Taylor Challenges Shippers to Prepare for Peak Oil

He was dressed for a funeral, and his speech sure sounded like a eulogy.

Consultant Chuck Taylor gave one of the most memorable presentations at the Transplace Shipper Symposium hosted last month in Rogers, drawing off a lifetime in the industry to sound the alarm about the end of the oil age.

Arguing the age of “Peak Oil” — the point at which production is maximized and can only decline — has drawn nigh, if not arrived, Taylor challenged the shipping executives pleading the case for new and improved roads, who preceded him on stage by just hours.

“We need to stop building roads,” Taylor countered.

Transplace vice president Matt Menner, who introduced Taylor and calls him a mentor going back to their days at Burlington Northern Santa Fe, called his concepts thought provoking.

Menner said the shipping world is aware change is required, the only question now is evolution versus revolution.

“You see the lens they look through,” Menner said of the panel Taylor derided. “He’s up there smashing those lenses. I think Chuck speaks much truth and it shocks us. But damn it, it should.”

The shipping execs weren’t Taylor’s only targets. He called Vice President Dick Chaney “an idiot” for suggesting Americans don’t need to conserve oil, and said Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of “The World Is Flat,” “doesn’t know what’s going on.”

“The world may be flat, but it’s running out of oil,” Taylor said.

Taylor blasted the idea of a “lean” supply chain that stretch 12,000 miles from China and suggested a potential topic for the 2009 symposium might be the end of globalization.

“We’re outsourcing because the labor is cheaper, but that’s not the only cost,” Taylor said. “Gee, we might have to go back to the old-fashioned idea of doing these jobs in America.”

He skewered every presidential candidate, calling them and the rest of the U.S. political leadership AWOL for failing to tell Americans the truth about how declining reserves in Saudi Arabia and volatility in most of the major oil-producing areas of the world are setting this country up for “chaos and confusion.”

A perfect example of what Taylor spoke was the pandering from Sen. John McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton to lift the 18.4-cent federal gas tax this summer.

Taylor said higher gas taxes are necessary to further curb usage, in addition to mandates for higher fuel efficiency and a reduction in speed limits.

“The single biggest oil supply in this country is conservation,” he said.

But increasing domestic supply is not off the board. He’s in favor of opening up the sacred cow of ANWR for drilling, as well exploring offshore oil fields.

He wants to speed up production of non-corn ethanol, noting there is only a 1.3-1 return on corn-based fuel, and lift the 54-cent per gallon tariff on sugarcane ethanol produced in Brazil. Sugarcane ethanol has an 8-1 energy return, but protests of the U.S. domestic sugar, biofuel and oil lobbies have locked out a potential source of fuel while we buy 11 percent of our oil from openly hostile Venezuela.

Taylor predicts that sometime during the winter season between now and 2011, a “crisis” for other distillates like heating oil will be born out of supply shortfalls, not merely high prices.

“He’s not some crazy futurist crackpot vying for a book deal,” Menner said. “He’s really sincere about his concern and that makes him even more credible.”