The Search For Plan B

The Search For Plan B

“Please tell Steve how proud I am of the work he has pulled together — it really makes the challenge of climate change so visible and visceral... My hope is that the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” proves to be true.”

— Gina McCarthy, White House National Climate Advisor to President Biden, and Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Under President Obama

A Different Perspective, and an Unusual Influence

The truth is, I have a somewhat unusual background for an American cultural and environmental photographer and author. I was raised overseas, without television, in a foreign language and culture, and time and time again, I found myself asking the essential questions, “Who are you, and where are you from?” Living abroad during my early years instilled in me an outsider’s perspective on America, while at the same time inspiring a great longing to know the land and its people — my land, my people. I still feel that way.

Growing up, my father was without doubt my biggest influence, but not in the way you might expect. Let me tell you a little bit about him.

My dad was the son of a lower middle class, Irish-Catholic factory worker from southern New England, and as a kid he enlisted for WWII at age seventeen. During the war he served as a radioman and tailgunner in a carrier-based Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber. After the war he went to Yale University and then Harvard Law School — courtesy of the GI Bill. Upon graduation, he married my mother, a recent Radcliffe graduate named Margaret Nehls, and he took the best jobs a smart kid from a modest background could get. Those early legal positions eventually led to his being named vice president and general counsel of Texaco Europe, a major multinational oil company; and later vice president and general counsel of Kennecott Copper, a major multinational mining company.

That’s why I know something about energy and materials. I didn’t have a choice. My dad and I fought endlessly about their environmental consequences, and in retrospect, I see that in these arguments my dad played my foil, making sure I sharpened my arguments. Looking back with the clarity of hindsight, I believe he was coaching me the whole time. Lord knows he had his faults, but he was an intellectual powerhouse. He had risen from a modest background to being sworn in to argue before the Supreme Court of the United States. He despized lazy thinking, and he wouldn’t accept an argument based upon public opinion or popular memes. From the beginning he insisted I argue my own well thought out position in a convincing manner, and stand firm whether my position was popular or not. He had the highest standards when it came to telling the truth and making a case.

Ultimately, he insisted that I at least understand the vital roles that energy and minerals play in our modern industrial civilization. He stressed that they are the pillars of what we consider modern life. Life without fossil fuels, he reminded me, will look very much like life before fossil fuels. In other words, life circa 1850. I said that I thought that sounded wonderful; he pointed out that not many people would agree with me.

Summer of ‘79

My friend Ed and I were sitting in his red Cutlass convertible in a parking lot behind a gas station in coastal Connecticut. It was the summer of 1979, and America was going through the second OPEC oil shock. It was around midnight. It was black as pitch. All the lights were off. Nothing moved. And then, tentatively at first, as if this wasn’t quite right and nobody wanted to be seen, one by one figures emerged from the darkness and approached the pumps.

The attendant took their five-gallon cans, filled them up, handed them back, and took their money. The figures scurried away into the night. I watched and thought, tonight it’s just desperate people. How long before it becomes armed gangs?

After a while it was Ed’s turn. He put the precious fluid into the car, and we drove away. We turned the headlights on when we were well out of sight.

“I think this is how the world is going to end,” I said.

“Show Me One Thing”

The next evening I confronted my dad. I demanded to know why the oil companies were artificially creating the gas shortage to drive up prices and gouge people. Then I demanded to know why they were polluting the world with their evil products in the first place. And here I spoke from personal experience. As a child I had seen the horror of a major oil disaster when the supertanker SS Torrey Canyon ran aground on a reef off the coast of England in 1967 and spilled 36 million gallons of crude oil into the English Channel. The beaches where I went to summer school were coated black with oil. Billions of globules of squishy dark petroleum floated in the tide. At the time, it was the worst oil spill in history. The coastlines of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain were devastated. Untold thousands of seabirds and other creatures died.

We had been through all this before, many times, and we usually got nowhere. Tonight, he took a different tack. He calmly asked me to trace things that I used and took for granted back to their point of origin. “Take a look around this room and show me one thing that isn’t either made from oil, made by oil-powered machines, transported here by oil-powered vehicles, or all of the above,” he said.

We were in the kitchen, and I looked at the dishwasher, the coffee maker, the refrigerator, the clock, the radio, the little television, the microwave oven, the countertop, the loaf of bread on the countertop, the plastic bag the bread was in, the detergent by the sink, the telephone.

I looked at each object and, in my mind’s eye I traced it back to its origins in some cases as simply oil; or as ore mined by oil-powered excavators and then shipped around the world by oil-burning container ships to a factory in Japan; and then as finished products ultimately delivered as if by magic by oil-burning container ships and diesel-powered semi-trucks to the point of sale.

I saw the bread begin as wheat grown in Nebraska with oil-based feedstocks and fertilizers, oil-based herbicides, and oil-based pesticides. It was then harvested by oil-powered machines, and finally trucked to our supermarket in diesel-powered semi-trucks via the Interstate Highway System — itself paved with oil in the form of asphalt.

The televison, the radio, the clock, and the phone were oil-based plastic gadgets made in Japan and shipped to Long Beach, California by giant oil-burning container ships. There they were loaded onto diesel-burning semis and trucked 3,000 miles across the continent to our local department store.

Many of the things in the room were simply oil at its wizardly, shape-shifting best – you could make practically anything out of oil, including the carpet beneath my feet, the light fixture over my head, the tile caulking behind the sink, and even the trash bags -- and the trash bin for that matter (all made God knows where) -- in the cabinet under the counter.

I imagined the mining, the smelting and refining, the manufacturing, and the transporting of the finished products all around the world; the trucking of them to first the warehouses and then the retail stores; the final delivery to our door. There was no getting around it. Everything in my life required huge quantities of oil.

“I can’t,” I admitted.

The Magical Benefits

Over time and despite my resistance to the idea, my dad made me grasp that energy is the currency of life; that any activity in Nature — whether it’s a wolf running down a caribou or a construction worker operating a backhoe — requires energy to perform. He also recognized the limits to growth, and impressed upon me that energy and minerals were finite, highly liable to misuse, and that if we didn’t acknowledge their value and employ them wisely, they would probably peak and begin to decline within my lifetime.

On more than one occasion he pointed out to me what should have been blindingly obvious — the magical benefits of fossil fuels that would gradually disappear when oil slowly but inevitably faded away. These modern miracles include life saving pharmaceuticals; fertilizers that literally keep billions of people from starvation; most medical devices; concrete; steel; plastics; and transportation. Oil is used to manufacture half a million everyday items that we take completely for granted; have no idea are actually made from oil; and have totally forgotten how to live without.

Today it is well-known that burning fossil fuels is warming the atmosphere and must stop, but here’s the problem: a single 42 gallon barrel of oil contains 5.8 million British Thermal Units’ (BTUs) worth of energy, which is conservatively equivalent to 5 years of one human’s labor. At the US median income of $75,000 per year, a single $80 barrel of oil is actually worth $375,000 in terms of work performed. Since the world consumes over 100 billion barrels of oil each year to grow our economy, oil provides us with the labor equivalent of more than 500 billion human workers annually. The average American uses 22 barrels of oil annually, thus benefitting from the labor of 110 personal assistants working 24/7/365 and enjoying the benefits of the $8,250,000 worth of work they perform for each of us every year. The wealthy use far more than that to maintain and enjoy their prosperity.

Channeling my dad here — I’ll simply point out that not many people living in modern industrial society will be eager to dismiss these essential workers.

A Statistically Perfect Correlation

Carbon emmissions from burning fossil fuels and GDP have a statistically perfect, linear correlation. In our quest for perpetual economic growth, will we ever be willing to voluntarily give up their magical power? Despite decades of scientific warnings, international agreements, trillions of dollars invested in alternative energy, and global activism to rein in climate change, emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise sharply and keep setting stunning new highs every year. “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far,” said NOAA Chief Scientist Dr. Sarah Kapnick. Despite the soaring temperatures and massive renewable energy buildout, global oil demand grew by 2.3 million barrels per day in 2023. There is no reason to think that 2024 and 2025 and beyond won’t promise more of the same.

Our economy has a built-in economic growth mandate. It priotitizes profits above all else; and from bread to paint to asphalt to cosmetics to carpeting to heavy machinery to solar panels and wind turbines; oil — and fossil fuels generally — is a major component in virtually everything we value, manufacture, and sell; and oil is indispensable to every aspect of our chosen way of life. We expect the economy to grow by at least 3.5 percent annually, which means that in 20 years the size of our economy will double. Think seriously about what that means: not only will we double the amount of materials we dig from the earth, we will double the amount of energy we use. As a result we will also double the amount of waste we produce, including carbon emissions.

There is no path forward toward reduction of carbon emissions that does not include reducing economic growth. The two rise, and eventually will fall, in lockstep.

The vast majority of us have never even seen oil. We just take oil for granted. Oil fuels our cars and heats our homes. It’s in the resins and glues of our furniture; it’s in our clothes and our sheets and our upholstery and our computers. It lubricates our machinery. We are concious of oil the way a fish is concious of water — we are only vaguely aware of it when it is suddenly unavailable. We have even based our entire food system upon it. The average item on your dinner plate travelled 1,500 miles via diesel burning semi truck to reach your table. Incredibly, we use 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce just 1 calorie of food. We are literally eating oil and increasingly, we are oil.

Our food, our furniture and appliances, our clothing, our building materials, and everything else in our homes and offices were all made with or from oil (usually both) and virtually all of these were delivered by oil burning semi-truck. When there is no more diesel, and trucks stop running, what then? I’ll just say this. We do not want to find out.

What to do?

The Oil Paradox

Oil sits squarely at the intersection of economic, social, geopolitical, and environmental challenges. It is essential to the globalized world but at the same time it endangers the planet’s life support systems. This is the oil paradox. To get elected politicians must promise economic growth because the public demands it, but economic growth requires oil which is the lifeblood of this civilization. We have arranged things so that we cannot live with oil — the biosphere will not survive our continued use of it — and we cannot live without it — our civilization will collapse. We are a petroculture. We live in the Petrocene Epoch.

I’ll never forget the evening that set the course of my career and my life. I’ve hit rewind and replay a thousand times. Once again I was home from college, and my dad and I were engaged in one of our usual arguments about energy and the environment when he looked at me owlishly for a long moment, swirled the ice cubes in his drink, and finally said,

“You know, it’s simply amazing to me that most people have no clue that cheap abundant energy -- mostly oil -- is what allows us to produce all the food and other resources we need to grow and maintain our civilization. Oil is a magical substance. You can make bowling balls and batting helmets out of it. You can make Beatles records out of it. You can store it indefinitely, ship it around the world, or put it in your lawnmower and cut the grass. You can make pharmaceuticals out of it. You can drive across the country with it. You can build bridges and skyscrapers with it. You can lift a 450 ton Boeing 747 35,000 feet off the ground and fly 600 people around the world with it. More than 80 percent of everything we have and everything we do depends upon cheap, reliable oil supplies. It’s incredibly precious stuff, an amazing resource, and if we just used it wisely, we would benefit from it for a very long time. But it’s a one time deal, and we’ll run out because we’re wasting it on building junk, and buying junk, and joyriding around the suburbs -- driving to Kmart and back.”

I nodded, and kept my mouth shut for once. I felt he was going somewhere with this.

“Oil is the only reason we have food for the 200 million people and counting in this country,” he said. “The so called ‘Green Revolution’ is totally dependent upon oil and natural gas fertilizer. Malthus was right, his timing was just a bit off. In this country it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel-based energy to produce 1 calorie of food. And even though it comes from 10,000 miles away from countries that don’t like us very much, a gallon of the stuff still costs less than a gallon of milk.”

“And it’s not just oil,” he continued. “Anybody who actually thinks about it for even a few seconds will realize that you can’t run a civilization forever on irreplaceable finite natural resources.”

Then what are we doing? I thought.

“Right now, it’s like a game of musical chairs,” he said. “Everyone’s having fun and the music is going faster and faster. There are a hundred people laughing as they go ‘round and ‘round, and until the music stops, nobody notices that eighty chairs have been taken away.”

That was a frightening image. I suddenly grasped the recklessness of what we were doing, and I was thinking about what would happen to the 80 percent of people without metaphorical chairs when he interrupted my thoughts.

A Fateful Decision

“Do you remember my story about The Lost Squadron?”

How could I forget? My Dad was supposed to have been a crewman in one of five Navy Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers – Flight 19 – that took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on December 5, 1945, on a routine training flight over familiar landmarks. For some reason that he could never explain, even to himself I think, the day before the flight my dad scratched his name from the flight roster. It was a fateful decision.

Flight 19’s assignment that day was a combined bombing and navigation exercise. Their route took them into the Bermuda Triangle, where the five planes and 14 crewmen vanished forever.

There was a massive search, but no sign of Flight 19 was ever found. Bestselling books have been written about the event, and the disappearance has been the subject of countless television shows, but no one knows what happened. In Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of The Third Kind, the Flight 19 airmen are discovered in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico, having been transported there by an alien spaceship.

Perhaps.

My dad had another idea about what had happened.

“They were lost,” he said. “They simply didn’t know where they were. At one point the flight leader radioed to say he saw islands below, and that he was over the Keys, but he wasn’t. He was flying over the Bahamas. Big difference. He didn’t have the necessary navigation skills. He didn’t know how to use his compasses or read his chart. He couldn’t identify critical landmarks. Basic stuff. He simply didn’t know where he was. If they had just flown West, they would have hit the Florida mainland and been OK, but they flew East instead, out into the open Atlantic.”

He paused for a moment, then said, “They flew the wrong way until they ran out of fuel, and then they crashed.”

Wow.

“I get your point,” I said. “So, what’s Plan B?”

“There is no Plan B.”

That was the moment that I began my search for Plan B.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

Looking back for the umpteenth time on that long ago evening, it occurs to me once again that it’s past time to imagine rearranging things so that we can realistically plan for life after oil. Current geologic inventory surveys indicate that globally, recoverable oil is about to pass a point of diminishing returns. Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2024, Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum warned, “2025 and beyond is when the world is going to be short of oil.” As if to underscore her remarks, the last giant oilfield in the United States – the Permian Basin in west Texas and eastern New Mexico – is now predicted to hit peak output in the next couple of years, and when it does it will set off alarm bells around the world, for in recent years the Permian — the primary source of non-OPEC oil supply — has helped to offset declining oil production around the rest of the globe. (Indeed, according to the latest research by the U.S. Energy Iinformation Administration, the Permian actually reached its peak output in December 2023.)

For those who believe in perpetual economic growth on a planet of finite natural resources, please pause for a moment to consider a troubling and inconvenient fact. According to the International Energy Agency, world oil production (and “production” is a misleading word - we don’t produce oil, we extract it) actually already peaked in November 2018, at 84.59 million barrels per day, which means production has not reached that level since. The most recent production number available, from March 2024, shows world oil production at just 82.59 million barrels per day.

Peak oil production is a wicked problem (a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve, and "wicked" implies the problem cannot be fixed, not that it is malevolent). Demand for oil is surging at exactly the same time that supply is shrinking, but we haven’t adjusted our expectations nor our behavior. My dad, who was a great admirer of Ernest Hemingway, thought the great novelist aptly decribed how the oil depletion process would play out:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

The peaking and decline of world oil production does not mean that we are about to completely run out of oil tomorrow, but it does mean we are on the downward slope sliding towards bankruptcy, and even a small decline in production can cause unimaginable havoc - recall that the 1979 oil crisis was the result of a mere 4 percent drop in global production. Today the rate of production is gradually declining, and from here on, each year there will be less oil to use. According to Rystad Energy, a renowned energy research company based in Norway, “In a more realistic outlook for oil production, total output would peak in 2030 at 108 million barrels per day and decline to 55 million barrels per day in 2050.” That is a massive decline of roughly fifty percent in just twenty years.

Since much less CO2 will be released from burning much less oil, this is certainly good news for the climate. But such a steady decrease in oil production will certainly spell doom to the globalized world economy, since the economy depends on an ever increasing rate of oil production to underpin its growth. Energy, not deficit spending, provides us with the ability to do work and is the basis of the real economy, and oil continues to be the largest source of world energy and thus world economic productivity. And as we’ve seen, since it powers more than 90 percent of total global transportation, oil is absolutely essential for global commerce.

Rather than grow in perpetuity, if the energy experts are correct the economy will shrink by half by the middle of this century, and there will be 50 percent less of everything — food, construction materials, housing, transportation, you name it — half of literally everything we now take for granted. Rather than build out a massively energy-intensive alternative energy infrastructure, or an energy-hogging AI industry, fuel will be increasingly diverted to essential services and agriculture. The remainder of the economy will face shortages and rationing.

Oil’s inexorable depletion will affect everyone, everywhere; first gradually, then suddenly. Virtually everything we do requires oil, there is no substitute for it, and the significance of passing this civilizational tipping point cannot be overemphasized. Without oil, the longstanding growth trends we have seen over the last century will reverse themselves, making our past experience a poor guide for adaptation to unanticipated and quite formidable ecological, political, and economic events. Unlike Inuit guided by Isuma - “the knowledge and wisdom to successfully navigate new and unexpected circumstances,” modern industrial society will likely experience the unexpected on a nearly daily basis, and few people will understand what is happening nor how to react to the new paradigm.

As my dad predicted that night, we have entered the beginning of the end of the oil age, and hence we have crested the top of the Petroculture and the social, political, and economic norms that oil made possible. Nobody knows for sure when the music is going to stop, but for those with foresight, the scene is beginning to come into focus.

A Failure of Imagination

I keep thinking about the 911 Commission’s conclusion: “The most important failure was one of imagination.” We are not prepared for this, and yet we cannot imagine another way of life. As our culture is presently configured, oil is still the central pillar of our civilization, and we take it for granted that it will always be available in increasing quantities. But we must burn 100 billion barrels of it each year just to keep standing in place, and even more to meet our cultural mandate, which is to move forward and keep growing the economy. Where will it come from? Mars? Asteroids?

Perhaps.

Scanning the Horizon

Despite all their rhetoric about an energy transition, world political leaders understand both the critical primacy of oil and the fact that production is peaking and reserves are declining. Already, rival nations are actively positioning to compete for what remains. The United States has just 3 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves; while closely aligned rival nations Russia, Iran, and Iraq possess 27 percent of proven global reserves. These three countries have increasingly close ties with China, which the United States government perceives as America’s greatest emerging economic, military, and geopolitical threat.

Not one of these governments is energy blind. All of them are acutely aware of the pivotal role oil plays in shaping the future landscape of global power and influence, and it makes them ever more adventurous and aggressive. They are increasingly ready to compete politically and militarily for what remains.

Throughout the years, watching the energy cliff get closer and closer as I scanned the horizon for an exit ramp, I have searched out, worked with, and traveled alongside rural, place-based, sustainable communities throughout North America, and recently Arctic Europe. These are proud modern people living in our planet’s last healthy ecosystems who have realistically solved the oil paradox. They are not members of petrocultures. They are not contributing to our multiple cascading crises. You will have the opportunity to meet and learn about some of those people in this exhibition.

Resources of Vital Importance for Humanity

As Thoreau pointed out, we “stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment,” and there is no time to lose.

Please consider this: Buried deep inside an icy mountain on Spitzbergen, an island high above the Arctic Circle in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a resource of vital importance for the future of human­kind is locked away and closely guarded. This resource is not an emergency reserve of oil, or coal, or rare earth minerals. It is the seeds from more than 930,000 varieties of food crops stored in the Global Seed Vault.

This is humanity’s safety deposit box holding the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity. It has been nicknamed “The Doomsday Vault,” but more than a hedge against a global crop catastrophe, the vault was actually built to protect us against a more banal but much greater danger: the relentless ongoing destruction of local seed banks and the local cultures that maintain them. This destruction is driven by globalization and corporate agribusiness food monocultures. We are all impoverished far more than we realize by the remorseless loss of local landscapes, local foods, and local knowledge that is happening all around the planet.

We need a similar plan to protect ourselves from the merciless loss of cultural diversity around the globe, for the same economic and globalization forces are contributing to the destruction of the world’s wealth of diverse cultures and languages and all of the useful knowledge they hold. Fully half of the world’s 7,000 languages will disappear within my lifetime unless something changes. Every two weeks, a language and its encoded cultural wisdom and alternative worldview dies, and when this happens we are all deeply impoverished, for the global monoculture gains strength and momentum whenever a language winks out. Language is the living expression of a human culture, and the distinct languages of our planet give voice to the rich diversity of our collective human experience. Much as genetic diversity is now understood as an indispensable resource to be safeguarded, linguistic diversity must also be considered a vital resource for the future of humankind. It requires protection and preservation against irretrievable loss.

As Kenneth Hale, an American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, "When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre."

The Search for Plan B

Behaving exactly like a mindless organism whose only goal is to reproduce itself, the global techno-industrial fossil-fueled monoculture has achieved spectacular evolutionary success. It has successfully eradicated diversity in virtually all of its forms as it has spread itself across the globe in recent decades. The tally of that success should be a wake up call. Red lights are flashing and sirens are sounding.

Since my father was born in 1927 the world’s population has more than quadrupled, from 2 billion to over 8 billion people. Just in my lifetime, wild spaces on Earth have plummeted by nearly half, from 62% of the planet in 1960 to just 35% in 2020. The same goes for vertebrate wildife populations, which have declined by an alarming 70% since 1970. A new study has revealed a staggering 81 percent collapse in worldwide migratory fish populations in the 50-odd years since 1970. And the same can be said for the atmosphere, which our culture considers a convenient sink for our waste. Just in my lifetime, annual carbon emissions have nearly quadrupled from 10 billion tons to almost 40 billion tons per year. If these trends don’t elicit a general widespread alarm, then I suppose nothing will.

This exhibition is not a prediction of what will happen — it bears witness to what is happening — and it offers us viable alternative outcomes to where the alarming trendlines are taking us. The future has not yet been determined, it is emergent, and there are still many benign cultural pathways before us leading to healthy, positive futures. We can still choose what we collectively believe and thus what we collectively do. As cultural anthropologist Wade Davis says, “A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined.”

In my search for Plan B, I have attempted to answer the following questions: “Are there examples of other successful contemporary cultures that modern industrial society can learn from? Can we grant ourselves the freedom to imagine — and perhaps even emulate — other approaches to living sustainably? Can we hear other peoples’ stories, adopt their worldviews, respect their wisdom, learn from them, and shift our cultural narratives and priorities in ways that put sustainability, community, and the planet first?”

We’ll see.

Is There Hope?

I get asked this question frequently at public events and in casual conversations, and my best answer is, “It depends what you are hoping for. If you hope that our hyper-complex industrial consumer culture can survive much longer on a planet of diminishing finite resources, then I would say, no, there is no hope. We still haven’t grasped that our problem isn’t economic or technological, it’s cultural and spiritual.”

“But,” I continue, “if you are hoping to transition to a more community oriented, ecologically balanced, purposeful life full of meaning and joy, then yes, I am hopeful. The world’s remaining diverse cultures and languages encoded with the wisdom to guide us towards a more satisfying future fill me with thousands of reasons for hope.”