‘Catastrophe’ if we don’t leave fossil fuels behind

EDITOR: America has been convinced by fossil fuels industries that we’ve become a new superpower in petroleum. Industry public relations departments and U.S. Energy Information Agency get out this message. A false message.

At the turn of century, Richard Heinberg, James Kunstler and others at our local Energy Fair said the peak of oil production was going to arrive soon (2005-2006). Americans are going to have to make other arrangements, they said, to operate our economy.

Then came peak “conventional oil” and the peak of gasoline prices in 2007-2008, the onset of the Great Recession. Job losses were huge; central Wisconsin lost jobs by the thousands. Oil and gasoline prices plunged. Then recovery began. But what was fueling this recovery? One word: fracking.

The four largest U.S. fracked-oil fields began to produce a lot of oil. However, there is a fatal flaw. The wells produce hugely for a very short time, then undergo a steady decline until the point where they’re just mere “stripper wells” polluting the landscape (and groundwater) but producing under 100 barrels a day/well.

By the year 2020, U.S. oil production again will be declining, fast. How will this impact Portage County? Severely. Typical of Wisconsin, we have a working class who live far from their jobs. Our large-scale industrial agricultural system is completely dependent upon petroleum and natural gas to do all of its work. We have no regional mass transit, thanks to the big government corporate bosses who run our state Legislature. They stripped counties’ power to form regional mass transit collaboratives with Act 32, the 2011 budget bill.

All that farmland destruction for frac-sand to our west, to feed a 10-year boom-bust cycle, and no sustainable energy system to show for it. Tragic.

Our aging population depend on auto transport, as do our poor and our super-poor, yet auto fuels will be growing scarce again within 10 years. Our UWSP campus may be “100 renewable” for electricity generation, yet is a “suitcase campus” dependent on autos to get students here, and back home every other weekend. We are zoned for the 1960s, with plenty of petroleum to allow endless urban sprawl. By 2025 the fracking “bust” will leave us with obsolete zoning.

We have a looming emergency on our horizon. I would suggest that local business, ag and government leaders begin to study this problem and begin planning for economic emergency. As Art Berman says, “energy (oil and gas) is the economy.”

Bob Gifford,

Park Ridge

The author is a Portage County Board member.

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