Since world oil probably peaked in 2018 (EIA 2021), clearly there will be a time when there are oil shortages. The price may be high at first, but that often brings on a financial crash (Hamilton 2013), unemployment rises as business shut down, and with less oil demand the price goes down, too low to entice oil companies to explore, drill, and produce more oil.  And that’s even more true now than it was in the past — the remaining oil is poor quality, very expensive, and difficult to get — miles under the ocean floor or in the arctic where permafrost and icebergs prevent drilling whether on land or sea.

I am sure that politicians and other government experts at all levels are aware of peak oil.  You can see that clearly in the congressional hearings, from the military, and the Hirsch (2005) report on Peak oil for the Department of energy (see all posts at category Experts, topic Government here or by subtopics). For example, see my post on Oil ShockWave. I summarized an executive crisis simulation that illustrated the strategic dangers of oil dependence by confronting a mock U.S. cabinet with highly geopolitical crises that trigger sharp increases in oil prices. They had to grapple with the economic and strategic consequences of this ‘oil shock’ and formulate a response plan for the nation. Spoiler alert: they didn’t come up with a plan, and worse yet, and the military argued that they should get all the oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  To do what? Start a war in the Middle East and waste our last drops of oil?

I’ve had a hard time finding plans to cope with an energy crisis. I suspect they’re top secret within the military and Homeland Security. But recently I discovered that the governors of most states have energy crisis plans, though not all states do, and they vary in what the governor can do and is expected to do in order to cope. I’m working on the California plan now, but it is terribly out of date, from 2014, and the plan is to anticipate shortages and scramble to buy supplies to avert an energy crisis. If the grid goes down, utilities are expected to have plans for mutual aide from out-of-state utilities. There’s some hope renewables can provide more power, but even in 2014 California was aware renewables would destabilize the grid and make additional natural gas plants essential (CEC 2014).

Of course I should have figured out actions would take place at the state level, with the governor in charge. S(he) would then ask the Federal government for help, call in the national guard, already have a plan to get more energy, where vulnerable populations were, and contacts at the county and city level to do the actual work of opening shelters and providing food.

But these state plans don’t mention rationing, because they aren’t planning for the Long Emergency. There is no planning for oil decline visible to the public, probably because the plans are too grim, perhaps involving preventing a Grapes of Wrath mass movement of millions to other states and cities. And dealing with the Four Horsemen who are likely to appear when oil shortages are beyond coping with.

An oil shock is coming. I make the case for in “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the future of transportation”, that it is diesel shortages that are the most critical to resolve, since diesel trucks and engines plant, harvest, and deliver food, haul garbage, mine, log, and the rest of the hard work that needs being done.

I’ve yet to find rationing plans for energy or food or anything else at the state level.

But I think I know why. In 1991 our house burned down in the Oakland firestorm, with 3500 homes lost and it was the most expensive fire in U.S. history. It was obvious that with climate change there’d be a lot more wildfires and drought, or other disasters such as earthquakes, ArkStorm, and tsunamis.

So I called the State of California emergency services and asked if they had plans, or already were stockpiling food, tents, blankets and other goods to cope with future disasters. I don’t remember who I talked to, but she explained that the state can not hoard and dispense goods in anticipation such as  food, blankets, tents and more. That would be too expensive and politically risky, various interest groups would claim they weren’t getting enough goods compared to others.  Too costly to maintain. Another bureaucracy. And what do you do with all the food and other perishables that weren’t used every year? Plus she saw help coming from the federal level, from FEMA and other monetary aid to buy and deliver goods, perhaps with the national guard.

Local governments are already barely able to run cities, they’re so complex and there’s never enough money or time to do what needs to be done, they count a great deal as it is on private charities, churches, and volunteers to support the poor, clean up parks and other services the city should be providing.

Cox (2013) has the best ideas on how to ration, but in Republican states, rationing will be by wealth, so if you can afford gasoline great, otherwise stay home and starve to death. No nanny state for you!

But here’s an old idea that might come in handy from the Technocrats back in the 1930s for blue states. Technocracy proposed a government where scientific and technical experts made the appropriate rules under the auspices of elected officials based on science, not politics.  Sounds good to me!  At a time when nearly all of our existential problems require scientific literacy, nearly all politicians are lawyers or businessmen, not scientists and staff who aren’t scientists either to advise them. M King Hubbert was a part of this and early on warned of limits to growth, since the planet was finite so growth couldn’t increase forever, after all, there was only so much land, so much coal, and so much iron. At some point growth had to hit limits.

A leader within the Technocracy movement was Howard Scott, who said things like “A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation.”  He thought that as we harnessed energy more and more efficiently to do more and more work, that people might only need to work 16 hours a week. Everyone would have plenty of goods and free time.

Money could be abandoned and replaced with energy certificates. Everything would be paid for based on how much energy it took to make it, with nearly all of that energy coming from fossil fuels or hydroelectric power.  And everyone would get the same allotment of energy certificates as long as they worked 16 hours a week.  These couldn’t be traded and expire in a year so no one accumulated wealth.  If purchases were kept track of, government run industries would have a good idea of what they needed to produce in the future and how much energy that would take.  Everyone would be equal and well taken care of.

Even Franklin Roosevelt sounded like a technocrat at times, once declaring that “our last frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free land.” The nation had reached a mature stage, in which it was time for a “reappraisal of values,” turning from an emphasis on growth to the “soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand,” and “of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people (Inman 2016).

Nobel prize winner Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) was one of the earliest to understand why economics should be based on energy. He wrote that financial debts grew exponentially at compound interest but the real economy was based on exhaustible stocks of fossil fuels, whose energy could not be used again. He had revolutionary proposals for reining in debt to create a more sound economic system based on energy that is now part of the field of biophysical and ecological economics (Zencey 2009, Fix 2020).

In an energy crisis, if ecological economist steady-state economy plans could be implemented in a hurry during the emergency to stabilize society, this would be the time to do so, since capitalism is about to go away because it’s based on endless growth on a finite planet, and limits to reserves of oil, coal, phosphorous and many other minerals are already here or will be within decades. I suspect that current financial system and capitalism have too strong a grip for an alternative system anticipating declining economic growth to be adopted unless there’s a crisis. And even then authoritarianism is more likely (Friedemann 2021).

In the next oil shortage, rather than money, state governments should issue energy certificates to all  citizens equally to prevent social unrest.  Perhaps only for gasoline initially, with diesel carefully allocated to agriculture and other essential needs using a different system.  But meat and other products embodying a great deal of energy — and water for that matter — ought to be given rough values so that energy certificates could be extended to food.

Above all, the reason that there are no plans can be found in the book “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Governments Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die. (see my book reviews here: Raven Rock parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

This book exposes the government’s plans to carry on government and democracy after a nuclear war. In the initial plans that began during the Truman administration, civilians were to be saved, but as time went on it became clear this couldn’t be done. Only top government and military officials would be offered a space in bunkers buried under mountains. This is still the plan.

So if the government wasn’t planning on helping the American people survive for two weeks after a nuclear war, then Homeland Security and FEMA surely don’t have any plans to help us cope or survive the permanent emergency ahead of energy and resource decline, which they certainly know about as shown in my posts at energyskeptic under menu item experts, categories government and military.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

References

Cox S (2013) Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing. The New Press.

EIA (2021) International. Data. Petroleum and other liquids. U.S. Energy Information Administration. https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/annual-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=0000000000000000000000000000000000vg&u=0&f=A&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=94694400000&e=1609459200000

Fix B (2020) Frederick Soddy’s Debt Dynamics. Economics from the top down.

Friedemann A (2021) Can democracy survive peak oil? energyskeptic.com  https://energyskeptic.com/2021/deja-vu-lessons-learned-from-the-peak-oil-crises-of-1973-1979/

Inman M (2016) The Oracle of Oil.  A Maverick Geologists Quest for a Sustainable Future. W W Norton.

Zencey E (2009) Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy. New York Times.