But this "solution' rests on the very traditional politico-economic assumptions that got us into this mess, and can only be taken seriously because the three-party consensus continues to overlook some of the most fundamental policy questions of all. Global energy scarcity being, perhaps, one of the largest elephants soon to be inherited by David Cameron that has been inhabiting the Prime Minister's living room at No. 10 for some years now.
The End of the Oil Age
It is increasingly clear that world conventional oil production peaked around 2008, is currently on an undulating but gradually declining plateau, and is most likely to continue declining for the foreseeable future. One of the latest official admissions has come from Australia. Curtin University's Professor Peter Newman, atop infrastructure adviserto the Australian government, warns that the current economic recession was indelibly linked to our energy crisis:
"Peak oil did happen I believe in 2008 and it didn't happen because some oil exporting country had a revolution or something. It just happened because we couldn't produce enough to meet the demand. Subprime mortgages were mostly out on the urban fringes miles away from work. People had to drive and when the price of fuel tripled in American cities they couldn't pay their mortgages. As the demand increases again the supply crunch will happen and the price will go up."
The implication is that the era of "growth' as we currently conceptualise it is reaching its own structural limits. If there is a meaningful economic recovery, and it is patently unclear that there will be one, the problem is that the "growth' it involves as demand increases will breach current global oil capacity limits, triggering an oil price spike that will once again induce recession. Indeed, the only thing stabilising oil prices at the moment has been the lack of demand that was induced by peak oil in the first place.
So potentially grave is this problem that now even theUS Joint Forces Commandacknowledges the dangers in itsJoint Operating Environment 2010report: "A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds." (p. 28) Of course, the assumption here is that the problem is not geophysical (i.e. that we have exhausted half the world's actual reserves of cheap oil) but that we haven't invested enough in refining capacity. A lot of hope was poured into the prospects for exploiting deepwater reserves a hope shattered for the next few years by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill which has frozen deepwater exploitation indefinitely. In any case, it's also clear that deepwater could at best onlyslightly amelioratethe impact of peak oil, but not prevent it. The US military report continues: "By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD." (p. 29)
The conclusion, in any case, is even more dire than the predictions of groups like the UK Industry Task Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security, which earlier this year timed the coming global oil supply crunch at2015. And the new analysis by Sir David King, the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, proves clearly that the problem is not just about capacity, but about how much oil is actually in the ground and the rates of exploitation. TheKing study, published in the journalEnergy Policy, finds thatofficial estimates of world conventional (including deepwater) oil reserves should be downgraded from 1,150-1,350bn barrels to between 850-900bn barrels and forecaststhat demandmay outstrip supply by around2014.
An Unnatural System
And that's not our only problem. The danger is that as we leave behind the era of cheap oil, we will turn increasingly to other hydrocarbon energy solutions like coal and gas which, apart from representing their own difficulties vis-a-vis scarcity, will continue to contribute dramatically to fossil fuel emissions and thus intensifying interference with the Earth's complexly-interdependent eco-systems. The spectre of runaway global warming remains a reality, whatever the pretensions of self-styled,oil-funded"climate sceptics'. Earlier this year, theGuardianreported the findings of a new peer-reviewed study published inScience:
"Scientists have recorded a massive spike in the amount of a powerful greenhouse gas seeping from Arctic permafrost, in a discovery that highlights the risks of a dangerous climate tipping point.
Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame.
The discovery follows a string of reports from the region in recent years that previously frozen boggy soils are melting and releasing methane in greater quantities. Such Arctic soils currently lock away billions of tonnes of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, leading some scientists to describe melting permafrost as a ticking time bomb that could overwhelm efforts to tackle climate change.
They fear the warming caused by increased methane emissions will itself release yet more methane and lock the region into a destructive cycle that forces temperatures to rise faster than predicted."
Needless to say, theimpactsof this positive-feedback alone would be sufficient to propel the entire Earth climate system into a process of irreversible runaway warming that could, well before the end of this century, create conditions devastating to most species, including droughts across a third of the planet, failed harvests in the major food basket regions, increased frequency of natural disasters, unprecedented sea level rise of up to five feet, and so on.
Paradigm Shift
These converging crises speak to the need for fundamentallyre-thinkingour understanding of the efficacy of the ideology, structure and values underlying ourcurrent economic behaviour, and whether they really are as inevitable, optimal or natural as we tend to assumea priori. At the very least, it is clear that unqualified austerity or in Stiglitz's words "deficit fetishism" is not the answer:
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