Tail Pipe Fumes and the Limits to Oil

American Psychogeography part 8: Dynamic Systems, The OPEC Embargo and Texas Oil

​One year before American Graffiti rolled into the drive-in movie theaters of the United States to celebrate cars and cruising, and to question the futures that awaited the assembled cast of characters, a major report was issued by a top world think tank that challenged the assumptions of the cult of progress.

The Limits to Growth was the brainchild of the Club of Rome, an informal group of intellectuals, business leaders, scientists and people from the political and economic spheres who banded together to help inform authorities and power holders around the world of the various dangers, problems, and predicaments facing humanity and the Earth.

It all started when an Italian industrialist named Aurelio Peccei gave a talk in 1965 about the rapid changes in science and technology happening around the globe. Alexander King was a British scientist who had worked as a government advisor. He wanted to meet up with Peccei and the two of them talked, later convening a group of individuals from various fields to discuss the possibility of creating “A tentative framework for initiating system wide planning of world scope.” After this meeting the Club of Rome was formed, named after the city where their first gathering had been held.

From the beginning the sciences of cybernetics and systems dynamics had a major influence on the work of the Club. Peccei knew that everything was connected. Poverty and ill-health often had correlations, as did urban blight with pollution and environmental degradation, which could be seen as connected to criminal behavior. Looking at these social problems as isolated from one another would not lead to lasting solutions. He noted that “It is this generalized meta-problem (or meta-system of problems) which we have called and shall continue to call the ‘problematic’ that inheres in our situation.”

In 1970 their first paper was issued, laying out a vision for the direction of their future work. This proposal was titled “The Predicament of Mankind: Quest for Structured Responses to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties.”

The world had become more complex, and by that very complexity, much more fragile. One way to attempt to understand it all was through math. Systems dynamics had been founded by computer engineer, management theorists and systems scientists Jay Forrester Wright who had a long and storied career at M.I.T. His work tackled the way different objects in complex systems interacted with each other dynamically. He is also remembered for his work on developing the theoretical principles behind magnetic memory storage in computers. He applied his mathematical models to business in his first book Industrial Dynamics. He started work on his second book at the urging of Boston Mayor John F. Collins, who implored him to use his mathematical models to tackle social problems.

The result was a paper he titled “Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems” that he further developed in his book Urban Dynamics that came out in 1969. It showed something that the poor and dispossessed might have been able to tell him if he’d just asked: depressed economies were the result of shortages in job opportunities in relationship to the population. Yet his model also showed something of interest: low-income housing and lower property taxes might not solve the problem, but make it worse. Other things that would make the problem worse were getting rid of homes for industry and property redevelopment in general. Now, almost sixty years later it would interesting to run his experiments again. It seems that the popular policy around these issues have proven his point.

Forrester continued to tinker with his models, eerily reminiscent of the advanced mathematical equations used by Harry Seldon in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction series Foundation, that formed the basis for what Asimov termed psychohistory: the use of math to be able to determine future events. In 1971 Forrester’s next book World Dynamics came out, and the models used in this book became a major influence on the Club of Rome’s iconic project, The Limits of Growth.

Forrester’s model became the basis for the World3 computer simulation model used by Donella and Dennis Meadows for Limits to Growth. Donella Meadows was an environmental scientist who ended up working under Forrester as a research fellow. The man who would become her husband, Dennis Meadows, was another scientist deeply invested in systems theory. Dennis Meadows had a PhD in management from MIT and became the director for the Club of Rome there between 1970 and 1972. Two other co-authors worked on the book, Jørgen Randers, originally from Norway and William W. Behrens III. Randers was another product of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Behrens was an expert in energy who went to found a renewable energy company.

For the Limits to Growth report, the Club of Rome wanted to find out the following:
1. Gain insights into the limits of our world system and the constraints it puts on human numbers and activity.

2. Identify and study the dominant elements, and their interactions, that influence the long-term behavior of world systems.

3. To warn of the likely outcome of contemporary economic and industrial policies, with a view to influencing changes to a sustainable lifestyle.

​To gain these insights they used the World3 model to analyze food system, including agriculture and making of food products, the industrial system, population, non-renewable resources, and pollution. Each of these categories was looked at as a system that interacted with the other systems. When they did the work and ran the models on these systems, they came to the general conclusion that “in the absence of significant alterations in resource utilization and environmental destruction, it is highly likely that there will be an abrupt and unmanageable decrease in both population and industrial capacity.”

​At the time people scoffed at the idea of population decline. In the seventies the general public was more worried about a population explosion. The 1973 film Soylent Green played on these fears in its masterful dystopian take on what would happen when cities became overcrowded and people underfed. At the time of this writing it is starting to become apparent that the world population of humans is a declining.
American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused show how just eager teenagers were in the sixties and seventies to get it on with each other, to seek each other out, and make out. People hadn’t counted on the fact that there would be a sex drought among Millennials and Gen Z as one contributing factor to a lack of babies being born. The idea that people might forgo the experience of making love would have been unthinkable to many in the Boomer and Gen X cohorts. It would have been unthinkable to think their children would be using computers and computerized phones to find their partners instead of meeting them on the streets, at the library, at the bus stop, at a music show or being introduced by friends. As memories of the Great Depression were forgotten, and the Silent Generation parents who’d lived through it as children ignored, the notion that people would be unable to afford homes and children was a thought ignored as often as the elders. As were the crises foreshadowed by The Limits to Growth, crises in climate and pollution that would go on to form a contribute significant anxiety to large swathes of Millenials and members of Generation Z.
Limits to Growth charted among other things the point where non-renewable resources would peak and then peter out. The geologist M. King Hubbert had already shown how oil-production follows a bell shaped curve, and that after the maximum point of global oil extraction is hit, later called peak-oil, these stores of energy would thereafter decline forever. Hubbert worked at a research center in Houston, Texas for the Shell Oil Company and was paid to figure these kinds of things out for the big wigs with the big rigs.

As a caveat to the dire scenario of world resources actually being limited and that humans might want to cut back on consumption to save something for future generations, the authors of The Limits to Growth put the following three points in the introduction, as possible ways things could go:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.

After the expansion of the economy following World War II, America was on an upward ascent driving onwards into a bright and happy future of fully automated luxury capitalism. If there was ever a problem, scientists and engineers would come along and fix it, find a solution. Yet the first inkling that the factories would not churn out more and more and more, and that the fuels that kept the whole operation going, coal and oil, might not be subject to an eternally recurring top off, hit home with a fury in 1973 when countries in the Middle East decided to turn the screws on their enemies.
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The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had put the smack down on any countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur war that lasted between October 6th to 25th 1973. They put the smack down on the United States. The OPEC Emargo meant that no petroleum exports were banned for the target nations. The countries involved also curbed their own oil production. This chess move precipitated the first major energy crisis faced by the United States. A time of reckoning ensued. The limits to growth were very real indeed.

One of the immediate results were the very long line of cars, all with their engines off, no idle fumes escaping into the atmosphere to fill the globe with greenhouse gases, all waiting to get whatever drop of gasoline they could.

The V8 engines that had been popular on the big bruiser cars of the American Graffiti era ate a lot of fuel. Even as shows like Happy Days, and later movies like Grease had kindled a way of nostalgia for a lost golden era in the postwar boom, drivers turned their attention to more economical vehicles such as Toyotas, Datsuns and Volkswagens. Plenty of car buffs remained, to be sure, but their muscle cars might have sat in driveways or garages until the weekend, unless they happened to be flush or already living from a silver spoon. Even for those with the means to buy gas at the more expensive prices, the gas wasn’t always there to be had.

America had its own sources of oil, with significant amounts in Texas, but by the early seventies they were already in decline. With the use of the “oil weapon” their was an immediate threat to national energy security. This precipitated a stock market crash in 1973-74. It wasn’t of the same caliber as the Great Depression but the cascading effects lasted for some years and continue to echo to the present day. It was the first oil crisis to face the world, but it would be far from the last. The oil crisis, in fact, would never again ever be over, even as the world of finance and market manipulation found ways to keep prices low.

The embargo was an opening salvo, a harbinger of the continuing mess fossil fuel would inflict across the land, to the detriment of the environmental from oil spills and practices like fracking, along with periodic bouts of economic uncertainty as the ups and downs of foreign relations dictated access to the crude. It’s a crisis that will continue to continue as the ever-dwindling flow gets slurped, good to the last drop in its final slurry.

With the ban in effect, the price of a barrel of oil quadrupled. Fuel rationings and stricter speed limits were just two immediate consequences as the government tried to grapple with the predicament. President Nixon thought a war might help things out. Just go over to the Middle East and get the stuff. The oil fields of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia, and Abu Dhabi were ripe for the plucking, if a last resort. Cooler heads and diplomacy won out, but meanwhile prices had already spiked and the average American was trying to make due.

If you happened to be in Texas though, and were an oil producer in Texas, the embargo could have been considered a boon. The next energy crisis of 1979 also played into the Texas hold’em hands of the state’s incipient oil barons. Previously they might have thought their wells were all tapped out, but now they had a reason to go back and keep on drilling for black gold, Texas tea.

Once again, the oilmen were happier than a tornado in a trailer park. Cowboys had put one major stamp on the culture of the state. The oil prospectors had put another. Texas was a big state and its big shots didn’t want to be limited. By 1976 when Dazed and Confused was set, a temporary reprieve was already underway. The OPEC Emargo had ended in 1974 and the crude had started to flow.

Refugees from the Rust Belt started pouring into Texas during the second half of the seventies and into the eighties. When the factories were closing up in the Midwest, there was still work to be found all around Houston.

The energy crisis would be revisited again in 1979 bringing even more wealth to Texas as they coaxed out the juice. So, in the meantime, why not party?
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As the old song goes, “The oil wells / Are full of smells” deep in the dark heart of Texas.

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