We’re Doomed
I realise that’s not the most cheery of post titles, and I also realise that a lot of what follows won’t be news to most readers of this blog, but given the content of a few news stories this week, I thought it was worth setting out briefly quite how fucked it looks like we’re going to be very soon.
It was the peak oil stuff earlier this week that sparked this off. That in itself was pretty bad, since it appears a) that we’ve been systematically lied to about how much oil is left, and b) that oil production’s set to begin its long decline in about…well, any time now. Unless it’s already happened. This, as Duncan’s Economic Blog explained a while back, might well screw over the global economy even worse than the banking crisis. Basically, oil prices will rise, so food prices will rise, (because farmers start selling their crops for bio-fuels instead of food – this is what happened when oil prices rose earlier this year). But people will still need food and fuel, so they’ll have less money to spend on everything else, so demand for non-essential consumer goods and services will drop, which means the economy will slow down, leading to job cuts. So that’s the inflationary pressure of energy and food prices, combined with the deflationary pressure of demand dropping for everything else. Of course, since the poorest members of any society are both the most vulnerable to losing their jobs and the ones who always spend the highest proportion of their income on food and energy, they’re going to get the worst of this. And this is the global poor, of course – the poor living in rich nations will probably get at least some assistance; others won’t be so lucky.
But that’s just the economic impact. It’s also pretty likely that wars will break out over what remains of the world’s oil (wars over oil are already kind of an established phenomenon, as you might possibly have noticed). Oh, and of course it’s going to become increasingly difficult to find enough fossil fuels to burn to keep the lights on (along with the life-support machines, the electronic communication systems, the fertiliser factories which make it possible to grow enough food for everyone, and all those other little luxuries). We could switch to renewables and nuclear, of course, but so far we’re not doing so well with that – in a staggering example of joined-up thinking at its finest, the government announced this week that as part of its plan to build new nuclear plants and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, it would be closing and dismantling one of the UK’s oldest windfarms.
Then there’s the small matter of the carbon emissions. As you’ve probably noticed, most people who actually have some expertise on the subject have been saying for some time that it’s pretty important we drastically reduce CO2 emissions to mitigate the effects of manmade global warming. Yet the graphs of oil production in this article (also linked above) show either a drop in output of about 6% or, if you believe the IEA, an increase of over 30%. So presumably neither the IEA or Professor Aleklett think that its realistic to expect that world oil production will reduce for any reason other than scarcity – that climate change agreements aren’t going to have any impact. And the reduction that Professor Aleklett forecasts still includes a significant proportion of what’s euphemistically referred to as ‘non-conventional oil’ – oil extracted from tar sands or coal, both of which, as George Monbiot pointed out in an interview with Salman on this site, are far more polluting than normal oil production, meaning that carbon emissions could still rise even if overall oil production fell. (I’m not certain that they would, since I don’t know the relative emissions figures for ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ oil production, but it at least seems plausible.) The effects of this, needless to say, won’t be pretty. And they’re being felt already.
What all this information should do, in an ideal world, is make people all the more committed to pressurising our governments to reach a sensible agreement at the Climate talks in Copenhagen, an agreement that’s looking increasingly unlikely. However, a poll in today’s Times shows that only 41% of people in the UK actually believe that manmade climate change is a reality (full details of the poll here). Since most prominent politicians do believe this (though not UKIP or any of the ten biggest Tory bloggers, surprise surprise), it looks like our political elites are actually ahead of the general populace on this one. Which, needless to say, makes the prospect of bringing popular pressure to bear on politicians on this issue pretty bleak. Enjoy your weekend…
Those of you who aren’t feeling quite as pessimistic are strongly recommended to join The Wave anti-climate change demo in London on the 5th December.
