Oil 49

'Former resident continues campaign against petroleum dependency Donna Tam/The Times-Standard Article Launched: 10/22/2008 01:26:37 AM PDT

Jan Lundberg has been in the oil business a long time. For the last 37 years, the life-long activist -- who called Arcata home for 12 years -- has worked as both an oil industry analyst and in the nonprofit world, championing the campaign against society's dependence on petroleum and what he calls the "synthetic sea."
"Some things have to change and it's not really about policies or better laws or identifying the criminal, it's more like what is our culture all about? Is it about bowing down to technology?" he said on the phone Tuesday from Portland, where he was scheduled to give a talk on the concept of peak oil.
According to Culture Change's Web site, peak oil theorizes that the Earth has already reached the halfway point for oil production, and the other half still in the ground is harder to extract and may not fuel the global economy or even provide for a transition to another phase. Lundberg founded the group.
The Bay Area-based nonprofit sets out to change the way people live in an attempt to decrease the use of petroleum, especially in the face of population growth, resource depletion and climate change, Lundberg said.
"We try to get society away from petroleum dependence to a way of living that is more in harmony with nature so that we are able to withstand changes," he said.
Lundberg said the organization has worked on many projects that promote a petroleum-free world, including campaigning Advertisement to stop road construction in an effort against car dependence in 1990 during the Persian Gulf War.
"We found that the anti-war movement was not interested in energy or the environment," he said about the campaign. "They simply wanted the bombs to stop falling so they could keep driving their cars on the road."
Lundberg said while society seems to have learned a lot since then, not enough has changed.
"The lifestyle hasn't changed," he said.
Lundberg has known about the nuances of the oil market since he was young.
From ages 19 to 36, he worked for his family business, the "Lundberg Survey," which he said was "known as the bible of the oil industry"
at one time.
The company was able to predict when oil prices would shoot up, he said, noting the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, when prices skyrocketed.
Lundberg said members of his family were always activists, despite being in the spotlight of the oil industry.
"The oil analyst business was something we reluctantly did to pay some bills to finance a world sailboat cruise and do other things, like have an organic ranch," he said of his family's progressive lifestyle in the 1950s.
Lundberg said he learned a lot from the work.
"It was interesting. Society runs on oil, so we were learning a lot. We were making a living," he said. "But for myself, I left in 1988 to get into nonprofit activism. I wanted to get back to what I was doing before in college as a student activist."'

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