A Civilisation In Denial
- We Are Running Out Of Oil The Bottom Of The
Barrel By George
Monbiot The Guardian - UK 12-4-3
- The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the
government approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in
British territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that
this is a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in
terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the human
predicament has become when you discover that this "huge" new field will
supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days.
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- Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that
the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We
don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation
in denial.
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- Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what
remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of
new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much
oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago:
the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered
piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of
small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one
with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production
of oil will peak before long.
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- The only question is how long. The most optimistic
projections are the ones produced by the US department of energy, which
claims that this will not take place until 2037. But the US energy
information agency has admitted that the government's figures have been
fudged: it has based its projections for oil supply on the projections
for oil demand, perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial
markets.
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- Other analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum
geologist Colin Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak
before 2010. In August, the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New
Scientist that he was "99% confident" that the date of maximum global
production will be 2004. Even if the optimists are correct, we will be
scraping the oil barrel within the lifetimes of most of those who are
middle-aged today.
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- The supply of oil will decline, but global demand will
not. Today we will burn 76m barrels; by 2020 we will be using 112m
barrels a day, after which projected demand accelerates. If supply
declines and demand grows, we soon encounter something with which the
people of the advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar: shortage.
The price of oil will go through the roof.
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- As the price rises, the sectors which are now almost
wholly dependent on crude oil - principally transport and farming - will
be forced to contract. Given that climate change caused by burning oil
is cooking the planet, this might appear to be a good thing. The problem
is that our lives have become hard-wired to the oil economy. Our
sprawling suburbs are impossible to service without cars. High oil
prices mean high food prices: much of the world's growing population
will go hungry. These problems will be exacerbated by the direct
connection between the price of oil and the rate of unemployment. The
last five recessions in the US were all preceded by a rise in the oil
price.
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- Oil, of course, is not the only fuel on which vehicles
can run. There are plenty of possible substitutes, but none of them is
likely to be anywhere near as cheap as crude is today. Petroleum can be
extracted from tar sands and oil shale, but in most cases the process
uses almost as much energy as it liberates, while creating great
mountains and lakes of toxic waste. Natural gas is a better option, but
switching from oil to gas propulsion would require a vast and
staggeringly expensive new fuel infrastructure. Gas, of course, is
subject to the same constraints as oil: at current rates of use, the
world has about 50 years' supply, but if gas were to take the place of
oil its life would be much shorter.
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- Vehicles could be run from fuel cells powered by
hydrogen, which is produced by the electrolysis of water. But the
electricity which produces the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. To
fill all the cars in the US would require four times the current
capacity of the national grid. Coal burning is filthy, nuclear energy is
expensive and lethal. Running the world's cars from wind or solar power
would require a greater investment than any civilisation has ever made
before. New studies suggest that leaking hydrogen could damage the ozone
layer and exacerbate global warming.
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- Turning crops into diesel or methanol is just about
viable in terms of recoverable energy, but it means using the land on
which food is now grown for fuel. My rough calculations suggest that
running the United Kingdom's cars on rapeseed oil would require an area
of arable fields the size of England.
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- There is one possible solution which no one writing
about the impending oil crisis seems to have noticed: a technique with
which the British and Australian governments are currently
experimenting, called underground coal gasification. This is a fancy
term for setting light to coal seams which are too deep or too expensive
to mine, and catching the gas which emerges. It's a hideous prospect, as
it means that several trillion tonnes of carbon which was otherwise
impossible to exploit becomes available, with the likely result that
global warming will eliminate life on Earth.
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- We seem, in other words, to be in trouble. Either we
lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry
the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation
collapses.
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- The only rational response to both the impending end
of the oil age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our
cities, our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without
massive political pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted
for austerity. People tend to take to the streets because they want to
consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching
tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people would
choose the tableware.
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- In view of all this, the notion that the war with Iraq
had nothing to do with oil is simply preposterous. The US attacked Iraq
(which appears to have had no weapons of mass destruction and was not
threatening other nations), rather than North Korea (which is actively
developing a nuclear weapons programme and boasting of its intentions to
blow everyone else to kingdom come) because Iraq had something it
wanted. In one respect alone, Bush and Blair have been making plans for
the day when oil production peaks, by seeking to secure the reserves of
other nations.
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- I refuse to believe that there is not a better means
of averting disaster than this. I refuse to believe that human beings
are collectively incapable of making rational decisions. But I am
beginning to wonder what the basis of my belief might be.
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- - The sources for this and all George Monbiot's recent
articles can be found at www.monbiot.com.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1097672,00.html
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