Julian Darley: The Energy Secret

Understanding What Drives The 21st Century And Why Peak Oil Really Matters

There are at least two invisible things that tend to be ferociously difficult to understand. One is relations among humans and the other is energy. Especially when the former want more of the latter. And for some reason, understandable perhaps but also unfortunate, we are mostly loathe to try to comprehend where our energy comes from. Thus there is a kind of ‘energy secret’: we cannot see energy and we don’t seem to be very good at understanding it, even though without it there is no life here or anywhere else in the universe.

These difficulties of understanding play out at every level from buying groceries to geopolitics. And yet though energy itself is invisible, its effects are visible everywhere, including this last week in the form of Hurricane Gustav, and a string of storms and hurricanes coming in behind it, lining up to hit the south east US. Gustav, though it has fortunately left New Orleans largely unscathed, has killed many people in the Caribbean.


Gustav has also caused many oil and gas wells off the Louisiana coast to be shut in temporarily. Only Hurricane Ike of the three named storms following Gustav is likely to cause any more shut-ins, but whatever happens this has been another reminder that the offshore Gulf of Mexico