Break out the bicycles Oil is running out, but the west
would rather wage wars than consider other energy sources
George Monbiot Tuesday June 8, 2004
The Guardian
Some people have wacky ideas," the new Republican campaign
ad alleges. "Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less.
That's John Kerry." Cut to a shot of men in suits riding
bicycles. Sadly, the accusation is false. Kerry has been
demanding that the price of oil be held down. He wants
George Bush to release supplies from the strategic reserve
and persuade Saudi Arabia to increase production. He has
been warning the American people that if the president
doesn't act soon, he and [censored] Cheney will have to share a
car to work. Men riding bicycles and sharing cars? Is there
no end to this madness?
Like the fuel protests that rose and receded in Britain last
week, these exchanges are both moronic and entirely
rational. The price of oil has been rising because demand
for a finite resource is growing faster than supply. Holding
the price down means that this resource will be depleted
more quickly, with the result that the dreadful prospect of
men sharing cars and riding bicycles comes ever closer.
Perhaps the presidential candidates will start campaigning
next against the passage of time.
But a high oil price means recession and unemployment, which
in turn means political failure for the man in charge. The
attempt to blame the other man for finity will be one of the
defining themes of the politics of the next few decades.
This conflict was exemplified last month by the leader of
the British fuel protests of 2000, Brynle Williams. "I'm
afraid to say I'm not very proud of what happened three
years ago," he admitted in a documentary broadcast on S4C on
May 4. "We all want turbo-charged motors now ... but we must
remember that it's some poor sod at the other end of the
world who ends up paying for
it." Five days later, on May 9, he told GMTV that he was
ready to start protesting again. Self-awareness and self-
interest don't seem to mix very well.
To understand what is going to happen, we must first grasp
the core fact of existence. Life is a struggle against
entropy. Entropy can be roughly defined as the dispersal of
energy. As soon as a system - whether an organism or an
economy - runs out of energy, it starts to disintegrate. Its
survival depends on seizing new sources of fuel.
Biological evolution is driven by the need to grab the
energy for which other organisms are competing. One result
is increasing complexity: a tree can take more energy from
the sun than the mosses on the forest floor; a tuna can seek
out its prey more actively than a jellyfish. But the cost of
this complexity is an enhanced requirement for energy. The
same goes for our economies.
They evolved in the presence of a source of energy that was
both cheap to extract and cheap to use. There is, as yet, no
substitute for it. Everything else is either more expensive
or harder to use. Without cheap oil the economy would
succumb to entropy.
But the age of cheap oil is over. If you doubt this, take a
look at the BBC's online report yesterday of a conference
run by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. The
reporter spoke to the chief economist of the International
Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. "In public, Mr Birol denied that
supply would not be able to meet rising demand ... But after
his speech he seemed to change his tune: 'For the time being
there is no spare capacity. But we expect demand to increase
by the fourth quarter by 3m barrels a day. If Saudi does not
increase supply by 3m barrels a day by the end of the year
we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult.
We will have difficult times.'" The reporter asked him
whether such a growth in supply was possible, or simply
wishful thinking. "'You are from the press?' Birol replied.
'This is not for the press.'" So the BBC asked the other
delegates what they thought of the prospects of a 30%
increase in Saudi production. "The answers were unambiguous:
'absolutely out of the question'; 'completely impossible';
and '3m barrels - never, not even 300,000'. One delegate
laughed so hard he had to support himself on a table." And
this was before they heard that two BBC journalists had been
gunned down in Riyadh.
The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six
barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. Major oil
finds (of over 500m barrels) peaked in 1964. In 2000, there
were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six, in 2002 two and in
2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream in
2007 and three in 2008. For the following years, none have
yet been scheduled.
The oil industry tells us not to worry: the market will find
a way of sorting this out. If the price of energy rises, new
sources will come onstream. But new sources of what? Every
other option is much more expensive than the cheap oil that
made our economic complexity possible.
The new technology designed to extract the dregs from old
fields is expensive and doesn't seem to work very well,
which is why Shell was forced to downgrade its anticipated
reserves (other companies, under pressure from the US
Securities and Exchange Commission, will surely follow).
Extracting oil from tar sands and shales uses almost as much
energy as it yields. The same goes for turning crops such as
rape into biodiesel. Nuclear power is viable only if you
overlook both the massive costs of decommissioning and the
fact that no safe means has yet been discovered of disposing
of the waste. We could cover the country with windmills and
solar panels, but the electricity they produced would still
be an expensive means of running our cars.
Just as the oil supply begins to look uncertain, global
demand is rising faster than it has done for 16 years.
Yesterday morning, General Motors announced that it is
spending $3bn on doubling its production of cars for the
Chinese market. Seventy-four minutes later, we saw the first
signs of entropy: the International Air Travel Association
revealed that the airlines are likely to lose $3bn this year
because of high oil prices. The cheap carriers complained
that they could be forced out of the market.
If the complexity of our economies is impossible to sustain,
our best hope is to start to dismantle them before they
collapse. This isn't very likely to happen. Faced with a
choice between a bang and a whimper, our governments are
likely to choose the bang, waging ever more extravagant wars
to keep the show on the road. Terrorists, alert to both the
west's rising need and the vulnerability of the pipeline and
tanker networks, will respond with their own oil wars.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle," HG Wells wrote, "I
no longer despair for the human race." It's a start, but I'd
feel even more confident about our chances of survival if I
saw George Bush and [censored] Cheney sharing a car to work.
· George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for
a New World Order is now published in paperback
www.monbiot.com
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004