End
Of Cheap Oil, The Global Energy Crisis And Climate Change
By Vandana Shiva
07 July, 2006
Zmag
The increase in oil prices has
led to protests, which have moved to the center stage of Indian politics,
displacing the protests against reservations in medical and engineering
colleges.
Increase in oil prices translates
into higher prices of all commodities. As Hindustan Times reported oil
price hike turns cereal killer (Hindustan Times, Wednesday, June 14,
2006, p.2 table). Yet the increase in oil prices in world markets is
inevitable because the resource is dwindling and supplies have peaked,
peak oil means the end of cheap oil, and an end to economies organized
around the increasing availability of cheap oil.
Oil is a non-renewable resource.
We have always known that yet the world has been behaving as if oil
is in endless supply. And we in India who have lived in a biodiversity
and biomass energy economy are rushing into oil addiction precisely
when the global oil supply is running low and prices are running high.
The Association for the Study
of Peak Oil (ASPO), an umbrella organization of oil expects, mainly
geologists who helped find oil fields are now warning us that there
are only a trillion barrels or less of oil left, and the supply will
peak within this decade. "Peak Oil", or the topping point,
is the highest amount that can ever be pumped. Beyond "peak oil",
there will be an overall decline in production and an increase in oil
prices. Oil that costs $5 per barrel to extract could become $ 100 per
barrel when confidence in supply erodes and demand increases, and there
is recognition that we are in a world of shrinking oil supplies, not
growing supplies.
Why are we as a country tying
our future to a resource that must shrink and become more costly? As
we build more superhighways and mega cities, destroying the decentralized
fabric of our socio-economic organization, we need to ask how long will
this last?
There is another reason to
stop this frenzy of oil addiction, and that is climate change, or more
accurately, climate chaos. Climate change is caused by fossil fuel emissions,
and stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions is an ecological imperative.
This is why the Kyoto Protocol to the climate change convention was
signed. The insurance industry, which takes over $ 2 trillion in annual
premiums, and is bigger than the oil industry, is now a major player
in addressing climate change since they have to pay billions out in
insurance as cities flood, cyclones such as Katrina uproot entire communities
and heat waves kill.
The costs of climate change
to the people of India are extremely high. The 1999 Orissa super cyclone
and the Bombay floods of July 2006 are just two better-known extreme
events linked to a changing climate.
This winter, we had no rains
during the wheat season, and heavy downpours during the wheat harvest.
Heavy rains before the monsoon in the catchments of the Ganga and Yamuna
destroyed crops so that farmers did not even have seeds to sow. And
in Sikkim, heavy rains led to land slides, which disrupted Gangtok's
water supply. I was in Sikkim during the crisis and we lived on one
bucket a day.
The fossil fuel economy is
based on two illusions - one, that we can keep up our oil addiction,
and two, that substituting renewable energy with fossil fuel has only
benefits, no costs. Climate change is very high cost of an economy based
on oil. We are starting to eat oil and drink oil. Oil is at the heart
of industrial food production and processing, and long distance food
transport. The wheat, India is importing is not just bringing weeds,
pests and pesticides. It is also carrying thousands of "food miles".
Imagine a Tsunami or cyclone if our food supplies become dependent on
wheat from U.S and Australia. And imagine the cost of wheat as oil prices
rise, and wheat embodies more oil than nutrition.
We are also drinking oil,
not water. When Coca Cola and Pepsi pump 1.5 to 2 million a day to fill
their soft drink and water bottles, and transport them to the remotest
part of India, water embodies oil both in its extraction and transport.
It is increasingly impossible to find clean water in our wells and springs.
But Aqua Fina and Kinley has reached every village, selling water which
has become oil, packaged in a plastic bottle made from oil.
While the political parties
protest against the hike in oil prices, society also needs to start
taking a long-term view of the ecological, economic and social costs
of our growing oil addition. We need to start addressing strategic issues
of real and sustainable energy security in the context of peak oil,
the end of cheap oil, and the climate chaos that the era of cheap oil
has left as an environmental burden on the planet.