Jonathon Porritt: Peak Oil and Climate Change
Posted by Chris Vernon on June 8, 2006 - 5:25pm in The Oil Drum: Europe
I attended the Hay Festival on Friday (02/06/06) where amongst other speakers I heard Jonathon Porritt speak on the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change.
Porritt could be described as a career environmentalist, his curriculum vitae includes chair of the UK Ecology Party (now the Green Party), a director of Friends of the Earth, founder of Forum for the Future and he currently chairs the Sustainable Development Commission, the Government's independent advisory body on sustainable development.
Speaking to approximately 1000 people his message was powerful and well received, here's what he had to say.
Spending little time on outlining climate change Porritt suggested that amongst this audience at least there can be little remaining doubt either of the urgency or severity of the climate change challenge. Tipping his hat to the recent statements from Sir David Attenborough on the subject, he noted that “The ranks of those still trying to tell us this is not serious is thinning, diminishing, all the time”.
Porritt outlined four key points on what the science is actually telling us about climate change:
Since it is clear that something absolutely has to change, something has to done, the question of whether we have enough time to enact the necessary changes must be addressed. There must after all come a time when it is too late to mitigate disaster. Whilst some, including James Lovelock would say it is now too late, Porritt said he was “not in the all too late category”. However I was left wondering whether this statement was his true belief or whether it was just what someone in his position has to say since to suggest it is too late also abandons all hopes of being able to “empower people, give them a sense of agency, a sense that there really is a set of actions, individual, communal, national, global, that we can take”. Without that the situation really is without hope.
- Everything is moving a great deal faster than they thought it was moving, even two years ago. When you talk to scientists in the science community they will tell you the last two years have been deeply shocking, in terms of the volume and the authority of the data that has come forward on a number of different climate phenomenon.
- We shouldn’t think about climate change as a gradually unfolding set of phenomena, all gradually increasing within our midst. The climate record tells us very clearly this is as much about sharp discontinuities in patterns of climate as gently rising changes.
- We should be thinking about systems not symptoms. We still focus on individual symptoms, we focus on the permafrost, disappearing sea-ice, melting glaciers or increased intensity of hurricanes. We keep looking at these individual phenomena, epiphenomena, and what we’re not looking at is the big systems stuff.
- This means nothing less than a radical break in the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today. I still hear people talk about climate change as something which can be managed in the dominant orthodox economic paradigm. I don’t believe them, I just don’t believe that is the case, I don’t see how we’re going to be able to manipulate those conventional aspects of growth bound consumer driven economy and cope with climate change in the way that we actually need to.
Porritt went on to say we needed to “shock this still, complacent, inert system into a state of radical response rather than grudging incrementalism, which is what we have to day”. He explained this as meaning “we need a hurricane season like last years for the next three years with each one worse that the year before” whilst noting the “moral horror” of wishing down on people utter calamity and misery to get the required change.
Peak oil was described thus:
People are asking the question, in which year will we take more oil and gas out of the surface of the Earth than any preceding year and in any year after that. So what is the year that we literally take more of that precious asset, our oil and gas supplies than any other year, because from that point on you’re into a very different set of resource depletion issues.Porritt reported that a lively debate was now joined with the likes of Jeremy Leggett on one side suggesting 2008-09 and on the other ‘economists’ relying on the laws of supply any demand to bring the situation back into balance and suggesting supplies will be fine until 2030. What’s the answer then? He was unsure, admitting Leggett’s argument was perhaps the more convincing but the economists weren’t without merit either. Uncertainly reigns. Nobody knows how much oil is left, the Saudi Arabian government say they have 268 billion barrels yet a credible, independent expert on the region suggest just 78 billion barrels.
On the Athabasca tar sands Porritt had this to say:
When you look at the amount of energy needed to get a barrel of oil out of those tar sands you suddenly realise that depletion rate and carbon are in a very intricate dance now and if we want to increase our supply of fossil fuels, unfortunately we have to increase the energy consumption required to deliver the same volume of energy. We are heading towards the point called the zero sum game, imagine a day when you need more than a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil equivalent out of the ground. That would be pretty odd world to live in wouldn’t it? We’re not far off it.Porritt recognised that the quality of debate on peak oil is currently very poor and you don’t really hear politicians talking about it at all, he blamed this on no one actually wanting to even think about what would happen if we suddenly lost access to cheap oil. So what is going to be done? Porritt told us what’s unlikely to be done, he doesn’t believe there is a set of fixes that can simply be deployed and the problems mitigated. Well, the fixes might exist but the will to deploy is clearly lacking. He attributed this to:
Not enough people are as yet persuaded that a very different way of life, in a carbon constrained, oil scarce world, they are not persuaded that their lives would be better in that world than the lives they have today.He went on to describe this as a long term failing of the environmental movement. Where the movement has been successful is in identifying unsustainability, damage to the environment, the cost. However the failure has been in convincing people that a different way of life, with less environmental costs would not only be better for the planet and future generations but also better for us today. Without being able to convince people there are benefits in the here and now their allegiance to the cause won’t be possible and the required actions to address peak oil and climate change will not be possible. Campaigning on potential future benefits doesn’t get far, the paraphrased response being:
Fine, but what has the future ever done for me, what is the Green Party going to do for me now? And if you’re not going to be able to persuade me that you’ve got something to offer me now, in my life, please do not expect me to vote for notional, potential benefits for my children at some distant stage in the future.I think that sentiment has a lot of truth to it so addressing potential, here and now benefits of living in a carbon constrained, oil scarce world should be explored. Porritt went on to do just that, plucking the numbers of $100 per barrel and $60-70 per tonne of carbon out of the air. What would such a world be like to live in?
Distance suddenly becomes a reality in our lives again. This will impact on our devastatingly inactive lifestyle with improvement to the health problems that currently entails. In terms of farming we would see a renaissance in local production for local markets and farmers taking advantage of the need for alternative sources of fuel.
With carbon taking on a more significant role those who live relatively simple lives would find themselves carbon rich, extrapolated out globally this would provide one of the most effective ways of changing the balance of power between the rich and poor today. This, Porritt believes, will provide the motivation to work out how to live in a sustainable way, bringing in new technology at currently unbelievable rates.
I know there are some people in the green movement who hate this technological enthusiasm, who feel deeply depressed when they hear people like me getting enthusiastic about technology. But if you’re not enthusiastic about technology you’re pretty much finished when it comes to optimism because there’s no optimistic solution to 6 billion people trying to live on this planet without a massive technological driver, no other solution available at all. So don’t get snooty about technology, get the system to start using technology in the way that we need.Porritt’s closing point was on happiness and wellbeing, on the negative impacts, psychological and human costs, stress, depression of living the way we now do. What if the changes required to live in a more sustainable way also resulted in us living in a happier way?
On population in the Q&A session Porritt stated that “the intensity of the problems we face now is largely a function of the size of the human population” and said how it “erked” him that so many environmentalists won’t recognise population as an issue.
When asked from the floor if one should think of peak oil not as a the point of despair but as the trigger to the solution, with oil prices exceeding the price of energy from alternatives oil would automatically be replaced. Porritt replied yes, he agreed, describing peak oil as:
Precisely the galvanising element we need to remind people that this is an unsustainable asset. We don't just want the peak oil bunch to be out there saying wooh this is coming a lot faster than you want, wooh it's going to be really tough, we want them to say YES, look at the magic moment, the peak oil moment from then on our lives are going to get better.I did detect a slight hint of sarcasm at this point, as if that point of view was very limited in its validity!
Porritt's recent book is Capitalism: As If the World Matters ISBN: 1844071928 (Amazon )
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I suspect he may be right, sadly, that it would take something of that type in either climate change or peak oil to shock people out of their complacency. At the moment, the changes that have occurred are just minor inconveniences for most, the predictions of disaster just media items. While most people have so much invested in the status quo (jobs, home, commuting, shopping, general lifestyle), it will need somethig that heavily impacts THEM , in their daily lives, that makes the status quo untenable, to bring about a real and rapid change.
Imo the principal cause of change for millions of individuals will not be persuasion but basic economics i.e. make the environmentally undesirable behaviour expensive enough and demand for such activities will then drop. Gov'ts are hardly likely to impose what would need to be extremely harsh taxes on such activities voluntarily - in a democracy that effectively would amount to political suicide. Instead take another look at the potential UK trade balance by 2014 based on DTI / JESS forecasts discussed here: http://uk.theoildrum.com/story/2006/5/26/20429/8203#21 . UK trade deficit is currently running at around £3bn per month or £36bn pa...and that's based on relatively neutral energy trade balance thus deficit is mainly down to import of food, goods and the tourist trade imbalance.
Now if UK is to move from a roughly neutral energy trade balance in 2005 to a monthly energy deficit of £4.5bn by 2014 i.e. £54bn pa annual energy imports are going to increase over the 9 years from 2005 to 2014 at £16.4 million per day. I'm not an economist but based on these numbers it would not be unreasonable to conclude that sometime, likely well before 2014, the 'wheels are going to come off the UK economy'. The result will be a depreciating currency, rising import costs, higher interest rates and large scale recession. In turn recession will curb demand for travel and energy consumption - those without work don't tend to drive or fly very far.
It might sound rather harsh, but that's one of the more likely scenarios if Gov'ts don't take a lead and start to influence big changes in behaviour. In the absence of such action it will be down to economic forces and probably Nature to implement such changes...and they are unlikely to be subtle.
challange, lack of fossil fule ferterlizer
and moden equipment will reduce yields.
Even if we go back to ww2 ration books
we will still need to import food, which
will require oil.
If the grid goes it would be impossable
to feed and store food for London. No
refridgeation for today population,who
generaly would have no idea how long food
would last,befor it goes off.
Add in eratic weather due to climate
change,and you will get some very bad
harvest.just to make life realy hard.
But carbon already does take on a hugely significant role in the world. Hence WW1, Gulf 1, Gulf 2, and lots of others. I don´t see those living relatively simple lives finding themselves carbon rich, I see them getting elbowed aside by the guys with the guns and their wholly-owned client states. That situation is going to get worse, not better, as the addicts get more desperate. When there isn´t a client state in place, you can see the balance of power altered as Ahmedinijad thumbs his nose at the Great Satan. Unfortunately he´s not into nuclear as a fix to Global Warming, but a solution to Israel.
The only way to deal properly with climate change and peak oil is to avoid them.
"The chief cause of problems is solutions."
Game over. Deal with it.
I can only ask....???????
What does that mean?
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Looks like PO has a chance to move into the main stream.
Bear in mind that of all the worlds big deepwater projects about half were completed in the last eight years or so. This implies that the remaining half will be completed in less than eight years because the industry knows how to do it all now.
What is needed to deal with the impending crises of Peak Oil and Climate Change, is a paradigm shaft in the thinking of western governments, which will only by brought about by overwhelming pressure from the public or economic circumstances.
The "paradigm shift" needed is of a type which, ironically, was exemplified by the science of geology in the 1960's. The centuries-old belief in fixed continents was eventually pushed aside by overwhelming evidence in favour of the plate tectonics theory (i.e. continents move, oceans open and close). The resistance to adoption on the new theory was huge at first and there was much denial and alternative interpretations of new facts and findings. Eventually, the new theory became accepted when it was no longer possible to do business - teaching, research, mineral prospecting - under the old system.
My feeling is that much the same would be needed with peak oil and climate change. The changes needed will only be made when "business as usual" collapses - implying economic depression, energy shortages, food shortages, etc. Not an alluring prospect.
Blair backs a nuke deal with France:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/10/nuke10.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/06/ 10/ixuknews.html
The New Goths are coming
Threat similar to 5th Century Rome.
Pirates in the Med....
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2220267,00.html
Well, it's been a nice little session of hand wringing and brow wiping, and repeated chants of roughly, "Ohhh Shiiit...we're in trouble deep!!"
What has been missing is any real discussion of "facts on the ground". So far, it seems to be a debate about the debate. Nothing wrong with that, as long as it doesn't go on too long...then it becomes akin to arguing about which would be the proper dinner fork to use for such an extended period that one allowed oneself starved to death!
On Carbon: First, we must say that up to the recent time frame, we (meaning the technical/industrial nations) were actually moving on somewhat the right path. That is, increased efficiency in consumption through better combustion (i.e., fuel injection controlled by computers, combined cycle natural gas electric generation controlled by computers), and to cleaner fuels (i.e. the aforementioned natural gas, light sweet crude oil, and low sulfer Diesel engines.
We now seem to be running up against the limit of available daily production on these "semi-benign" fuel sources, however, and that presents a sticky wicket....after having progressed over the years up the "hydro/carbon" levels, (that is to say, a move from high carbon (C) but limited hydrogen (H) fuels, from wood (high C/low H) to coal (high C/low H) to oil (a bit better, high C/but higher on H) to light sweet oil, and then to natural gas (best on the C/H equation behind only hydrogen itself (H), we are now faced with the prospect of sliding back down the ladder, to high Carbon/lower Hydrogen fuels (such as tar sand, shale oil, heavy oils). This is one more indication of something most environmentalists hate to admit: The best friends the environmentalists had were light light sweet crude oil and natural gas.
Peak OIl, when it occurs, will almost certainly not help the environment, as the world moves back to high carbon content fuel in an attempt to maintain current lifestyle.
This leaves the world with very limited available options:
1.Nuclear Fission
2.Nuclear Fusion
- Renewables
- Carbon Sequestration or capture on a massive scale
- Massive efficiency and conservation gains, including hgh speed electric rail to maintain the transport of goods and people.
The good news is that all of the above except one are working technologies, at least on some scale. The odd one out is nuclear fusion, which unlike wind or solar has never produced a kilowatt of salable power. The promise is huge if it can be made to work, but we must be prepared if it does not.I detest nuclear fission for all the normal reasons, but unless renewables can be developed very fast, it is the only real alternative for large scale power production, in particular on an island nation like the U.K. Then if nuclear fusion ever does become a reality, the infrastructure would already be built, except for inserting the new reactor.
One can visualize a future in which the U.K. would have a set of modern nuclear reactors, with a mix of renewables and conservation to stretch the kilowatts, and importing enough LNG and propane combined with methane recovery from waste for what road transportation was still needed and any additional electric power, but with the bulk of goods and people moved about by electricified rail. Great Britain is not that large of a country, and the rail infrastructure could be easily recovered from it's decay of the last couple of decades (much easier done there than in the U.S.) Increased strategic storage for natural gas and propane would also assist in energy security and planning.
This leaves us with the above mention "massive efficiency gains", by way of very modern appliances in homes, insulation, solar hot water, etc.
It is not an unworkable situation for the U.K., and in the long run, the island geography might pay off in creating a "defense-able" nation that would be "carbon clean" (the above prescription is the only way the U.K. has a hope of making the Kyoto Protocol mandates) and sustainable with it's current population (no population growth, however, but like the rest of Europe, the birthrate is already dropping in the U.K.)
Note that many of the above methods can also apply to other island states (Japan, Cyprus and Malta come to mind, and our U.S. state of Hawaii) and on mainland European countries (the French are actually going in the direction we have discussed, but please, Brits, don't dismiss an idea just because the French use it! :-)
So we are not ready to give up on the future of our Limey cousins yet, they still have a few cards to play, and cheers to Jonathon Porritt for pointing up that the changes must start now, for the United Kingdom and for all of us.
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Many of UK policies seem to be 'stuck in a 1970's timewarp'. Taking a local issue - I should be devoting my time pressing local officials and politicians to prepare for declining supplies of oil (and especially gas) in UK; instead I find myself having to help oppose a $1bn major highway scheme which the businesses and politicians in my area seem determined to persue. I number of us have written objections citing reducing availability and increasing cost of oil, increased CO2 emissions from extra road traffic generated etc but are either met with silence or the standard response that 'the new road will benefit the region's economy'. It's this kind of official attitude right across the UK which leads us to believe that nothing really will change until the sheer scale and cost of energy imports renders the situation impossible to ignore. By then, of course, we will have lost precious years (and wasted even more precious energy) which we could have used to redesign infrastructure to be much more sustainable.
With regard to UK railways most of the mainline routes were retained at the time of the 1960's 'Beeching Cuts' and several key routes have received major investment in track and signalling in past decade. Even in the (anti-rail) Thatcher years investment still took place, for example the 393 miles from London to Edinburgh was electrified. In the past decade UK rail has experienced passenger km growth of 40%, the fastest rail growth in Europe. Provided the planning process is streamlines (which will almost certainly happen in an energy descent scenario) relaying rural rail tracks would be relatively simple given necessary will and resources. Unlike the 1800's when such routes were first built signalling technology has seen huge advances with result that reconstructed branch lines could well be single track with passing loops and will thus take up much less land than their predecessors.
As of yet, however, few rural branch lines are being reopened although a 35 mile reopening from Edinburgh to the Borders is planned for 2008. In the meantime plans for highway and aviation expansion continue apace.
On a more hopeful note Cardiff Bay is putting in an advanced ULTra system, as is Heathrow. Try and ignore the irony of the latter!
says he believes oil will fall to $25-30 per barrel in 10 years time. Allowing for 1.5 - 2.0% p.a. production growth which is the minimum that would allow this sort of fall with growing Chinese and Indian economies, that implies a daily output of well above 100 Mbl/day by 2016. I can't recall a single regular TOD contributor who has written of such a level as feasible.
So what is he on about? Does he think this will really be reached, even with optimal output from Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, etc? Is he trying to head off a windfall tax on oil company profits? Has he wind of a stock market collapse and recession that actually would hit demand and price, and is trying to head that off? Very interesting.
Browne is due to retire soon. I think he's just being mischeivous.
Obviously a lot of people don't have their own opinions on this and will listen to people am eminent as Lord Browne - I mean he must know what he's on about. The question we should be considering is why he is saying that? Why does he want people to believe those figures?
Remember Total's head of exploration Christophe de Margerie, telling The Times in April that "120 million barrels per day will never be reached, never" adding "The world lacks the means to produce enough oil to meet rising projections of demand for fuel over the next decade." (TOD Link)
''Oil supply to peak sooner than we think, says BP scientist
Richard Orange
November 07, 2004 6:00 AM (GMT)
WORLD oil production is likely to peak in the next decade, much earlier than many international forecasts, a senior BP executive has told The Business.
BP exploration consultant Francis Harper said he estimated the world's total original usable oil resources - the amount of oil before drilling began - at about 2.4 trillion barrels of oil. This is considerably less than the 3 trillion assumed by bullish commentators such as the US government's Geological Survey. This points to oil production peaking between 2010 and 2020.
His comments are a rare entry by a global oil company into the debate on the life of global oil supplies. If true, it would mean demand outstripping supply much earlier than energy projections by ExxonMobil and Shell. BP does not officially supply projections.
The International Energy Agency, the industry watchdog, expects oil demand to continue to rise until 2030. It assumes production will rise to meet demand.
Harper will argue at a London conference this week that production would start to slow in non-Opec members, concentrating the cartel's power.
He said: "When the world peaks isn't the critical thing. What's more salient is when non-Opec oil peaks, then you'll have the control of marginal production passed back to a progressively smaller group of countries."
He added that oil companies' public positions on the issue masked debate within them. "There are people in BP who happen to be economists and so happen to think there's no problem, and there are people in BP who are geologists who are saying it's getting hard to find."
Harper's prediction is higher than the 2 trillion posited by doom-sayers like Colin Campbell. Harper said: "I'm more conservative than Exxon Mobil with regard to future oil resources, but I'm not Colin Campbell."
Seth Kleinman at PFC Energy said oil companies had held back from such statements. "There's a certain degree of hesitancy for oil companies to go on the record and say, 'we are doing well with oil prices where they are now, but 10 years down the road things actually look pretty dire'."
Repeated from within the text above:
"There are people in BP who happen to be economists and so happen to think there's no problem, and there are people in BP who are geologists who are saying it's getting hard to find."
Instead of following the words of CEO's I prefer to 'follow the money'. BP plan to return $65bn to shareholders in form of stock buybacks and dividends over the next 3 years; this money is thus denied for funding exploration and new field development. More specifically regarding one of the 'giant' fields in Caspian region here's what BP (and BG and Statoil) actually did:
Above quote is from interview FTW / Simmons
Some of the background behind BP's decision to exit is discussed here: Caspian Oil Myth
If Caspian region really does hold the 200 Gbbls that Browne refers to why did BP reduce its presence in the area?
What is worrying about well-publicised comments like this, is the effect it may have on people's attitudes to energy conservation. You can imagine people thinking "Perhaps I'll buy that 4x4 I don't really need instead of the turbo-diesel hatch that does 40mpg. I can put the extra fuel cost on the credit card until the price goes back down. Maybe leave the cavity-wall insulation for now and go on holiday instead if heating prices arn't going to go any higher." At best, many people will be confused at the mixed messages - then they are likely to do nothing different to their previous behaviour. It's bad news for both peak oil preparations and for climate change.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5078200.stm
Rating houses on energy with the new sellers pack:
Houses rated A-G , just like an electrical appliance.
I am trying to think of how this would be successfully implemented and the number of personnel involved in certification and the arguments that would follow
People buy mainly SECONDHAND houses based on location first, then space required, then value. I cannot buy a wizzo house and the put it where I want to. I am stuck with the available choice.
By all means, charge builders a tax on a poor rating of their new houses, but not the public.
Personally I think they've wrecked the festival by moving from the old school site to a field a mile away from the center but there you are - that's greed for you. So much more room for lucrative fast food vendors.