Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,734

This is the grave of the M. King Hubbert.

Born in 1903 in San Saba, Texas, Hubbert grew up well off enough to attend the University of Chicago, where he excelled. He did all three degrees there, getting his BS in 1926, his master’s in 1928, and his PhD in 1937, after some time working in private industry. He was very much a man of Texas, which meant oil. He would use his skills to pursue the race for the black gold. While working on the PhD, he already worked as a geologist for Amerada Petroleum Company. He got an assistant professor position at Columbia, though his colleagues hated him because he was not a nice person. This was by his own admission and his colleagues denied him tenure for it.

Said one student of Hubbert, quoted in Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, “I found him to be arrogant, egotistical, dogmatic, and intolerant of work he perceived to be incorrect. But above all, I judged him to be a great scientist dedicated to solving problems based on simple physical and mathematical principles. He told me that he had a limited lifetime in which to train and pass on what he knew, and that he couldn’t waste time with people who couldn’t comprehend.”

Hubbert wasn’t just an oil hack though; he was a serious contributor to the field of geophysics. In 1940, he published a super influential paper that argued that the rock in some parts of the Earth’s crust should exhibit the plasticity of clay due to the intense pressures it was under, helping to explain how the crust changes over time. Of course, behind this was the desire to use the most modern scientific methods to discover where the good oil fields were. During World War II, the government brought him into the Board of Economic Warfare as a policy analyst. Oil was of course absolutely critical to the war, not only the need to have a lot of it for the military, but because it was so key to the goals of both Germany and Japan to conquer nations with oil fields.

But we don’t really remember Hubbert for any of this. All of this makes him a reasonably important guy in a narrow but important scientific field. No, the reason we remember Hubbert is that it was he who articulated the idea of peak oil. That came in a 1956 paper before the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio, where he argued that American oil production would peak sometime between 1965 and 1970, probably around the former date. Not too many people believed in him at the time. But then about 1970, US oil production dipped and he became famous.

Now, he was wrong, at least mostly. As it turns out, there are many ways to get that sweet liquified dead animal. And by god, we are going to find everyone of them no matter how this planet gets. He held onto these beliefs though for his whole life. In 1974, he revised the claim–given the new oil producing technology, peak oil would happen in 1995. Well, that didn’t happen either.

But still, if only he was right. Being correct about that would have meant an immediate transition to renewable energy sources and we would all be better off today. The 1970s certainly was the era in which faith in government began declining across the political spectrum, from reasons ranging from letting Black kids go to integrated schools to environmental crises. But at that time, government leadership might well have made that transition. It would have meant a big investment in nuclear, yes, and that was becoming ever more controversial before screeching to a halt with Three Mile Island. Hubbert himself urged major investments in solar and nuclear. He unfortunately did buy into some of the anti-population rhetoric among environmentalists at this time, who incorrectly saw population at the biggest threat to the planet, as opposed to unchecked consumption by the globally rich nations. This was quite common, as blaming the poor for the problems of the world so often is for the world. It wasn’t unchallenged though. Indira Gandhi among others called out Paul Ehrlich and his followers like Hubbert for their racism and hypocrisy.

Hubbert had a pretty significant career outside of the Peak Oil theory. He was a geologist for Shell for years after Columbia got rid of him before leaving in 1963 to teach geophysics at Stanford. While at Shell, he published work that set up much of the fracking world, including his 1957 paper, “The Mechanics of Hydraulic Fracturing.” He consistently alienated everyone who worked with him at Shell and few remained on his team for more than a year or so. When a woman named Martha Lou Broussard, the first woman to graduate with a geology degree from Rice was sent to him, his interview consisted of his berating women for having children and trying to convince her not to because of overpopulation issues. He was at Stanford for five years. In the 70s, he took another professor position at Berkeley for a few years. He was also a senior research physicist for the U.S. Geological Survey until his retirement in 1976.

Hubbert was also a great advocate of technocracy. This went back to when he was a young man. In 1934, he wrote the Technocracy Study Course, which became one of the key texts of the Technocracy Movement. On all this, he worked with the engineer Howard Scott. The idea was getting rid of the politicians and replacing them all with scientists and engineers because they believed in SCIENCE and TRUTH and wouldn’t let pesky things like people and their desires get in the way of SCIENCE. And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that scientists are never, ever, ever influenced by their own personal political beliefs or develop technologies that enhance racism because they didn’t even think to test them on Black people. Thinking about that wouldn’t be science! Also, Technocracy Movement people believed that they could ban partisan politics and social revolution this way. Sure…..

Well, the technocracy thing is complete bullshit that fetishizes science, but this was the 30s and people were still figuring a lot of things out, especially in the Great Depression.

People still do push the Peak Oil thesis. Someday, they will be right. Kenneth Deffeyes’ book Hubbert’s Peak was a best seller reviving these ideas in 2001. And he continues to push this stuff. There was a big boomlet in this sort of thing in the mid-2000s, probably in part due to the Iraq War. But today, it’s hard to argue we are very close to Peak Oil.

Hubbert died in 1989, of a pulmonary embolism. He was 86 years old.

M. King Hubbert is buried in Colony Cemetery, San Saba, Texas.

In 1962, Hubbert was president of the Geological Society of America. If you would like this series to visit other GSA presidents, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Harry Hess, who was president in 1963, is in Arlington. Thomas Nolan, who was president in 1961, is in New Haven, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.