The coming end of the 'oil age'

An amusing comment on the influence of the automobile in the 20th century can be found in an incident that occurred in 1896. The occasion, a fatal accident that saw Bridget Driscoll run down by a modified vehicle travelling at a blistering 4 mph, prompted the following warning from the coroner Percy Morrison:

“We must ensure that such a thing would never happen again”

In hindsight it’s a touching, if not a little naïve, sentiment. Road accidents resulted in the death of some 3221 people in 2003 alone in the UK. Meanwhile, the internal combustion engine – and the way it exponentially drove the oil age – has proved to be a far more lethal device than anybody in the nineteenth century could have imagined.

The fuel protests, which this week threatened yet failed to materialise, demonstrate how the price of gasoline has evolved into a barometer for public grievance with the government. In 2000 well-organised protests scared a government that was approaching the end of its first term into cutting duty tax. However, back then the assumption (largely correct) was that the problem was due to the government’s punitive measures. In 2005, the problem is more one of logistics: the high price of oil, coupled with the worldwide shortage created by Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of vital Gulf refineries, has caused pump prices in Britain to inch over the once-unthinkable £1 per litre mark.

Thus, a sense of panic has set in across the country, with drivers filling their tanks and lines of cars idling outside petrol stations who are struggling to cope with the demand. Whether all this is an example of a self-supporting myth is unclear; the ‘crisis’, if it can so be termed, appears to stem from the beginning of this week – a day on which the Daily Mail published a largely inconsequential piece, which nevertheless carried the alarming headline “Panic at the petrol pumps”. Cue sinister threats from some of the co-ordinators of the 2000 protests, and on Wednesday efforts were made to blockade refineries. By all accounts these were a somewhat ridiculous failure and, despite fighting talk from the organisers, efforts on Thursday and Friday were similarly futile. Unlike in 2000, the protestors lack the backing of the public.

Part of the reason is the assumption that Britain, like many other countries, is the victim of oil price rises elsewhere on the globe. This week Gordon Brown claimed that the problem lay squarely at the door of OPEC and their opaque declarations on oil production quotas. It is a simplistic, short-term analysis of what is a problem on a much larger scale. Even if OPEC were to increase production, it would not alter the fact that – according to an increasing number of experts on the subject – we have long passed the point of peak oil production.

In his recent book The Long Emergency: Surviving the converging catastrophe of the 21st century, James Howard Kunstler depicts a nightmarish, yet chillingly plausible, account of the way that the end of the oil age will change civilisation as we know it. His central argument is that the world’s population is sustainable only in an age of vast industrialisation. When cheap fossil fuels are exhausted, which could happen much more quickly than anybody anticipated, this industrialisation will gradually come to an end, and with it the ability to sustain what we have come to regard as the ‘westernised’ style of existence – suburban living, mass car ownership, air travel on demand, food, goods and services, shipped from one side of the world to the other. The dramatic rise of industrialisation in China and India is further exacerbating the problem.

Furthermore, the ‘controversial’ subject of global warming – controversial only to those, such as many in the Bush administration, who blithely refuse to believe that it even exists – is reaching an ever-more precarious position. A report in the Independent suggests that global warming is now past the point of no return – the polar ice caps are now melting at an unprecedented rate, and, essentially nothing can be done to reverse the process.

Such apocalyptic considerations jar with the idea – expressed most effectively by the disgruntled drivers lining up at petrol stations - of our ‘right’ to cheap fossil fuel. It is a word you often hear bandied about, this notion of one’s ‘right’; to have the freedom to own and run a car, go on cheap flights, enjoy a plentiful supply of energy. The unfortunate truth is that we are going to have to wean ourselves off this idea if we are ever to move beyond the oil age into whatever form of energy comes next. Trade advertisements by companies such as Shell and BP talk blithely about wind power, as if it is a ready-to-use solution that can be simply switched on as and when necessary. There is a chance that we will discover some form of renewable energy that is as plentiful and as wide-ranging as oil; however, as Kunstler ominously warns, the “likely scenario is that new fuels and technologies may never replace fossil fuels at the rate, scale and manner that the world currently consumes them”

When this crisis comes, there is little chance that such arcane events as the ‘fuel protests’ will be remembered. But for us today, they are important milestones it what will emerge to become the greatest challenge of the 21st century: how civilisation will react to the end of the oil age.