ASPO Août 2006
ASPO AOUT 2006
https://aspo-ireland.org/Newsletter68.pdf
newsletters :
Algeria 41 Chad 59 Iran 32 Nigeria 27 Trinidad 37 Angola 36 China 40 Iraq 24 Norway 25 Turkey 46
Argentina 33 Colombia *62 Italy 43 Oman 39 UK *68 Australia 28 Denmark 47 Kazakhstan 49 Peru 45 USA 23 Azerbaijan 44 Ecuador 29 Kuwait 38 Qatar 58 Venezuela *67
Bolivia 56 Egypt 30 Libya 34 Romania 55 Vietnam 53
Brasil 26 Gabon 50 Malaysia 51 Russia 31 AFRICA 68
Brunei 54 India 52 Mexico 35 Syria *60
The General Depletion Picture
732. When will they ever learn ?
The Financial Times of July 4th discusses the energy situation, explaining how sticks and carrots are being deployed at the G8 Meetings to try to persuade Russia to liberalise its energy industry.
The notion evidently is that Western companies and capital should flood into Russia to exploit its oil and gas as fast as possible and export the surplus to Europe. The negotiators have evidently failed to study the experience of Britain. Prolific oil and gas came to this country with the opening of the North Sea in the 1960s. At first, responsibility was largely in rather slowmoving State hands with security of supply being one of the priorities. But then, Mrs Thatcher’s Government liberalised the market, releasing all the well-known attributes of enthusiasm, initiative, enterprise, and competition, accompanied by monumental engineering achievements. At first, it seemed a remarkably successful policy, raising employment in a huge new industry and yielding a massive flow of revenue, while at the same time reducing energy costs to the consumer. The coal and nuclear industries went into decline as new prosperity opened the flood gates for immigration to a consumer society relishing cheap labour. But there is an irony to depleting a finite resource: namely, that the better you do the job, the sooner it ends. Oil and gas production peaked in Britain in respectively 1999 and 2003 being now set to decline at respectively about 7% and 10% a year, meaning that the resources will be virtually exhausted by 2020, as the responsible government department has admitted. Furthermore, rights to the remaining production are largely in foreign hands with freedom to export, whatever Britain’s needs. So is it wise to press Russia to follow this example based on outdated economic principles and mindsets ? Would it not be better if Russia were to produce and export more slowly for a longer period, and encourage Europe to use what time is left to find some sustainable basis on which to approach the next Century.
733. People Eat
While admittedly some people eat less than others, no one has found out how to live without eating.
The question is : what do they eat ? The image the diners have at their groaning tables is that they are swallowing beautiful fruit, ripened by sunshine in the golden orchards or wheat nourished by the rich prairie soil.
The image of the steak is slightly less appealing, but even so, they can picture the herds having had happy lives, munching luscious grass on the ranches, before facing the slaughterman.
A new book Eating Fossil Fuels by Dale Allen Pfeiffer (New Society Publishers ISBN 978-0-86571-565-3) answers the question of what it is we really eat : in short energy. Some is indeed captured from sunlight by photosynthesis, but much comes from oil and gas. The Green Revolution of the 1960s was hailed as a scientific breakthrough that would feed the world’s burgeoning population, but in reality it destroys the ecosystem. Irrigation, and petroleum-based synthetic nutrients and pesticides have increased crop yields, as have oil-fuelled tractors and harvesters working the fields. Massive corporate agri-business has replaced smallholders, while cheap transport has moved food around the world such that strawberries are available everywhere on every day of the year. The peasants in some countries starve as cash crops are exported.
The physical cost has been monumental as the deserts encroach and the water tables fall, which is bad enough, but this Century will see the decline to exhaustion of the critical oil and gas supply that made it all possible.
There are plenty of precedents.
The potato was introduced to Ireland in the 1600’s as a highly efficient source of energy and nourishment, allowing the population to increase three-fold until a fungal blight decimated the crop in 1846.
A million people died of starvation, and more were forced to emigrate, such that the population halved over the next fifty years, never to recover.
Some 400 million people occupied the Planet at the time of Christ, and the number no more than doubled over the next seventeen centuries.
They lived sustainable lives relying on human and animal muscle-power,
supplemented by wind for sail, and water mills.
Then came coal, followed by oil and gas, which provided a massive flood of new cheap energy, derived from concentrated photosynthesis of a few rare epochs in the distant geological past, which allowed the population to increase six-fold in parallel.
It is no coincidence that slavery ended as the oil age began.
It poses the awful question of how many people the Planet can support by the end of this Century when oil and gas will be virtually exhausted.
Pfeiffer’s important book provides a compelling insight as well as guidelines for the survivors.