We would have laughed at him too. Indeed, who had time or reason to pay attention to such a worry-wart?!
It was the 1950s and the future from our vantage point looked bright, hopeful and endless. Not only were we among the victors of the war, but unlike our allies in Europe, our American cities, factories and infrastructure were still standing. Our role was to help others clean up and rebuild. Many countries were standing proud, but only we were standing proud and strong.
New, amazing plastic and metal gadgets appeared in the store windows every week. Cars, once a privilege, were now everywhere you looked. A new national interstate highway system was announced - the largest public works project in the history of the world. It seemed only the beginning of the great things we would do! And escape from the dirty crowded cities was being offered to everyone. The Eden-like creation of suburbia was now a reality. Life was plentiful and easier, and only getting more so by the day.
It was in the midst of this amazing moment that a calm and quiet geologist named M. King Hubbert made his wet-blanket announcement: We are going to run out! Oil - our new found magical liquid - is not endless. This life of ours is not quite as solid as it seems.
Now, of course, there were many reasons to laugh. We didn't think of our new amazing lives as being based on oil. No, our modern world, we told ourselves, was the gift of human smarts and imagination, the by-product of science and technology. Those were the essential ingredients. Those were the stars of the show. Fossil fuel was a supporting actor at best and more like a mere extra to tell the truth. Or so it seemed, or maybe better put, that was the way we wanted it to seem.
So no one listened. Moreover, no one told us we had to listen.
Hubbert's announcement came in the form of a mathematical model - that too was surely part of the reason we didn't listen. He wasn't a preacher or politician, so there was no stirring speech or dramatic call to action. He wasn't trying to moralize or sell a new ideology; he was simply trying to tell us the truth.
These mathematical calculations were part of Hubbert's job as chief of research at Shell Oil. They led him to conclude that U.S. oil production would "peak" sometime around 1970. He displayed this with what is now somewhat famously known in science circles as "Hubbert's Bell Curve." We all remember bell curves from our Jr. High science classes - those graphs that look like an upside-down U - or more accurately, just like a bell, with a steep upswing, a rounded top (called the peak) and a steep downswing immediately after that.
That peak, that highest point, that tiny moment right at the top is the one we need to pay attention to, said Hubbert. That's the moment when we've used up half of all the oil we've got. It's downhill from there, as the saying goes. And since it's a bell curve, Hubbert stressed, it's an awfully sudden and quick downhill. Additionally, as all of us know from riding roller-coasters, you don't want to wait until your right at the very top to prepare for the quickly toppling ride down the other side.
So while it's fine to enjoy this upward turn, please, his research said, let's remember that it's not going to be like that for the entire ride. And here's the exact date: 1972 - that's the peak, the point at which the radical shift will occur and the ride as we know it will begin to change.
Now if you are riding home from work in 1950 in your shiny new car, having successfully put work out of your mind with the wonderful image of pulling into the driveway of your very own picturesque suburban home in which sits a fancy Formica table with a perfectly cooked turkey from your new state-of-the-art oven, which after devouring you will turn on your new miracle-vision color TV set - if this is you, and you hear a report about young Hubbert, the oil scientist, and his prediction about peak oil 20 years from now, what do you think you're going to do?
The same thing as everyone did-the same thing we are basically still doing today.
But wait a minute right? We are way past 1972! How come the ride doesn't feel like the bottom has come out from under us? Well that's the part of the story that's especially important for us to know because it's where the story shifts from the chapter that was our parents and grandparents lives to the chapter that is ours. Simply put, the answer to why the bottom didn't feel like it dropped, was that, although Hubbert was right, we were, in a sense, able to hop off our roller coaster car and hop onto another newer one that was still headed up.
You see, the oil that exists within our united 48 states did peak in 1972 - just as Hubbert predicted - and has quickly been going downward ever since, so quickly in fact that today we're talking only handfuls of years left not dozens. But the reason we didn't - and don't - "feel" that rapid depletion is that other oil fields came in to save the day. In addition to tapping into the mid-east oil supply, the 1960's brought us the surprise discovery of the final 2 major oil fields on earth, one in our very own Alaska and the other in Europe's North Sea. In other words, right as our 48 state roller coaster was about to head over the hill, alongside it rose up this world-wide roller-coaster and we quickly jumped seats and got on.
Which didn't just save the day, it created an illusion. Or rather, it enabled an illusion that we gladly embraced.
To explain this embrace of illusion, we need to complicate things a bit and pull in wisdom from the land of social psychology, whose research has shown that we human beings have evolved this remarkable ability that the experts call "presentivism" - a big fancy term to name the fact that none of us really live with the future in mind. Rather we think about the future only through the lens of our present experience. This isn't really a choice or something we do consciously; it's just the way our brains are built. We most certainly tell ourselves that we are thinking about the future, but in truth - psychologists tell us - that future that we hold in our heads is really a creation unconsciously built out of our experience of the present.
My favorite example of this has to do with the grocery store. All of us, when we go to the grocery store after work, we tell ourselves a story about the future. We go there with a clear assessment of how hungry we are going to be at dinner time two hours later. We think this assessment is based on reason and "the facts," and yet something mysteriously and regularly messes up our predictions. Presentivism! That's the mysterious culprit, the researchers say. That's what makes us terrible predictors. Simply put we regularly fail to consider how deeply our present experiences distort our thinking about the future.
For instance, give people who eat a ton for dinner a giant snack before they enter the grocery store and they will convince themselves that "tonight will be different" - "I won't really be that hungry, so I'll just buy a little bit." And without fail, two hours later they are famished and wishing they were able to have their usual second helping of potatoes. Same thing happens the other way. Withhold lunch from a person who regularly eats like a bird for dinner and that person will convince themselves that "tonight I'm going to pig out" - "I'm going to fill my cart to the max." And again, without fail, what happens? That bird-like eater eats the same tiny amount as they always do and ends up with a ton of left-overs.
That's "presentivism"! Our present experience almost always trumps, blurs, distorts and controls the stories we tell ourselves about the future. Forget the facts!! Your spouse can be right beside you at Wegman's telling you, "Honey please, you've never eaten three pork chops for dinner before!!" And all that poor spouse of ours will get is one of our deadly glares! "I'm not that easily duped by my emotions dear! I'm not imagining things!"
And in a sense, when we say that we're right: We're not really imagining the future our of made-up things, we're just building our story of the future based on too many of the things from our present. So much so that the true facts about the future just get crowded out.
Which is exactly why Hubbert's facts haven't been - and aren't being - taken into account! Our present-bias brains simply won't let those facts in!
Again, it is a fact that oil in our 48 states will run out in the very near future, with giant problems resulting because of it. But our present experience was - and still is - that we were saved by the discoveries of the Alaskan and North Sea oil. So as we look out into the future, we don't ask about the facts, we stick with the present feeling of being saved and tell ourselves somehow, someway it will happen again.
Same thing with the OPEC oil embargo in the early 1970's. This incident pointed clearly to a quickly coming future in which the Middle East will be able to dangerously cripple our U.S. economy at will. But our present experience of being able to side-step them and replace what they withheld with oil from Alaska, Norway and Russia enabled us to feel as though we would always be able to find another oil rich friend if the middle east turned on us again. Remember what we did to Jimmy Carter during this time? He was brave enough to level with us and said the embargo was a bullet that we would not be able to dodge forever so we'd better start developing alternative energy sources. We laughed him and his worries out of office and voted in Ronald Regan who immediately took down the solar panels from the White House roof and told us to smile along with him as everything would be all right, and that our American way of life needed defending not changing.
And a final example - one that is so important for us today. Hubbert ran his models again, toward the end of his life, in the 1980's. This time he looked at the world's supply of oil - not America's but the world's supply. And he identified that this would hit peak around the year 2000. He was a bit off, but not by much. It turns out that world oil supply is peaking right now, as we speak. But now - unlike in the 1960's and 70's - there simply are no other roller coasters out there to hop over to - there are no more Alaskas or north seas! The fact of our future is that we are finally headed for that downward fall of the bell-curve - a fast 35-year downhill ride. But once again, our present is so full and over-flowing with oil that we simply can't imagine feeling starved for oil or not being able to get second helpings of it only 10-20 years from now!
So there it is: Presentivism. And you thought today was suppose be about rebels? Which of course, underneath all this, it is.
Hubbert and the story of peak oil teach us two very important things. First, that we are not cowards, selfish or being duped. But rather that we are human, and as such, we're a bit short-sighted and struggle with sleep. There are, most certainly, numerous reasons we fail to think about and deal with the hard facts of our oil and environmental future. Yes, cowardice is a part of it. Yes, selfishness is a part of it too. And yes, we are a bit duped and controlled, even overpowered. But what Hubbert's story is saying to us - and I think it's right - is that in the end, our greatest enemy is this much more benign problem of having a hard time transcending the limiting power of our present experience. And make no mistake, we're not used to having such a benign enemy. It is, very much, something entirely new.
Which brings us to the second thing that Hubbert and the story of peak oil teaches us: that this entirely new challenge cries out for an entirely new kind of rebel. M. King Hubbert is just about the farthest thing from Alice Walker's young daring rebel that we could find. Someone who puts their body on the line. Someone bold and brash. Someone out to destroy all the barriers. Someone acting from a place of moral outrage. This is what we think of when we think of rebels. And this is not M. King Hubbert.
His boldness and daring were of a different kind: He simply, but amazingly, dared to imagine that the future will not be like the present. It wasn't a "whites only" beach sign he forced down, but hard facts about the future that he forced into his awareness. Indeed, awareness, not anger, was his most rebellious act. He wasn't striving to be moral, as much as simply awake. His was an act of consciousness, more than conscience. And while that may not fit our James Dean and Malcom X notions of what a rebel is suppose to be, maybe it's exactly the kind of rebel we need now.
In his masterpiece work, the French philosopher, Albert Camus, famously wrote, "What is a rebel? Simply a man who says no!" While this is surely true for us today in the sense of us needing to refuse unquestioning allegiance to our modern lifestyles, in another sense, this long-time definition simply won't do. It assumes a clear enemy that needs defeated or dismantled; whereas the great oil and environmental challenges ahead of us involve building up another way that is by no means clear yet. Dismantling "what is" is surely part of it, but no longer the heart of it. The new kind of rebellion to which we are called is not that of "taking down the man," but quickly putting up new structures so that the men and women who come after us will have a livable world.
Don't get me wrong. I don't at all mean to say we should abandon our 20th century rebellions against the many isms that oppress us and others. But what I am saying is that the 21st century now ups the ante: right along side the rebels of resistance, we need rebels of openness - crazy and seemingly extreme folks who are open to living in a radically different way. "No" is simply not enough anymore. Anger alone, even righteous anger, misses the point. Our new challenges aren't about getting people angry, they're about trying to make sure all of us stay awake!
Global warming, a world-wide AIDS pandemic, Peak Oil, Nuclear-bomb-empowered terrorism, Resource Wars over oil and even water - this is all scary, scary stuff. And yet the thing that should scare us the most is that none of it is on top of us right now. That sounds odd I know. But if any of these 21st century challenges were right on top of us - were literally at our door step - then I have no doubt that we'd rise to the occasion and make every single radical change we need to make. But they aren't right in front of us, we can't really see and feel them right now, and we won't until it's largely too late. The unique thing about our 21st century challenges is that they require us to change and respond before those challenges are even here. Unlike almost all of our challenges in the past, they don't wake us up at night with their presence, but rather they require us to wake ourselves up so they never become present.
And friends, this "waking ourselves up" is, simply put, a harder task, especially with all of us as tired, committed and over-extended as we are. That's right. I know we are tired. Please don't think that I'm unaware that this sermon is making you hyperventilate. None of us feel like we've got much room in our lives for more rebellion - the new or the old kind. And damn the person that dares to tell us we are not doing or worried enough. But I'm asking us to rebel against the great sleep none the less, to look for the room and energy in our lives that we can't right now imagine having - not out of guilt or because we must, but simply because it is what we are being asked.
Meaning no disrespect to the greatest generation, I truly believe it is us now who must become literally the greatest generation that ever was. It's hard to see how we have any other choice. The challenges ahead require us to be more than has ever been and to make changes greater than have ever been made. And what gives me hope, is not that I believe we are greater than those that have come before, but that like those that have gone before, we have each other to do it with.
Which maybe, in the end, is the most important thing that needs to change about our idea of rebels: They simply can no longer exist on their own. The only rebels capable of making a difference now is a community of rebels!
May we help make that so. Amen.
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