Peak Oil Medicine

Dan Bednarz is a public health professional and president of Energy & Healthcare Consultants of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His company focusses on energy and the future of public & private healthcare, including risk assessment and management, scenario generation and strategic planning.

Later today Dan is presenting a paper entitled “Leadership, environmental scanning and the future of public health: The case of peak oil” at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Boston.

He has graciously allowed me to publish his presentation here on peak oil medicine, as well as providing me with an advance copy to review. You can read my take on Dan’s message below, or download his paper in pdf format here: Public Health and Peak Oil (Bednarz)

The main thrust of his presentation is that public health (both academic and real world) is endangered by the coming peak in global oil production.

He is critical of the public health profession in general for not recognising and addressing the coming crisis, and says that

“much opportunity for risk assessment and mitigation has passed”.

He suggests that due diligence and adherance to the precautionary principle both demand that the threat of peak oil be analysed. This assertion is based on the magnitude of the expected impact on population health and the delivery of health care.

He provides an hypothesis about why this failure has occurred - essentially that the threat and its potential impact are so far outside the normal parameters of expectation that we are almost incapable of acknowledging and dealing with them.

He raises a crucial point that I have not seen formally expressed before. In the current model of public health, disease outbreaks and natural disasters are dealt with by transferring aid from areas of relative excess to those of acute lack (for example food aid or mass vaccination). The distinction with peak oil is that there is no area from which aid can come - we are all in the same boat, and must rely on our own efforts for salvation:

“Peak oil is about the lack of exogenous relief - it is about the systemic worldwide scarcity of an indispensable multifaceted resource”.

In relation to this idea of rescue from peak oil, he discounts the wholesale adoption of coal as a substitute energy source. His reasons for this dismissal include global warming, environmental impacts, and the financial and thermodynamic costs of coal-to-liquid conversion.

He also asserts that the coal resource will be consumed much faster if there is a massive shift to its use: I conceptualise this as “peak coal”. Even though there are “hundreds of years” of coal reserves, one must remember that current estimates of reserve size assume current usage rates, and that the wholesale substitution of coal for petroleum will consume coal much faster than we do now. Our planet will also certainly be cooked in the process.

He provides a useful insight into why there is so much institutional resistance to dealing with a problem the size of peak oil - he calls the three reasons brains, beliefs and bureaucracy. These factors combine to make it difficult for institutions to construct and analyse true worst-case scenarios. He cites catastrophic examples of institutional failure, such as the two space shuttle disasters, as supporting evidence.

Bednarz next examines the current practice of public health, highlighting that no preventative or aid-based intervention can be truly successful without the current petroleum-derived energy subsidy that allows the organisation and delivery of personnel and material. He also suggests that applied (ie real world) public health may experience a renaissance:

“(Governments may) transfer funding from treatment to prevention as the optimal way to preserve the health of the nation under dire economic circumstances”.

He concludes by saying that

“public health is moving out of alignment with its external environment by ignoring the geological fact of peak oil and its astounding sociological and ecological implications”.

I contend that the public health profession is no more guilty of this accusation than the wider industrialised society of which it is a part.

Coming next: One of Dan Bednarz’s co-presenters, Mary McKee, on how local health departments can prepare for peak oil.