A view from the peak

Dora, The Bean and I spent last weekend in the Peak District in Derbyshire (England), a mostly desolate and in places quite stunning region of hills, moors and valleys. I enjoyed some superlative beer produced by Peak Brewery, while The Bean was equally appreciative of the Peak Dairy ice cream. I found myself reflecting that it's a shame the climate there is too cold to grow olives, otherwise we would doubtless have encountered a producer called Peak Oil.

Not entirely coincidentally, I have been thinking about the connections between climate change and peak oil. Climate change has an increasingly high profile these days but most people seem less aware of the fact that the world's oil supply has probably peaked over the last few years and will now slowly start to decline, while demand will certainly rise, if only because of the rapidly increasing "development" of middle-income countries. The result can only be shortages and price increases, the latter being quite severe as history shows that oil prices are extremely sensitive to the difference between demand and supply; a mere 5% shortfall during the 1970s oil crisis led to a tripling in price, for example.

Which is the more serious problem? Do the limits to oil supplies mean we don't need to worry so much about CO2 emissions? No; there's still plenty of the stuff in the ground, not to speak of all the coal and natural gas, so if we burn everything we know we can get at, the climate will be in big trouble. On the other hand, the effects of peak oil may well become apparent in everyday life before those of climate change do. We could be talking of a few years for many of them, rather than decades.

Which is, in a way, encouraging. Many people seem (in practice) to oppose measures that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions because of the effect such things will have on their lifestyle. They imagine that if we can somehow make the "climate thing" go away, what James Kunstler calls the "happy motoring fiesta" can go on indefinitely. But it won't; it'll get more and more expensive and unreliable, as will (still more) air travel.

In other words, the choice isn't actually between "doing the right thing" and continuing to enjoy our current lifestyles. It's between saying goodbye to our current lifestyles in a coordinated and planned way, under a treaty of the kind that I hope will be agreed at the UN climate conference in December, or saying goodbye to them through the chaos of random oil shocks, price hikes and shortages, perhaps with (more) resource wars thrown in. Do we want to just let the transition happen to us against our will, or do we want to manage it in a dignified way?

Dora thinks my reasoning here is deficient, though, and she's usually right. She says that (a) most people will think talk of peak oil is crying wolf, just like the Millennium Bug, the population bomb and nuclear war, and (b) most people's reaction to the impending disappearance of some perceived good thing is to get as much of it as they can, while they still can (I certainly experienced some of the latter tendency within myself when I tasted that Peak Brewery beer; the best stuff doesn't travel very well, so we can't get it here in Flatchester).

On the other hand, a series of increasingly severe shocks and shortages, demonstrably caused by our over-reliance on cheap fossil-fuel energy, may be just the thing required to bring us all to our senses without (immediately) actually killing too many of us. We live in interesting times.