Oil production set to peak. One more time?

In August last year, I read a Guardian opinion piece by lovable looney George Monbiot about how oil production had peaked. He quoted the unlikely-named Texan oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens as saying "Never again will we pump more than 82 million barrels." well you can read the rest of the story here. Monbiot is great. he writes these opinion pieces from the old school of lefty-green fatalism and makes these wonderfully final statements like 'it's the end of the modern age' and they just come true.

But George has competition. John Vidal writes for the… er… Guardian as well. And today he has written a wonderfully pessimistic article about how oil production is about to peak. Sometime next year, he reckons. So we are actually still in the modern age. Now don't get me wrong. I enjoy reading about the end of the world as much as the next smug pseudo-socialist (I am on the way to becoming an archetypal Champagne socialist, the only issue being that I drink Cava - living as I do in Catalunya). What would prove us all more right than the utter collapse of capitalist society?

John Vidal makes the sensible point that oil is necessary for our way of life. I've asked friends and colleagues many times: what do we do when the oil runs out? It's not merely a fuel. nearly every aspect of our lives is partly reliant on plastics of the multitude of other chemicals we manage to extract from that gorgeous black milk. Gemma's response is usually "they'll find something" - and I suppose she must be right. The truth is that necessity has always bred invention. So there'll be a period of what? years, decades? And then things will be OK again.

But that could be my whole life. Living like Mad Max. I hate Mel Gibson.

On the positive side, T. Boone pickens was saying that we'd never pump 82 million barrels a day again. Well John Vidal says we're now pumping 83 million a day. So none of the predictions are that reliable.

One hint: put a decent fuel tax in place in the USA. The average price per litre of octane 85 unleaded petrol in the UK costs 80.5 pence. In the USA, customers pay an average of 27.05 pence* for the same stuff. It doesn't take a genius to realise that a decent fuel levy in America might help reduce consumption… and also raise the necessary dollars to invest in correcting the $7.7 trillion defecit. I know things aren't quite that simple, but they ain't that complex neither. Radical ideas need to be considered, or it's off to the Thunderdome for the lot of us.
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* World petrol prices from the AA.

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April 21, 2005 | Filed Under Capital, Politics 

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