“End of the Oil Age” June 18, 2007
Posted by Graham in : Peak Oil , trackbackGeorge Lee’s RTE documentary “Future Shock: the End of the Oil Age” was shown this evening on TV and is most notable perhaps for being a breakthrough into the mainstream Irish media. Though by no means the first such coverage- RTE radio did an excellent series of short pieces with Philip Boucher-Hayes last year- it did present a more hard-hitting message about the vulnerability of Ireland as an island nation to rising prices and eventual oil shortages than has usually been the case.
Well-known Peak Oil prophets including Jeremy Leggett, Colin Campbell, Matt Simmonds, Richard Douthwaite and Michael Meacher were joined by Frank McDonald of the Irish Times and other economists and political analysts to discuss the likely effects on the Irish economy should Peak arrive before we are prepared for it. Ireland ranks third in the EU in terms of per capita oil consumption; we are particularly vulnerable because of excessive dependency on cheap air travel and very high rates of private car ownership and commuting distances; Irish manufacturing has been largely dismantled and we depend upon imports from around the world to keep the economy going; oil has lead to the rapid expansion of suburban development and big out of town box stores which will be unable to continue after oil becomes too expensive.
Lee emphasied these issues as well as the inevitability of peak at some point, pointing to the likelihood of an early peak within the next five years rather than the IEA’s later date of 2030.
Renewables were touched on and it was shown how they cannot replace oil and all the many things it does and is used for. The programme enede rather lamely, I felt with an urgent injunction for us the use the “window of opportunity” that we have to “change the way we use oil” but apart from increasing public transport, very little clue was given as to what this might mean. Oddly, on a radio interview earlier in the day, Lee had stated that there could be no “going back”; and yet in the TV documentary, he asserted unequivocally that Peak Oil would role back some of the gains of the last decade. Jeremy Leggett was quoted as saying that the oil shock will likely hit us “like a Tsunami”.
The plain fact is, everything countries like Ireland have been doing for the past 20 years has been wrong; oil-fuelled Growth has created an over-extended economy and an over-fed population who seems to believe the Celitc Tiger was something to do with Irish entrepreneurship and hard work. While the urgency of the situation was well explained in the programme, the basic premise still seemed to be that the “problem” was that Growth was coming to an end and we may not just be ready in time, rather than the reality which is that Growth itself has been the problem and something entirely different is needed. We need to reinvent our society if we are to survive at all. There was very little discussion of what the future might look like, although growing food on the lawns was mentioned.
The End of Oil is not a problem; it is just an inevitable event that we have been heading towards since the first oil well was drilled. The problem has been the lack of foresight that this will happen, and an apparent ongoing willingness to postpone looking for an alternative path until it is way too late and wishful thinking that the next generation will have to deal with the crises instead of this one.
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For those who didn’t manage to see it, the documentary can still be watched online for the next 21 days. Just follow this link -
http://www.rte.ie/tv/futureshock/index.html
Regards,
Eoin