THE SAGE OF THE END OF OIL

Caltech physicist David Goodstein contemplates the fragile nature of civilization during a recent visit to Rome.

Caltech’s vice provost David Goodstein remembers very well when he got the idea for Out of Gas because the date was June 11, 2001, exactly three months before an event that would further crystallize his thinking about America’s dependence on oil. What caught his eye that June morning was an illustration in the Los Angeles Times. The graphic depicted a type of bell curve that had originally been plotted out in the 1950s by a contrarian-minded Shell Oil geophysicist, Marion King Hubbert. Hubbert had predicted that oil production in the continental United States would peak within 20 years, and, although he had plenty of detractors at the time, he turned out to be right. The Hubbert’s Peak bell curve pictured in the newspaper cast a wider net—it applied Hubbert’s calculations to oil resources worldwide and projected that supplies would peak within a decade, followed by, as Goodstein puts it, “an inexorable decline.”

The Caltech professor of physics and applied physics, who remembered all too well the upheaval caused by short-term oil crises in 1973 and 1979, immediately began to wonder how an ill-prepared world would cope with an irreversible fuel shortage in the near future. The self-evident answer: Not very well. “I thought, ‘I’d better find out what this is about, because it’s a prediction for worldwide calamity in approximately 2007.’ And, as I read up more on it, I began to think, ‘What can I do? I’m a physicist—I don’t really do anything that helps anybody,’” says Goodstein, who is also the Institute’s Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor. “Then I realized—I can write a book.”

Out of Gas was published February 2, 2004, Groundhog Day—an auspicious date (or not) for a book whose opening lines bluntly predict heavy weather ahead. “The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil. If we manage . . . [to shift] the burden to coal and natural gas . . . life may go on more or less as it has been—until we start to run out of all fossil fuels by the end of this century . . . . Civilization as we know it will not survive unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”

Goodstein says he really didn’t know what sort of reception these ominous pronouncements would get, but before the week was out, the New York Times Book Review had published an enthusiastic review, calling Out of Gas “a book that is more powerful for being brief, [written] with the clarity and gentle touch of a master teacher,” and virtually guaranteeing that the publisher, W. W. Norton, would sell out its modest first run of 15,000 copies. Now in its 4th printing, Out of Gas will be published in paperback in February 2005.

This year’s steep run-up in gasoline prices has also boosted interest and sales. “We really caught a wave,” says Goodstein, who has since been swept up in a variety of media interviews and appearances around the country, including write-ups in Newsweek, Forbes, and Fortune, and broadcasts on CNN, Fox-TV, NPR, and the new Air America radio network, where his fellow panelists—an oil company consultant and an environmental activist—promptly got into a round of verbal fisticuffs. Recalls Goodstein, “I was able to pretty much stay out of that one.”

Although Caltech’s vice provost is pleased with the widespread interest Out of Gas has evoked, he says he is disappointed, if hardly surprised, that he has yet to hear from anyone who is actually in a position to influence national or global energy policy. “This issue is the third rail of politics,” he says. “Nobody wants to touch it.”

Out of Gas is Goodstein’s third book and the first to deal explicitly with science and public policy, although he has addressed the issue at length in articles and lectures. His previous books include States of Matter and Feynman’s Lost Lecture, coauthored with his wife, Judith Goodstein, Caltech archivist and faculty associate in history. There are no plans at the moment to write another book. “When you write a book about the end of civilization as we know it, there’s not much left to cover.” -H.A.