Oil: It is the addiction that is causing the crisis
This week, a battalion of angry addicts brought London to a standstill. They snarled up the traffic, then marched on 10 Downing Street to demand their fix at prices they can afford. Across the world, in countries as different as the US and Iran, fellow junkies are rising up in rage. Their addiction is to a gloopy black drug called petrol v- and we are all about to go cold turkey. In the past seven years, the price of oil has soared from $30 a barrel to $140. By the end of the next year, it could be at $200. No matter how much we plead or howl at our governments, it will never go back: the final act of the age of oil has begun.
The era that is ending began at 10.30 am on January 10, 1901, on a high hill called Spindle top in south-eastern Texas. A pair of pioneer brothers managed to drill down into the biggest oil field ever found. Un till then, the dribbles of oil that had that had been discovered were used only for kerosene lamps – but within a decade, this vast gushing supply was driving the entire global economy. It made the twentieth century – its glories, and its gutters – possible. Humans were suddenly able to use in one frenetic burst an energy supply that had taken 150 million years to build up. A species that died before the age of forty after a life of boring, back breaking labor spurted forward so far and so fast that today billions live into their eighties after a life of leisure and plenty.
Oil now drives everything we do. It shuttles us across the globe, we fight wars for it, and we even eat it: to farm a single cow and deliver it to slaughter house burns up six barrels of oil. That is why food becomes expensive. It is totally understandable that most of us want to live forever in that sweet niche in history when we had seemingly infinite reservoirs of oil, and no awareness that burning it would, in time, burn us too. There are three reasons why the placebos demanded by the petrol protesters and the politicians cowering from them across the world – lower taxes! – are a delusion.
Reality check one: Petrol is finite. There is limited amount of oil in the world and we have already burned more than 900 billions barrels of it. Some geologists the point of peak oil production have already passed. We will have for another 30 years to go. But all agree the remaining oil is harder to reach, and much of it can never be accessed. So we a diminishing supply – at the very moment when billions more people want access to it.
Reality check two: Even if we had infinite supplies of free petrol, we couldn’t afford to use it without dramatically destabilizing the climate. The oceans are rapidly turning more acidic. Worst droughts are common. Drinking water supplies are becoming scarce. The arctic is now completely free of ice in summer. This is all with just one degree of global warming. The world’s climatologists agree that if we burn up most of the remaining oil on earth, we could be on six degrees this century. The last time the world warmed so quickly was 251 million years ago – and 95 percent of everything on earth died.
Reality check three: Our addiction to oil means we can never undermine the Islamic fundamentalists who want to kill us – and often actually help them.
Most of the world’s remaining oil is in the middle east. In order to access it we have a twin-track policy. To start with we support the most repressive dictatorship in the region – the torturing, Sharia law enforcing house of Saud – because they keep the supply running nicely.
The Saudi states then use the money we pay at the pump to fund a vast network of extreme madrasas and mosques across the world – including within the Europe and US – preaching that democracy is evil, women should be subordinated, Jews are pigs and apes, and gays should be killed We do not query this because, as the writer Thomas Friedman put it, “junkies don’t tell the truth to their dealers.”
Where we cannot find a friendly local tyrant, we invade the country in order to control the oil, arguing that energy independence would prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the middle-east.
On their own, each of these inconvenient truths would be enough to require us to begin an urgent transition away from petrol. Together they are unanswerable. Every penny should be spent now not on perpetuating petrol, but on developing and disseminating alternative fuels. The addiction that began a century ago on a hill in Texas is ending – and we no choice but to check en masse into petro-rehab.
Leave Your Comments