel António Gomes, known as Father Himalaya for his extreme height.
Born into a poor family in 1868, Father Himalaya went into the priesthood mainly for the paycheck. A polymath who taught himself chemistry, biology, and optics, he invented an explosive, himalayite, said to be safer and more powerful than dynamite, and the first rotary steam engine. He was critical of other solar pioneers, because their mirrors did not track the sun with sufficient precision: their inexact alignments meant that the central boiler cast a shadow on the mirror. By contrast, Father Himalaya’s first solar engine, which avoided both problems, generated temperatures hot enough to melt iron. Indeed, its very effectiveness was a problem. His second prototype, incorrectly operated by an assistant, melted itself down before a delighted mob. Undaunted, Father Himalaya decided to build a new machine that would track the sun automatically, without needing unreliable human operators.
The Pyrheliophoro was unveiled at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Shaped like a sail, its reflector consisted of 6,117 hand-sized mirrors attached to a steel frame forty-two feet high. The Pyrheliophoro focused light so intensely that an awed New York Times reporter noted that the reflected heat killed birds forty feet above it. It could produce temperatures up to 7000°F, then the highest ever seen on Earth. Fascinated businesspeople thronged Father Himalaya, who firmly rejected their blandishments. “The sun machine is not yet in an industrial stage,” he said. “I cannot lie to form a company, and it is necessary to lie [to do so].”
Instead he took the Pyrheliophoro back to Portugal. There he found out that his backers had pulled the plug. Portugal, like France, had too much coal. A British firm had obtained a monopoly on power distribution and was building giant coal plants. Nobody paid attention when Father Himalaya proclaimed his Ericsson-style vision of free neighborhood electricity powered by mirrors. Solar research had been the product of anxiety about fossil fuels. When the anxiety faded, so did the interest.
Hubbert’s Pique
Marion King Hubbert, an idealist through and through, believed in the power of Science to guide the human enterprise. A geophysicist at Columbia University in the early 1930s, he was one of the half-dozen co-founders of Technocracy Incorporated, a crusading effort to establish a government of all-knowing, hyper-logical engineers and scientists—men rather like Hubbert himself, as it happened. (Hubbert had impeccable academic credentials: undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago.) Technocracy adherents believed that the world was controlled by flows of energy and mineral resources, and that society should be based on this understanding. Rather than allowing economies to dance to the senseless, febrile beat of supply and demand, Technocrats wanted to organize them on the basis of a quantity controlled by the eternal laws of physics: energy.
Politically unbiased experts in red-and-gray Technocracy uniforms would assay each nation’s yearly energy output, then divide it fairly among the citizenry, each person receiving an allocation of so many joules or kilowatt-hours per month. If people wanted to buy, say, shirts, they would look up the price on a table of energy equivalents calculated by objective Technocratic savants. The leader of the system, the Great Engineer, would oversee a new nation, the North American Technate, a merger of North America, Central America, Greenland, and the northern bits of South America. No more would self-interested businesspeople and short-sighted politicians run rampant; the North American Technate would be smooth, efficient, and rational. Practical skills and the hard sciences would be prized; law, politics, the liberal arts, and the so-called “life of the mind” would be relegated to the cellar. Hubbert spent more than a decade laboring to transform this vision into reality.
Hubbert was a poor boy from central Texas who scrabbled his way to the top. Even before he finished his dissertation he was invited to lead Columbia’s new geophysics program. These early accomplishments, real and impressive, gave Hubbert an equally real and impressive estimation of his own abilities. He came to believe that he was destined to exert an impact upon society. In this he was wholly successful. Hubbert, one of the nation’s most important petroleum scientists, built much of the intellectual framework for the environmental movement. He was a Wizard who became a Prophet.
In New York Hubbert fell under the spell of a charismatic Greenwich Village layabout named Howard Scott. According to Mason Inman, Hubbert’s biographer, Scott claimed to be, variously, the son of the head of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway; the scion of an aristocratic family that had lost a fortune in Constantinople; an honors graduate of Berlin’s select Technische Hochschule; the manager of a huge nitrate plant during the war; and the creator of a revolutionary Theory of Energy Determinants. A newspaper exposé proved that none of these claims was true, except possibly the last. It didn’t matter, either to Hubbert or the thousands of others who were mesmerized by Scott’s apocalyptic predictions of the capitalist system’s unavoidable collapse by 1942. Guided by the Theory of Energy Determinants, Scott proclaimed, Technocracy would then step in to create a Utopia in the Technate. Alas, working out the theory took Scott so long that when Hubbert met him he had been jobless for years and was about to be ejected from his apartment. Hubbert paid his debts and moved in with him.
M. King Hubbert Credit 60
Scott never managed to put his theory on paper. Moved by a disciple’s fervor, Hubbert set aside his other work and devoted 1934 to writing a definitive, 250-page statement of Technocracy dogma. The Technocracy Study Course, as it was called, dismissed the world’s businesspeople, social scientists, lawyers, and teachers as charlatans. Rather than being products of economics, psychology, culture, and history, the Course said, societies were ruled by the kind of immutable natural laws that the biologists Raymond Pearl and Georgii Gause had discovered when experimenting with fruit flies in bottles and protozoa in petri dishes.
Pearl had placed a breeding pair of fruit flies in a bottle with a food supply that was replenished at a constant level. He found that the fruit-fly population increased in a way that could be described by an S-shaped curve—an initial rise followed by a leveling off. The leveling off was because the fruit-fly population hit the limit of its food supply. (The curve for Gause’s protozoans was almost identical, except that the protozoa had a finite food supply, so they died out after exhausting it.) Scott’s great insight—Technocracy’s central dogma—was that humans behaved exactly like fruit flies. Hubbert laid this out in the Technocracy Study Course:
Should the fruit flies continue to multiply at their initial compound interest rate, it can be shown by computation that in a relatively few weeks the number would be considerably greater than the capacity of the bottle. This being so, it is a very simple matter to see why there is a definite limit to the number of fruit flies that can live in the bottle. Once the number is reached, the death rate is equal to the birth rate, and population growth ceases. Very little thought and examination of the facts should suffice to convince one that in the case of the production of coal, pig iron, or automobiles, circumstances are not essentially different.
Politicians and economists who argued for perpetual economic growth were deluded, Hubbert said. The population of the United States would hit a maximum “of probably not more than 135,000,000 people” in the 1950s, and after that the nation simply would not contain enough new consumers to need more consumer products. Hoodwinked by the fantasy of continuing growth, the ruling class had lost sight of these basic scientific realities. They were rushing toward inevitable disaster—after which they would be replaced, thank Heaven, by an elite corps of eco-engineering mandarins with the technical know-how t
o “operate the entire physical equipment of the North American Continent.” In other words, Technocracy.
Surprising to Hubbert, Technocracy was mocked rather than embraced. The group split into factions, and Hubbert slowly became disenchanted. According to Inman, his biographer, a “visibly drunk” Hubbert showed up in 1949 at Technocracy’s Manhattan headquarters. He demanded to know if Scott had predicted that capitalism would fall apart by 1942. No, Hubbert was told. This was a lie. Scott had long predicted just that. Now it was seven years past the deadline, and capitalism was still there. For Hubbert, the failure of Scott’s predictions was empirical proof that the Theory of Energy Determinants was wrong. “Hubbert never attended another Technocracy meeting,” Inman wrote. It was the end of his career as a Wizard.
That same year Hubbert visited a friend who was attending a big natural-resource conference sponsored by the new United Nations. At the conference Hubbert was startled to hear a prominent geologist assert that the world still had 1.5 trillion barrels of obtainable oil, enough to last centuries. “I nearly fell out of my seat,” Hubbert recalled later. “I was up here, relaxed, visiting with my friend—and good God Almighty! And nobody said boo.” A trillion-and-a-half barrels was “just an utterly preposterous amount of oil.” Annoyed, Hubbert raised his hand at the end of the session. The geologist’s claims, he said, were “an exercise in metaphysics.” The dispute grew heated and did not end in agreement.
Lacking a real theory of petroleum formation, early petroleum geologists had assumed that oil and gas deposits must be located in zones similar to those where oil and gas had been found before. They looked, so to speak, for more Pitholes. Because few such areas were known, researchers believed that petroleum deposits therefore must be rare. In reality, new oil was found repeatedly—by wildcatters who, unaware of expert opinion, searched for it in all the wrong places. After many such stories, scientists had become persuaded that petroleum could be found in some form almost anywhere. The main obstacle to finding oil, the famed petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt wrote in 1952, was the conviction that it wasn’t there: “Where oil is first found, in the final analysis, is the minds of men.”
To Hubbert, this kind of thinking was sheer mysticism. Earth, being finite, contains a finite number of hydrocarbon molecules in a finite set of locations. Supplies are therefore limited—a fact that Hubbert had been pondering since his undergraduate days, when he speculated that the world might run out of the most desirable types of coal “within fifty years.” Now, spurred by his annoyance with the 1.5 trillion figure, he developed the first formal model of petroleum peak output. Between the first Pennsylvania wells and 1947 the world had produced 57.7 billion barrels, Hubbert estimated. “Of this, one half has been produced and consumed since 1937”—that is, in the previous ten years. “One cannot refrain from asking, ‘How long can we keep it up? Where is it taking us?’ ” The answer, in his view, was obvious: “the production curve of any given species of fossil fuel will rise, pass through one or several maxima, and then decline asymptotically to zero.”
Decline asymptotically to zero! The potential consequences were vast. Hubbert believed that the fossil-fuel explosion had created the population explosion—that consuming coal, oil, and gas had provided the impetus to drive our species up Gause’s S-shaped curve. Because the amount of the world’s oil was by definition finite, the supply would fall to zero after too much use. As a result, we were bound, so to speak, to hit the edge of the petri dish. Hubbert drew Gause-like graphs showing the simultaneous rise in energy use and population—and the inescapable future peak in both.
Hubbert’s original 1956 diagram of the rise and fall of global oil production Credit 61
Hubbert’s views echoed those in The Road to Survival, published the year before, except that he thought in terms of physical limits, rather than biological limits. Still, he ended up in the same place: capitalist-style economic growth was not only unsustainable, it was actively driving humankind beyond its limits to disaster. “The future of our civilization largely depends,” he wrote, on whether humanity will be able “to evolve a culture more nearly in conformity with the limitations imposed on us by the basic properties of matter and energy.”
These ideas might have been expected to draw fire from Hubbert’s employer—he had become second-in-command at a big Shell Oil research center in Houston. But they attracted little notice until 1956, when Hubbert explained his thinking at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio. Just before Hubbert gave his talk, he later alleged, he was telephoned by an appalled Shell public-relations executive. “Couldn’t you tone it down a bit?” he recalled the man asking. “Couldn’t you take the sensational parts out?” Hubbert, rarely in doubt about his own abilities, refused to back down. Between 1965 and 1970, he told the audience, crude-oil yield in the continental United States would peak. Global production would hit its maximum by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In 1964 Hubbert left Shell to work for the U.S. Geological Survey. As the University of Iowa historian Tyler Priest has written, Hubbert didn’t have it easy at USGS: his boss, USGS director Vincent E. McKelvey, became his most rabid critic. Like Hubbert, McKelvey saw himself as a grand thinker with wisdom to impart about society at large. But unlike Hubbert, his vision was sunny and optimistic, Borlaugian to the core. Human ingenuity and technical prowess, this Wizard believed, were the sturdy vehicles that would carry us into a future of unbounded affluence.
Unsurprisingly, the two men clashed. McKelvey’s USGS sent out a flood of cheery projections of the country’s oil reserves, as did the oil industry. All the while, Hubbert broadcast jeremiads about imminent exhaustion, none of them published by USGS. The dispute soon grew personal: Hubbert accused McKelvey of stealing his papers; McKelvey accused Hubbert of withholding information; the two men wrote dueling reports for different branches of the government. In a fit of pique, McKelvey snatched away Hubbert’s secretary, a low blow in the pre-computer era. According to Priest, the historian, Hubbert struck back by blackballing McKelvey when he was nominated for the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In a setback to McKelvey, Hubbert’s estimate proved to be correct: U.S. crude-oil production hit a peak in 1970 and then slowly fell. As the output declined, former interior secretary Stewart Udall—“a Hubbert man,” he called himself—ridiculed McKelvey’s work as “an enormous energy balloon of inflated promises and boundless optimism [that] had long since lost touch with any mainland reality.” In 1977 President Jimmy Carter forced McKelvey to resign—the first such ouster, Priest reported, “in the survey’s ninety-eight-year history.”
McKelvey’s fate may have been sealed by the Arab oil shock, which resonated with Hubbert’s message of limits. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, several Arab nations decided to slap the United States for supporting Israel. They cut oil production for four months. Huge public alarm ensued. Passions boiled over as people waited for hours in gas lines; line-jumpers got into fistfights. To Hubbert, the oil shocks presaged “the end of the Oil Age.”
Today most historians and economists instead view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies. Arab petro-states could not target individual nations, the energy analyst Michael Lynch told me, because national oil companies sell oil and gas to what is, in effect, a single worldwide pool controlled by middlemen. Any embargo thus could only raise prices equally across the planet, rather than striking at a single nation. Or, rather, the Arabs couldn’t have targeted a single nation if President Richard Nixon had not imposed price caps on U.S. oil and gas two years before as an inflation-fighting measure. The embargo cut global oil output by about a quarter, pushing up petroleum prices worldwide. Middlemen could take advantage of the higher prices only if they sold their oil to nations other than the United States, with its price caps. Doing just that transformed a modest global shortfall into a U.S.-specific oil drought.
That was not how events were understood a
t the time. One year previously, an MIT-based research team had created an international furor with The Limits to Growth, a book-length study that used computer models to predict that unless radical steps were taken the world would soon run out of resources, precipitating civilizational collapse. Hubbert’s name does not appear in Limits. Nor does Vogt’s. Nonetheless their fingerprints are all over it—indeed, the Limits authors, influenced by Hubbert’s peak-oil theory, had futilely begged him to collaborate with them. The final result was as if the MIT team had plugged Hubbert’s equations into a computer and applied them beyond oil to resources like coal, iron, natural gas, and aluminum. Graph after graph depicted a Hubbertian race to a peak of production, followed by a ruinous decline. Like Hubbert, the Limits writers saw a direct connection between economic growth and calamity. As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock “seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth.” The fistfights at the gas pump were viewed as a harbinger of a coming crisis caused by overconsumption. The Vogtian vision of inescapable limits to carrying capacity had become an organizing principle of environmental thought.
Propelled by the oil shock, fears of scarcity wafted across the nation like a bad smell. Rumors of shortages in any number of goods—gasoline, salmon, cheese, onions, raisins—caused brief, unwarranted episodes of anxiety, some of them about commodities one would never imagine could run out. The Great Toilet Paper Panic of 1973 occurred after talk-show host Johnny Carson joked about a shortage, causing frightened consumers to buy out stores. Carson’s jest ricocheted to Japan, which imported almost all of its paper from the United States; toilet-paper supplies disappeared from Hokkaido to Kyushu. The next elected president, Jimmy Carter, was a Hubbertian. Soon after his inauguration, he gave a nationwide address warning that the planet’s petroleum could be gone “by the end of the next decade”—i.e., by 1989. Hubbert himself thought the disaster would occur a bit later, in about 1995.