Riding
Bicycles
By George Monbiot
08 June, 2004
The Guardian
Some
people have wacky ideas," the new Republican campaign ad alleges.
"Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That's John Kerry."
Cut to a shot of men in suits riding bicycles.
Sadly, the accusation
is false. Kerry has been demanding that the price of oil be held down.
He wants George Bush to release supplies from the strategic reserve
and persuade Saudi Arabia to increase production. He has been warning
the American people that if the president doesn't act soon, he and Dick
Cheney will have to share a car to work. Men riding bicycles and sharing
cars? Is there no end to this madness?
Like the fuel protests
that rose and receded in Britain last week, these exchanges are both
moronic and entirely rational. The price of oil has been rising because
demand for a finite resource is growing faster than supply. Holding
the price down means that this resource will be depleted more quickly,
with the result that the dreadful prospect of men sharing cars and riding
bicycles comes ever closer. Perhaps the presidential candidates will
start campaigning next against the passage of time.
But a high oil price
means recession and unemployment, which in turn means political failure
for the man in charge. The attempt to blame the other man for finity
will be one of the defining themes of the politics of the next few decades.
This conflict was
exemplified last month by the leader of the British fuel protests of
2000, Brynle Williams. "I'm afraid to say I'm not very proud of
what happened three years ago," he admitted in a documentary broadcast
on S4C on May 4. "We all want turbo-charged motors now ... but
we must remember that it's some poor sod at the other end of the world
who ends up paying for it." Five days later, on May 9, he told
GMTV that he was ready to start protesting again. Self-awareness and
self-interest don't seem to mix very well.
To understand what
is going to happen, we must first grasp the core fact of existence.
Life is a struggle against entropy. Entropy can be roughly defined as
the dispersal of energy. As soon as a system - whether an organism or
an economy - runs out of energy, it starts to disintegrate. Its survival
depends on seizing new sources of fuel.
Biological evolution
is driven by the need to grab the energy for which other organisms are
competing. One result is increasing complexity: a tree can take more
energy from the sun than the mosses on the forest floor; a tuna can
seek out its prey more actively than a jellyfish. But the cost of this
complexity is an enhanced requirement for energy. The same goes for
our economies.
They evolved in
the presence of a source of energy that was both cheap to extract and
cheap to use. There is, as yet, no substitute for it. Everything else
is either more expensive or harder to use. Without cheap oil the economy
would succumb to entropy.
But the age of cheap
oil is over. If you doubt this, take a look at the BBC's online report
yesterday of a conference run by the Association for the Study of Peak
Oil. The reporter spoke to the chief economist of the International
Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. "In public, Mr Birol denied that supply
would not be able to meet rising demand ... But after his speech he
seemed to change his tune: 'For the time being there is no spare capacity.
But we expect demand to increase by the fourth quarter by 3m barrels
a day. If Saudi does not increase supply by 3m barrels a day by the
end of the year we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult.
We will have difficult times.'" The reporter asked him whether
such a growth in supply was possible, or simply wishful thinking. "'You
are from the press?' Birol replied. 'This is not for the press.'"
So the BBC asked the other delegates what they thought of the prospects
of a 30% increase in Saudi production. "The answers were unambiguous:
'absolutely out of the question'; 'completely impossible'; and '3m barrels
- never, not even 300,000'. One delegate laughed so hard he had to support
himself on a table." And this was before they heard that two BBC
journalists had been gunned down in Riyadh.
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The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil
for every new barrel we discover. Major oil finds (of over 500m barrels)
peaked in 1964. In 2000, there were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six,
in 2002 two and in 2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream
in 2007 and three in 2008. For the following years, none have yet been
scheduled.
The oil industry
tells us not to worry: the market will find a way of sorting this out.
If the price of energy rises, new sources will come onstream. But new
sources of what? Every other option is much more expensive than the
cheap oil that made our economic complexity possible.
The new technology
designed to extract the dregs from old fields is expensive and doesn't
seem to work very well, which is why Shell was forced to downgrade its
anticipated reserves (other companies, under pressure from the US Securities
and Exchange Commission, will surely follow). Extracting oil from tar
sands and shales uses almost as much energy as it yields. The same goes
for turning crops such as rape into biodiesel. Nuclear power is viable
only if you overlook both the massive costs of decommissioning and the
fact that no safe means has yet been discovered of disposing of the
waste. We could cover the country with windmills and solar panels, but
the electricity they produced would still be an expensive means of running
our cars.
Just as the oil
supply begins to look uncertain, global demand is rising faster than
it has done for 16 years. Yesterday morning, General Motors announced
that it is spending $3bn on doubling its production of cars for the
Chinese market. Seventy-four minutes later, we saw the first signs of
entropy: the International Air Travel Association revealed that the
airlines are likely to lose $3bn this year because of high oil prices.
The cheap carriers complained that they could be forced out of the market.
If the complexity
of our economies is impossible to sustain, our best hope is to start
to dismantle them before they collapse. This isn't very likely to happen.
Faced with a choice between a bang and a whimper, our governments are
likely to choose the bang, waging ever more extravagant wars to keep
the show on the road. Terrorists, alert to both the west's rising need
and the vulnerability of the pipeline and tanker networks, will respond
with their own oil wars.
"Every time
I see an adult on a bicycle," HG Wells wrote, "I no longer
despair for the human race." It's a start, but I'd feel even more
confident about our chances of survival if I saw George Bush and Dick
Cheney sharing a car to work.
· George
Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order
is now published in paperback
www.monbiot.com