What happens when we’ve used the last drop?

SIXTY years ago the Orkney poet Edwin Muir wrote some lines which, in the panic surrounding the Grangemouth strike, feel like a premonition. They point to a world not too far in the future where our reliance on oil has become all too clear, and the way we live our lives all too fragile.

And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.


The tractors lie about our fields; at evening


They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.


We leave them where they are and let them rust:


They’ll molder away and be like other loam.


Something of his prediction seems to be forming itself. The petrol age, scarcely making much of an impact when he wrote, now seems hastening towards its end.

Around the year 2000, the Californian Delphi research institute was predicting the $15 oil barrel for about 2010. We are now over $100 and there’s talk of a ’stabilisation price’ as high as $300. This doesn’t just reflect the problems of forecasting; once a commodity like oil is in crisis, any notion of expectations goes out of the window.

Every aspect of the use of oil is about to get argued or fought over. From the philosophical issue of whether the ‘good’ of individual mobility can be respected if it brings hellish climate change in its wake, to the sheer social disorientation of motorists