James Delingpole
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Transition Towns is a ‘community project’ whose aim is to ‘raise awareness of sustain-able living and build local ecological resilience’ in response to the ‘dual challenges of climate change and peak oil’. A jolly admirable aim, too, I’m sure we would all agree, if either of those ‘challenges’ were genuine.
But they’re not. Today, skipping lightly over the first of those two alleged challenges, I’m going to focus on peak oil. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Perhaps you’re even worried about it. Peak oil is the notion, hugely popular in environmentalist circles, that any time now the oil is going to run out. And when it does run out, so the theory goes, there’s going to be mayhem: massive hikes in the price of energy will send the cost of living skyrocketing and push the global economy into a major depression, leading to civilisational collapse; and a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the only transport is gyrocopter or camel-drawn wagon, everyone wears terrible 1980s haircuts, and we are forced to fight for our lives in a giant dome presided over by an elderly Tina Turner.
All right, maybe not Tina Turner. But the rest is what peak-oilers actually believe. It is one of the key tenets of the global green religion: ‘scarce resources’ are running out; they must be preserved for ‘future generations’; ergo, we must reduce our consumption of them either through self-abnegation or through state intervention ranging from market manipulation (e.g. taxes and subsidies to drive us all from fossil fuels) to full-on rationing. If you refer back to the previous paragraph, you may detect a certain irony here.
Yes, in the name of averting global economic disaster, concerned greens have been pushing the very policies most likely to cause it. Driving up energy prices, discouraging consumption, increasing regulation, rationing resources: these are not, I think we can all agree, methods traditionally associated with getting an economy out of a depression.
Still, what other option do we have? I know. Let’s ask an expert: a physicist of such distinction he even had a temperature scale named after him. Here’s what Lord Kelvin had to say on the subject of another scarce resource, back in 1902: ‘The enormous amount of coal required to run our great ocean steamships, our leviathans of the deep, and the innumerable factories of our cities is making such inroads upon the available store that nature cannot forever supply the demand. When all the coal of the earth is used, what then?’
Twenty years later, the situation had grown more dire still. US president Warren Harding’s Coal Commission, having consulted 500 experts, concluded: ‘Already the output of [natural] gas has begun to wane. Production of oil cannot long maintain its present rate.’ Then in 1956, another renowned expert called M. King Hubbert declared that oil reserves were far more limited than was generally recognised; in the US supplies would peak between 1965 and 1970. Sure enough US oil production did indeed peak in 1970. Woah! How spookily prescient was that?
Actually, not very. Last year, for the first time since the 1940s, the US became a net exporter of oil — helped by such discoveries as the Bakken shale beneath North Dakota, which is reckoned to have between 4 billion and 24 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Around the world, despite a drilling rate of around 93 million barrels of oil a day, the quantity of known reserves at the end of each year is increasing, not decreasing.
Here’s Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Quest, putting it into perspective: ‘The world has produced about one trillion barrels of oil since the start of industry in the 19th century. Currently, it is thought that there are at least five trillion barrels of petroleum resources, of which 1.4 trillion is sufficiently developed and technically and economically accessible to count as proved.’
And that’s just oil. We haven’t got on to the miracle of shale gas yet, found in such abundance in the US that energy costs have plummeted — as they would do in Britain too, were we properly to exploit our own bounteous reserves (the Bowland shale alone, beneath Blackpool, has 200 trillion cubic feet of the stuff) and abandon our vainglorious pursuit of ‘renewables’.
My beef with the green movement is not that it cares too much about the ‘environment’ — I do too — but that its strictures and Weltanschauung are so often divorced from reality. If those green fundamentalists can get it so badly wrong on ‘peak energy’, why should we trust anything they have to say on anything else?
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