The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)

***FRONT PAGE***

Residents bracing for an oil crisis
Louisville group urges conservation

By Martha Elson
melson@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

George Perkins led a talk for the local Peak Oil Discussion Group. (By Michael Clevenger, The Courier-Journal)

To save gas, Kristin Matly Dennis walks two miles from the Highlands in Louisville to her job as an English teacher at St. Francis High School downtown. Her husband, Jonathan Dennis, rides his bike nearly everywhere he goes -- and in all kinds of weather.

The couple are among a growing number of people in Louisville who are doing more than just complaining about high gas prices. And they are trying to persuade others to follow their lead.

They're members of the Louisville Peak Oil Discussion Group, one of more than 40 "oil awareness" groups worldwide, mostly in larger U.S. cities including Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Minneapolis.

They believe production of oil worldwide could peak as early as next year and then begin to decline. The price of gasoline could go out of sight because of the continuing demand for oil, making driving too expensive and causing food and other goods that are shipped in to be scarce, they say.

It could mean "the end of society as we know it," said George Harding of St. Matthews, a University of Louisville lab technologist and a group member.

With gasoline and natural gas prices so much higher than they were last year and Gulf Coast oil refineries' production down after the recent hurricanes, more people are cutting back on consumption.

"All of a sudden there's an urgency that nobody felt before" about conserving energy and natural resources, said George Perkins of Manor Creek in eastern Jefferson County, leader of the 23-member local Peak Oil group.

Perkins said the group members know their actions will not prevent the world from running out of oil, but they feel they are practicing survival tactics as the supply dwindles.

The "Peak Oil" concept is based on a prediction by geophysicist M. King Hubbert, who died in 1989. The "Hubbert Peak" is the point at which the world will have used half of all the recoverable oil.

While some oil experts believe the "peaking" will occur as early as next year, others say it won't happen for 20 years or longer.

Most scientists believe the concept is correct -- oil production worldwide will begin to decline in the not-too-distant future, while demand is still going up.

"We found that even if the optimists are right, we're probably in trouble anyway," said Roger Bezdek, a Washington, D.C., oil consultant. He was talking about the findings of a recent study he co-authored for the U.S. Department of Energy called "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management."

"We did not try to predict an exact date" of the peak, Bezdek said. "But if it occurs any time within the next 15 or 20 years, it's almost too late already to avoid serious economic problems."

Robert Hirsch, an oil consultant and engineer who has worked at the Department of Energy and Arco Oil and was the lead author of the report, said that cutting back on driving to the grocery store and other conservation measures are good for the environment, but they won't make any real difference in the oil supply.

"We're talking about a problem that is so much bigger than any of us," he said from his home in Alexandria, Va.

"Because our whole system operates on oil, it's like blood in your body. If you drain a significant amount of blood out of your body, you're not going to perform very well in a whole lot of ways. If you keep draining it out, the situation gets worse and worse."

Hirsch said the only hope for avoiding economic upheaval would be to quickly start building facilities on a massive scale to produce alternative fuels for vehicles, or "trash half the vehicles out there."

Some scientists, however, say the Peak Oil concept is wrong.

Energy consultant Michael C. Lynch, who has written articles debunking the Hubbert Peak model, said people who believe they should change their lives and habits are being misled. He said most of the world's oil reserves are "still very much underexploited."

Locally, Peak Oil group members don't agree.

"We're not cutting back to save the world," Perkins said, but "I'm going to need to figure out how to get along."

He's saving gasoline and preparing for the future by riding the bus or his bike about 12 miles each way to his job in computer support for the Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District.

His wife, Joan Perkins, a French teacher at Manual High School, stopped using her electric clothes dryer 15 years ago. She hangs her clothes outside to dry.

Accountant Tim Darst, a longtime environmentalist who lives in the Deer Park neighborhood in the Highlands, used to drive a sport utility vehicle. Now he rides the bus to his job, and when his family needs groceries or pet food, he often rides his bike to the store and hauls items back in a cart attached to his bike.

Another way to be prepared, Perkins and other local Peak Oil group members say, would be for people to grow more of their own food and live and work in the same community to cut down on long commutes.

Harding, the U of L lab technologist, said he grows a significant portion of his food on his family's two-acre property in St. Matthews. "My plans to try and ride out the crisis is to move to a productive farm," he said, "and begin to re-establish a horse drawn means of producing food and fiber as a place where my three girls can come for refuge and survival."

Harry Pickens of the Cherokee Triangle, a jazz pianist and peace educator, said there might be an upside to an oil crisis.

"There is an opportunity here not only to lower our dependence on fossil fuels, but to begin to build a deeper sense of community," he said.

"We're talking about a problem that is so much bigger than any of us." - ROBERT HIRSCH, an oil consultant and engineer

Peak oil sources

Numerous Web sites have information and discussions about Peak Oil - the concept that oil production worldwide will peak and begin to decline in coming years, while demand is increasing. The Web sites include www.peakoil.net and www.energybulletin.net.

Peak Oil also is discussed in books, such as Richard Heinberg's "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," and Matthew R. Simmons' "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy."

A Canadian documentary on Peak Oil called "End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream," will be shown at 4 p.m. Oct. 29 at the Kentucky Theater, 651 S. Fourth St, as part of the Mountain Justice Film Festival. A $10 donation is requested.

Quick take

Who: The Louisville Peak Oil Discussion Group

When: Meets from 9 to 11 a.m. the second Saturday of each month. The next meeting is Nov. 12.

Where: Village Green shop, 1813 Frankfort Ave.

Information: http://www.oilawareness.meetup.com/35/; George Perkins, 425-6645; or e-mail

george.perkins@louisville.edu.

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