“This is no longer a fringe idea,” said Miner, who is also a chairman of the city’s branch of the Sierra Club and the leader of a “peak oil” Meetup Group with 535 members. “It’s leading edge.”
This Friday, many Queens “peakers” will join curious filmgoers for a presentation of a documentary, “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” at All Saints Church in Sunnyside.
The film takes a look at Cuba’s economy, forced to adapt to severe oil supply disruptions, first from the U.S. embargo instituted in the 1960s and later from the collapse of the tiny communist nation’s chief patron, the Soviet Union.
Adherents of the peak oil theory see Cuba as a test case for a phenomenon that Miner says is already happening in industrialized economies everywhere. A longtime director of one of the borough’s largest trade groups, Miner sees an unending period of extreme volatility in fossil fuel markets, with a trend toward ballooning prices and shrinking supplies.
For many drivers finally getting some relief at the pump (this week, gas has been spotted under the $2 a gallon mark in New Jersey), Miner’s prediction of higher oil prices may seem poorly timed.
But falling gas prices, brought on by an unprecedented global economic slowdown, might just be a passing phase.
In an Op-Ed piece in last Sunday’s New York Times, the Nobel Prize winning-Gore made a reference to the belief that world oil production had “peaked.”
And like many peak oil adherents, Gore dismissed efforts made by the Bush administration to increase domestic fossil fuel production by ramping up offshore drilling and opening national parkland in the West to natural gas exploration. “In every case, the resources in question are much too expensive or polluting, or .... too imaginary to make a difference,” Gore wrote.
However, many oil companies and geologists see no evidence of a peak in oil production, arguing that there still are plenty of untapped fossil fuel deposits around the world. “The world is nowhere near running out of oil,” said a spokesman for oil behemoth ExxonMobil in 2006.
Meanwhile, Neil King, who writes on oil, OPEC and international energy issues for the WSJ, recently said at a forum on peak oil in California that the phenomenon meant “the likelihood that our current mobility lifestyle will be kneecapped is fairly high.”
So what is a gas-guzzling nation, city and borough to do? Miner suggests putting congestion pricing back on the table, for starters, along with increased funding for public transit.
However, with MTA projecting a $1.2 billion deficit and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan having gone down in flames in Albany, none of those carbon-reducing measures are likely to become a reality.
But the sky is not likely to fall anytime soon, either. “This is not the time to get lost in apocalyptic visions — or complacency,” Miner said.
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