http://www.theecologist.co.uk/archive_article.html?article=263&category=47
The Ecologist - ARCHIVE
The Reality Principle: The consequences of oil shortages
Date Published: 22/10/2001
Author: David Fleming
In the heat of the coming oil shock Green ideals will be forged into
hard economic truths, as energy crisis devastates the global market.
It's a pity no one in authority listened. The case was made, not
least in these pages, for reshaping the market economy intelligently,
before the ecosystem took its brutal revenge. Arguments were made for
the speedy development of renewable energy, organic agriculture,
competent local economies, closed systems and effective means of
restraining predatory multinational business. Solutions were invented
and refined.
But the opportunity has now passed. The turning-point at which the
initiative shifts from the market economy to the ecosystem will be
the moment when the world experiences a peak, followed by a downturn,
in the supply of oil.
This will occur when the five large OPEC producers in the Middle East
- Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE - are no longer able
and willing to pump their oil fast enough to meet the growth in world
demand. All the other oil suppliers throughout the world (including
the UK's North Sea) are in decline, or too small for any remaining
growth in their output to make a difference; global growth in oil
supply now depends entirely on the 'Middle East Five', and when they
can no longer meet demand, there will be an oil shock. The speed at
which it arrives could be startling.
This will mark the beginning of the end of the oil-based market
economy, and it is for this moment that we should by now have
prepared an infrastructure of renewables, backed by conservation
systems to reduce energy demand to less than one third of what we use
at present. However, this infrastructure takes a minimum of 25 years
to build, and since it has been barely started, the oil famine which
can be expected to develop in the next ten years will be catastrophic.
The consequences in the short term cannot be predicted in detail
because, when systems break down, they do so chaotically. But some
leading symptoms can be foreseen. There will be incremental economic
damage, affecting Third World countries first of all, before becoming
more general. This is because the multinational institutions have
taken pains to make 'developing' economies dependent on oil, and so
when the price of oil rises beyond their means, their economies will
start to disintegrate. Agriculture will be disabled by disruptions in
the supply of oil for fertiliser, machinery, irrigation pumps and
transport. Tourism will be paralysed by high fuel costs and by a
collapse in consumers' income. Political unrest will develop as
economic institutions and distribution systems for food and fuel show
the strain and begin to break down.
It is now too late to prevent this from happening. Moreover, it is
likely that governments, international organisations and
transnational corporations will refuse to recognise that there is a
problem until they are actually buried in it. Even then, they will
insist that more oil exploration or more faith in free market forces
will solve it. They will claim that a few wicked hooligans or
'extremists' are stirring up public unrest. Then they will panic. But
what about the critics who have been warning about this for so long?
What should they do?
Endgames demand new tactics. During this period of transition, it
will be necessary to shift the grounds of the ecology-argument
decisively forward from ethics to practice. Let me explain. Ethical
arguments are relevant in cases where a course of action is possible
but undesirable and avoidable. It is possible to produce large
quantities of cash crops by means of heavy applications of fertiliser
and pesticide, by expropriating subsistence farmers and depleting the
soil and drawing on irreplaceable reserves of groundwater - but, of
course, there are environmental-humanitarian-ethical arguments
against it. In the future, by contrast, such a policy will no longer
be possible: there will not be the energy to produce the fertiliser,
to drive the machines, the irrigation and the transport, nor the
rich-country incomes to buy the product. There is no doubt that such
industrial agriculture is bad, but we will be wasting our time
pointing that out. If it is impossible, the ethical argument becomes
scarcely relevant.
With oil famine, ethical options become the only way forward.
Industrial agriculture? Fantasy. The only option for the future is
low-energy organic cultivation, bringing redundant farmers and
abandoned fields back into production. Globalisation? This is no more
than a short-lived side effect of cheap oil. In the future, local
development is the only practical solution. Nuclear energy? Moonshine.
To fill the energy gap left by oil and - shortly - by gas, would
