An Interview with Michael Meacher MP on peak oil and relocalisation

Michael Meacher has been Labour Member of Parliament for Oldham West and Royton since 1970. He was Minister of State for the Environment between May 1997 and June 2003, and has been very outspoken on issues of peak oil and climate change. I managed to grab a short interview with him while he was eating his lunch at Schumacher College during his one day visit to the Life After Oil course and ask him for his thoughts on peak oil and localisation.

How do you see the results of peak oil manifesting around us in our daily lives? How will we observe that we are nearing that point?

First of all rising oil prices of course, because of relative scarcity, the scarcity of demand compared to supply. We are observing that of course because the price of oil 10 years ago was on the floor, around $12 a barrel, something of that order, it is now $60, and it virtually tipped $60, and that is not just conflict in the Middle East and the fact that the supply of oil from Iraq has still not reached, three years after the invasion, the level it was at before.

The main reason is the increased level of demand from China and India. We now are seeing a culmination of 2 trends, one of which is diminishing supply, that is, the really big fields in the world, Al Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, Cantarell in Mexico, and others including the North Sea, those are all in decline, whilst decline is racing ahead because of the size of the population of China, about two-fifths of the world population and 7 to 10% growth for the last decade, and carrying on and on as far as the eye can see at that rate. China will be as big an economy as the US, because it will be four times the population of the US within 10-15 years, so the pressure on the supply of oil is immense from the level of demand.

Four-fifths of the oil we use today comes from fields discovered before 1970. There are no big new fields to be developed. You will see this because of data coming onto the world scene about reduced supply, we calculate pretty clearly by projecting forward growth rates what the level of demand will be, and of course where these two come together is over price, and occasionally in terms of war, as it did over Iraq. So that