California must wake up to looming fuel crisis

Gasoline prices are advertised at a gas station near Lindbergh Field as a plane approaches to land in San Diego, California in this June 1, 2008 file photo. To match Reuters Witness story OIL/TAXI in which, Daniel Fineren, who is a senior energy correspondent, describes his recent encounter with a Spanish taxi driver on the way home from the World Petroleum Congress. To match Reuters Witness story OIL/TAXI. REUTERS/Mike Blake (UNITED STATES) less Gasoline prices are advertised at a gas station near Lindbergh Field as a plane approaches to land in San Diego, California in this June 1, 2008 file photo. To match Reuters Witness story OIL/TAXI in which, ... more Photo: Mike Blake, Reuters Photo: Mike Blake, Reuters Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close California must wake up to looming fuel crisis 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

I lived in Berkeley for 16 years before getting around to stashing my 5 gallons of water and 20 cans of fruit cocktail. I'm as ready as can be for the big earthquake we're all waiting for. But what I'm not prepared for - what virtually no Californian is prepared for - is the other Big One: peak oil.

That's the day when we hit the tipping point, when demand for oil exceeds the supply.

Like it or not, oil fuels the engines of industrialized economies. In California, we burn through nearly 20 billion gallons of the stuff each year just driving around. Then there's the oil we use to grow and transport food and pump water, the oil that fuels planes, trains and cargo ships, and the oil that is embedded in every computer, every inch of asphalt and every bit of plastic. So imagine my surprise when I learned that oil supplies are running out - and that the federal government is doing nothing to prepare for it.

Speculation regarding the human impact of oil shortages runs the gamut from a deep recession to a second Great Depression to widespread famine and social disintegration. As an urban dweller with two kids, a 40-square-foot yard and little ability to keep houseplants alive, much less grow my own food, words like "famine" and Web sites likewww.dieoff.orgtend to hit my panic button.

As the third-largest refiner of crude oil in the United States and home to 206 oil fields, California has more petrol than most states. But we're also the third largest consumer of transportation fuels in the world, just behind the United States itself and China, and we import 45 percent of it from abroad.

Energy forecasting is a tricky business. On one side are those who say that we will never produce more oil than we do right now and should expect supplies to start dwindling rapidly by 2015 at the latest, at which point we're in deep trouble. Shell Oil recently joined their ranks: In January, its CEO called on the government to initiate a man-on-the-moon intensity project to prepare for the supply-demand gap.

On the other hand, skeptics don't see peak oil occurring before 2030, though they agree that the sooner we make the switch to alternative fuels, the better.

Whatever the case, we already feel the effects of a tight oil and natural gas market when we fill up our tanks and pay our PG&E bills. But it's hard to predict when exactly the supply crunch will really start mangling the economy - and changing the way we live.

The biggest oil and gas guzzler in the Golden State may surprise you - it's the food we eat. California's 11 million acres of cropland produce more food than any other state: Half of the nation's fruits, vegetables and nuts originate here, as do 1 out of every 5 glasses of milk. But the $32 billion-a-year agricultural industry is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, a fact that is just beginning to weigh on the minds of thrifty farmers alarmed by recent spikes in the price of petroleum-based pesticides, fertilizers and diesel fuel.

With a little luck and a big commitment to energy self-sufficiency, California could, theoretically, grow enough food to feed itself - if it stopped exporting its products all over the map, transitioned entirely to organics (currently a mere 5 percent of our harvest), converted its cow manure into bio-gas, and stopped allowing subdivisions to be built on prime farmland. Those are big ifs, and they're not even the biggest problem: how to get the food from the Central Valley to the distant population centers.

Despite the threat to our food supply, the issue of peak oil and gas is not on the radar screen of most agricultural policy analysts in Sacramento. My inquiries to the Department of Food and Agriculture, the Senate Agriculture Committee, the Assembly Agriculture Committee, and the Future of Farming Select Committee yielded variations on the standard response of "huh?"

The exception was Steve Schaffer, director of the Office of Agriculture and Environmental Stewardship of the Department of Food and Agriculture. He agrees that peak oil is a critical issue and points to an old (but still valid) study showing that the agricultural sector gobbles 5 percent of all oil, natural gas and electricity. And that's just the energy needed to grow the food and ship it to first-line processors; it doesn't count the many miles that food will still travel to packagers, distributors, supermarkets and, finally, homes, a journey that averages 1,500 miles.

When you add up all those detours, you're looking at an industry that Cornell University Professor David Pimentel estimates requires 400 gallons of gas to feed just one of us for a year.

I did a little calculation using Pimental's 400-gallon figure: How much would we Californians, who drive our 20-mile-per-gallon vehicles an average 11,000 miles a year, have to reduce our driving to free up enough oil to keep us fed? Answer: Three-quarters. Got a bike?

California's passage of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 puts us in the forefront of conservation programs and technological initiatives to find less carbon-producing alternatives to fossil fuels. But will it all be too little, too late? We are measuring the time frames for reducing our carbon footprint in decades, not years, yet oil and gas shortages may be just around the corner.

Part of the reason California is moving slowly to wean itself from fossil fuels is that policymakers, to the extent they are even aware of the peak oil and gas dilemma, seem to think we have far more time than we actually do. The California Transportation Plan 2025 puts peak oil at midcentury and sets forth a gradual transition toward oil independence.

State planners rely on energy forecasts provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, forecasts that have proved overly optimistic time and again.

The one very important fuel conservation measure California has tried to implement - raising fuel efficiency standards above federal standards - is still being blocked by the EPA. If the state's lawsuit against the EPA is successful, we will save almost 4 billion gallons a year by 2020. That sounds like a big number, but in fact it's only a fifth of our current annual petrol use. And if we're going to stay ahead of the peak oil curve, we'll need to wean ourselves long before 2020.

Astonishingly, oil conservation no-brainers like lowering the speed limit are nonstarters politically. One California Senate energy committee staffer actually laughed aloud when I asked him whether restoring the 55 mph speed limit was on the table.

Fortunately, some cities in California have awakened to the reality of peak oil and are not waiting around for the state and federal governments to act.

The Oakland Oil Independence by 2020 Task Force is pushing for the city to electrify its transit system, and is recommending a "back to the future" approach to urban redesign - essentially, a network of densely populated, streetcar-interconnected neighborhoods in which people live, work and shop.

The San Francisco peak oil task force is entertaining similar notions - how to keep the economy afloat, the lights on and the food coming in once we're on the downside of the peak oil curve.

Even the notoriously car-centric southern half of the state seems to be stirring from its slumber.

"They get it," says Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook, who has spread the gospel of peak oil to elected officials and urban planners across the nation. Cook is troubled by the disconnect between what planners know we need to do and what is feasible politically.

"It's such an incredible challenge, yet it's so under the radar screen," Cook says. "How could the government not be screaming from the mountaintops?"