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Oil culture: John Hinkson reflects on the cultural meaning of the oil crisis and the end of growth.

Article Excerpt
Over the last sixty years of the Age of Oil, oil crises have mostly been the outcome of political ruptures between nations. Even the gravest crisis was essentially political. The emergence of OPEC in the early 1970s, initially as a political response to US Middle Eastern policy, is the leading example. That crisis for the West was followed in the late 1970s by the Iranian revolution, when supplies were also withdrawn, the United States refusing to deal with Iran ever since.

No society can ignore the basics of material production, and for all 'modernised' economies the system of production is in crisis if access to oil cannot be secured. Oil has long been a strategic matter. But the politics of oil changes forever when availability begins to reflect restrictions of a more profound type: those arising out of the finiteness of the resource itself. Such restrictions are matters of fact to be established, but they are also in the eye of the beholder. There are now many beholders: political leaders, including Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, George Bush and Dick Cheney, who while publicly saying little, nevertheless believe and act as though policy must now reflect the likelihood of finite availability. Whether restricted supply based in finite resources is actually upon us right now is not the main point. Rather it is that society and politicians believe that it is about to be. With this changed expectation global politics moves into completely uncharted territory.

Any reflections on the oil crisis need to begin with how this new acceptance of a finite resource has emerged. For this revolution in thinking turns most of the assumptions of the growth society on their head, at a time when the growth society is largely taken for granted as the only way to live. There are now quite a few books that explore the contemporary situation of oil as a finite energy resource. In this essay many of the statistics and empirically based conclusions have been drawn from David Strahan's The Last Oil Shock, published in 2007 by John Murray.

Apart from difficulties in securing supply in the early decades of the twentieth century, the first inkling that there might be a crisis related to a finite resource emerged in the provocative writing of Marion King Hubbert in the 1950s and 60s. An oil geologist, and something of a maverick, he is responsible for the idea of peak oil. This theory, which initially focused on the continental United States, demonstrates via various techniques that the production of oil in any given territory proceeds through stages of growth and then decline. It is grounded in an assumption that geological oil is finite, being generated by known processes of organic transformation over millions of years and found in definite geological structures. While the techniques of discovery and recovery vary, and some are more successful than others, Hubbert used practically grounded mathematical techniques to make his argument. He showed that the Bell Curve was an appropriate tool to predict the life of a given oil province once it was subject to serious exploitation. His most famous victory came when he counterintuitively predicted in the 1960s the 1970 peak of oil production for continental United States. This prediction was made at a time when production was rising and in the face of universal scepticism.

The United States was...

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