When the oil runs out

Are we heading for the end of civilization — or are the warnings of a coming apocalypse just another case of Chicken Little?

The Four Horsemen have upgraded to SUVs. Not the hybrid ones either, but those gas-guzzling, bunny-crushing behemoths that Arnold Schwarzenegger favours. In oil-rich Babylon, whores are so thick on the ground that it’s a little hard to pick just one. Although everyone can agree on what the Antichrist is up to — running a multinational petroleum company. Yes, the End is nigh, if you believe the consensus that has been brewing in the halls of academe and the non-fiction aisle at the local bookstore. Starting in 2010, no later than 2020 or 2030, according to the latest vision of secular apocalypse, global oil supplies will peak, and the world will begin to unravel at the seams.

Could that have been the reason behind last week’s surprise admission by a former Texas petroleum executive turned president that “America is addicted to oil”? George W. Bush’s sudden embrace of the obvious in his State of the Union address, and his new “national goal” to cut Middle East oil imports by 75 per cent by 2025, has environmentalists blowing the dust off plans for hydrogen filling stations, fields of wind turbines and giant ethanol plants. (Although VP Dick Cheney quickly assured supporters that plans to start drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge “are not off the table by any means.”) But even a modest change in direction for a president who had supported the bottomless U.S. appetite for energy as “an American way of life” suggests his advisers have caught a whiff of brimstone on the breeze.

It will be a fiery storm indeed, to hear some tell it. “One week — one apocalyptic week — a germ of panic will take root and then spread like wildfire through the markets. The price of oil, on which modern human society has allowed the stability of its economic system to rest, will begin to climb toward the ceiling,” Jeremy Leggett writes in The Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air, and the Coming Financial Catastrophe (Random House, 2005). “The crisis will play out in television images around the world. Frantic oil traders will scream at each other on trading floors, eyes wild and hair akimbo.”

Leggett, an Oxford-trained geologist and professor at the Royal School of Mines, underwent a road-to-Damascus-style conversion in 1989, resigning his job to become Greenpeace’s chief scientist. After falling out with the environmental group in the mid-1990s, he again transformed himself, into a green entrepreneur, launching his own solar power company. Time Europe has declared him one of “the key players in putting climate change on the world agenda.” What he shares with other proponents of the End of Oil theory is a conviction that we are dangerously near the “topping point,” where half the world’s petroleum reserves are gone.

Macleans