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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Less oil = smaller world = look out!

Reviewed by: Donald Benham

Posted: 05/24/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller

By Jeff Rubin

Random House Canada, 265 pages, $30

Your world is about to get a whole lot smaller, Canadian economist Jeff Rubin predicts, because the planet is running out of oil.

The price at the gasoline pumps may spike up and then subside, but the overall trend will be up, along with all other energy costs.

With the world economy based on the myth of cheap, infinitely abundant energy, the current recession will look puny compared to future economic dislocation, Rubin warns, if we don't find a way to cut the link between economic growth and burning oil.

How do we do it? Listen, Rubin's an economist, not a magician.

The chief economist and chief strategist at CIBC World Markets pats himself on the back for correctly predicting world oil prices would top $100 a barrel, when they were much lower and nobody wanted to believe him.

In this, his first book, the self-dubbed maverick turns conventional economics on its head.

His colleagues in the dismal science insist that their diagrams and flow charts remain immutably true: An increase in oil prices will make it more economic to recover oil from marginal wells, leading to an increase in supply and a decrease in prices.

Not so fast, Rubin says. Conventional economists cover their ears and sing to themselves rather than admit that a resource quickly being depleted doesn't fit into their theories.

Rubin cites study after study to prove his thesis that oil is disappearing; it will cost more and more to "scrape the bottom of the barrel"; and the resulting crisis will have profound implications for all of us.

Rubin translates complicated facts and numbers into what it means for you, the consumer.

When citing an alarming study of oil reserves called The Coming Oil Crisis, Rubin dryly observes that "the title of the book pretty much gives away the ending."

When describing how China, India and Brazil are increasing their energy consumption and there's no looking back, he explains it's like table tennis on a moving train -- the ball goes back and forth, but it's always moving forward.

Rubin blows up what he calls "head fakes" associated with energy.

Ethanol is hailed as a renewable way to improve gasoline mileage, by mixing in alcohol made from corn. But it actually takes more energy to produce the corn and turn it into fuel than is contained in the ethanol.

Energy conservation has been a head fake. Consumers buy more energy-efficient cars, but then drive more, using up just as much gasoline, he says.

However, Rubin does perpetuate a head fake of his own, when he repeats the dogma that hydroelectricity is clean and green.

In fact, trees in northern Manitoba are still rotting and emitting methane, a harmful greenhouse gas, from land that was flooded decades ago without being cleared first.

True energy conservation is possible, he says, but only through a genuine change in behaviour by consumers and businesses.

Whether we like it or not, whether we feel prepared or not, we will all be forced to adapt to the new world of scarcer, more expensive oil.

Rubin's ending is disappointingly self-absorbed. Having predicted wrenching changes in the lives of everyone on the planet, Rubin muses that more expensive oil might mean the end of his fly-in fishing vacations in the Yukon, hardly something most readers can identify with.

Despite being short on solutions, Rubin's book deserves to be read for its clear warnings of what is to come.

Donald Benham, the public education co-ordinator at Winnipeg Harvest, teaches courses in politics and media at Canadian Mennonite University and the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 24, 2009 D4

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