Will We Run Out Of Gas?

By Mark Hertsgaard

The metaphorical answer to this question is more important than the literal, but the literal is irresistibly short: No, unfortunately not. Humans will have at our disposal as much gasoline as we can burn in the 21st century. Nor are we likely to run out of heating oil, coal or natural gas, the other carbon-based fuels that have powered industrial civilization for 200 years.

Why won't we run out? And why is that unfortunate? After all, these fuels provide nearly 80% of the energy humans use to keep warm, to light buildings and run computers, to power the cars that get us around, the tractors that plant food, the hospitals that serve our sick. If these fuels were to vanish tomorrow, worldwide chaos would follow and humans would die in the hundreds of millions.

So why not rejoice at having lots of fuel to burn? Let me try to answer that by telling you about my friend Zhenbing.

I met Zhenbing in China in 1996, near the end of a six-year journey around the world to write a book about humanity's environmental future. A 30-year-old economics professor who was liked on sight by virtually everyone he met, Zhenbing was my interpreter during five weeks of travel throughout China. A born storyteller, he often recalled his childhood in a tiny village northwest of Beijing. Like most Chinese peasants of that era, Zhenbing's parents were too poor to buy coal. Instead, in a climate like Boston's, where winter temperatures often plunged below zero, they burned dried leaves to heat their mud hut. Their home's inside walls were often white with frost from November to April.

In 1980, China's economic reforms began putting enough money in people's pockets to enable even peasants like Zhenbing's parents to buy coal. Today coal supplies 73% of China's energy, and there is enough beneath the country to last an additional 300 years at current consumption rates. Plainly, that is good news in one respect. Burning coal has made the Chinese people (somewhat) warm in winter for the first time in their history. But multiply Zhenbing's story by China's huge population, and you understand why 9 of the world's 10 most air-polluted cities are found in China and why nearly 1 of every 3 deaths there is linked to the horrific condition of the air and water.

Equally alarming is what China's coal burning is doing to the planet as a whole. China has become the world's second largest producer of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and it will be No. 1 by 2020 if it triples coal consumption as planned. But the U.S., the other environmental superpower, has no right to point a finger. Americans lead the world in greenhouse-gas production, mainly because of their ever tightening addiction to the car, the source of almost 40% of U.S. emissions.

Which returns us to gasoline and its source, petroleum. The earth's underground stores of petroleum are not quite as ample as those of coal or natural gas, but there is enough to supply humanity for many decades, even with rising population and living standards. Crippling shortages may still occur, of course. But they will arise from skulduggery or incompetence on the part of corporations or governments, not from any physical scarcity.

"Will we run out of gas?"--a question we began asking during the oil shocks of the 1970s--is now the wrong question. The earth's supply of carbon-based fuels will last a long time. But if humans burn anywhere near that much carbon, we'll burn up the planet, or at least our place on it.

Change won't be easy. But how we respond will help answer the metaphorical meaning of "Will we run out of gas?" That is, will our species fizzle out in the coming century, a victim of its own appetites and lethargy? Or will we take action and earn a longer stay on this beautiful planet?

The good news is, we know how to change course. Improving energy efficiency is the first step and--surprise!--potentially a very profitable one, not just for consumers and businesses but also for all of society. And better efficiency can buy us time to make a global transition to solar power and other renewable energy.

China could use 50% less energy if it only installed more efficient electric lights, motors and insulation, all technologies currently available on the world market. Americans could trade in their notoriously gas-swilling SUVs for sporty new 80-m.p.g. hybrid-electric cars. Better yet: hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars, expected in showrooms by 2004. Since their only exhaust is water vapor, fuel-cell cars produce neither smog nor global warming.

The best part is that we could make money by making peace with the planet. If governments launched a program--call it a Global Green Deal--to environmentally retrofit our civilization from top to bottom, they could create the biggest business enterprise of the next 25 years, a huge source of jobs and profits.

Which is why I'm not entirely gloomy about our future. After all, what's more human than pursuit of self-interest?

Mark Hertsgaard's most recent book is Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future