It’s the oil crisis of the Seventies back to haunt us

And it will be far worse this time, says Eddie Hobbs, who believes that we must now start far-sighted planning for our energy needs

THERE’S been a lot of bull talked about a temporary little problem with oil. That’s why the OPEC president’s prediction last week that oil prices will rise to $200 a barrel especially if the dollar stays weak, will stun the Department of Finance. The piston in the National Development Plan is the assumption that oil would be $100 per barrel (42 gallons) by 2020. The Government’s big strategy, so clearly priced on pre-peak oil economics is already bog-roll, but, officially, the Government is sticking to the daft idea that our energy input costs will remain a constant for the next 12 years and plans to build an infrastructure for the oil age.


Think of home heating and petrol prices doubling and consider the effects on your own net take-home pay when energy and motoring costs rise to absorb a chunk somewhere between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of average wages. Now consider the effects on the world’s fourth most dependent economy on imported oil and gas which already has a lousy record in integrated planning on everything from its health service, to decentralisation, to transport and tell me that the risk of the mother of all cock-ups isn’t on the cards.

Despite the presence of two Green ministers who understand the maths, there’s no sign of collective urgency or understanding from the Cabinet. In an article lovingly headed “Cowen Secures Economic Strength”, penned by the Cabinet’s unofficial minister for propaganda Willie O’Dea in this newspaper, we were told not to worry, that oil would be driven down. Since Willie’s intervention a few weeks back, prices have risen another 20 per cent.

The evidence that we are at the foot of a prolonged period of undulating high inflation and which will last until dense and scalable alternatives to oil and gas become widespread, is staring us in the face. At the time of Julius Caesar 400 million people lived on the planet. It took the next 17 centuries for the population to double. The injection of cheap energy 150 years ago from the exploitation of coal, oil and gas resources, fuelled industry, trade, transport and agriculture but also drove the population to over six billion. In more recent years the advent of globalisation, the internet, free trade and the collapse of communism, have created vast new markets and demand for natural resources from three billion new consumers who’ve emerged from fast-growing middle income economies, to claim their share of the pie.

Irish Independent