Tragedy of the Commons

IN 1968 G. Hardin wrote a paper for Science magazine. You may have heard the name of the title in discussion, as I have heard all my life. It was and is entitled "the Tragedy of the Commons." Today I followed a link to the discussion of it, and you can download the whole article as a on the Main website later today. I entertain this because the enormous reservoirs of oil in the earth are the new tragedy of commons, and it behooves us all to understand what happens when too many need, desire, demand, too little.

Using land that is open and unfenced, open range, or common lands for the use of all is an English idea dating back to before the Romans occupied Britain. In simple terms it is the idea that you or any herdsman has the right to put his cow on common ground that is shared by all. This right is fundamental in the development of our modern crisis of declining energy (peak oil) today.

There is very little downside to you putting your cow on the commons. They eat food that you do not have to provide that is largely free to you, except for a little upkeep of the cow. It is a high win value situation for you, giving you practically a free cow over time. The problem with your right to use the Commons is that it is every one else has the same right too. Soon the grass is exhausted and can't support even a few cows. We collectively ruined the resource, and now few cows at all can be supported because the pasture is destroyed (Overshoot). It is our right to use the common land by legal right and tradition but in reality there is a limit to how much resource the common land can provide. Unfortunately without control our method for testing the carrying capacity of any Common resource is to use it to destruction. Then we know it was one less cow than that.

Hardin in his 1968 Science article describes what must exist to control the Commons for the best use of all. There are three things that must exist to protect and extend the commons forever.

First, you must be able to measure the extent of the resource.

Second, having measured the resource the users must agree to be controlled in their use.

Third, a government, having the measurement of the resource in hand, and the method of control of Commons users also in hand, must have the ability to use that coercion to protect the commons and insure fair use by all.

If each of those three criteria are met, then the commons can be sustained indefinitely.
How does that work with our modern society and the nearly magically free energy spigot of oil?

We could not measure all the oil when oil was first discovered, and even today there is endless misrepresentation of findings, and even complete discord over what is found oil. In essence, we can't accurately describe the resource. But in 1930 for instance, almost every oil geologist would have said that the amount was so large as to be equal to infinite. We would always find more oil, there would always be more oil to pump. It seems ludicrous in retrospect, I mean, these are scientists who learned that three apples minus two apples equals one apple. But there is a flaw in humans that when the resource is so large, and the use so small, we extrapolate large to infinite and never revisit that thought it seems.

Second, our meaurements of remaining oil are more accurate in the present time because of the oil finding technology, so we come late to the savings of this Commons with measurements that no one wants to hear. Essentially, giving myself leeway of 10 years, there is agreement that we are at the 1/2 way point of having used all the oil that exists. Unfortunately that was the easy half, the inexpensive half, the upside slope of cheaper and cheaper oil. Now we are looking at the downslope of the next 1/2, with each barrel more expensive to extract than the previous. With this gloomy unwanted measurement of the size of the remaining Commons in our hands, we find that we fail Hardin's second requirement. A way to control the use of the commons by all. There is no current way to enforce the use and importing of oil in the world except by a group of oil producers reducing the flow. They have the right to do that if they could all agree, and they do not all agree, and if they did, world wide business will collapse. So Opec or Russia may say they will slow down the pumping, but every country that believes they have the mandate to grow their economies and support their population will use military might to open up the spigots of oil again.

Thus failing the control of use, and failing to have a world organization with the authority to coerce restraint of use of the commons, we cannot control the exhaustion of the resource by which much of the world population is fed.

This is our oil "tragedy of the commons," that describes in ever lessening flow, the loss of energy and the ushering in of a new age of de-industrialization, energy poverty, and return to human and animal labor supporting populations a mere fraction of the size that they are today.

The final point I realized in this examination of the "Tragedy of Commons" is that oil never was really similar to the English Commons, though world wide we have treated it as such. The pasture in the middle of an English village, with the aid of the world eco system, can grow new grass, replenish itself, and even add to it's critical topsoil if it is used very lightly. But oil, well, as Richard Heinberg replied when asked when oil started running out, "oil started running out when we used the first barrel."

Oil is not replenished. When we use it, that part is gone. The easy oil is gone, and from now on it is harder and harder to get. We will never pump it all, because at a certain point, oil being the blood of our industrial world, there will not be enough to run our world, and it's use will collapse. Perhaps our few descendants will place small cups of oil in clay earthen bowls and worship it, telling religious stories of a mythical time past, when people flew in the air, powered by this magical liquid.