Get ready for a buzzkill. There’s your disclaimer. This shit is going to shake you to your core. I don’t even mean that in a casual, “this movie is pretty scary, yo” way. I mean literally, in reality, objectively, things are about to get pretty fucked. Have you ever heard of the concept of Peak Oil? No? Are you sure you don’t want to turn back now? The foyer is a much happier place. THEY HAVE POPCORN AND JELLYBABIES. Alright fine. Fuck it. Peak Oil is the point at which the oil that’s left in the earth is more expensive to get out than it is beneficial to sell it. It doesn’t stack up anymore. That means it’s not worth drilling. It’s the bell curve where - in the bluest of blue-sky of scenarios - only a few rich countries can fund the extraction and refinement of crude oil, out of the ground and put it into their cars. The rest of the world falls apart. And in the most likely scenario, every single country and society is ruined. It is the endgame of civilisation as we know it. "That sounds really fucking over the top, can you just chill out, we've had Brexit and Covid and Ukraine, can we just have ONE weekend blog where the world isn't ending?" Ok, look. I know everything feels like the end of the world nowadays. But let's look at what Peak Oil actually means on the shop floor. Eventually... Petrol will stop. Deliveries will stop. Toothpaste, Police, Lorries with FOOD.. all of it will stop. So, unless you live in a hippy commune or a part of the world that grows more food than it consumes, then either through rioting or starvation - things are going to get, well, a bit deathy. "Pffff, nah people will just have to adjust", you might think. "People will adapt, Aid, people will adapt and evolve". Hmmm. People phoned emergency services when KFC wasn't open. What do you think people are going to do when there's no chicken AND no emergency services? MI5 put it more succinctly than I ever could: British society is 4 meals away from anarchy. "Err. No. We have renewables, we have nuclear, wind, solar, natural gas and rainbows and teddybears." Ok, so, yes and no… Let's take a look at some of those now. Wind & Solar We can harness energy from the sun. And we can put big fuck-off wind turbines in the sea and in the countryside. Sure. But we still need to build those machines out of something. Where are the solar panels coming from? Oil. How are you building windmills? What materials? Steel (shipped with oil), plastic (made from oil) - they are renewable solutions that are still rooted in finite, one-time resources. In the years that follow a peak in oil production, ask yourself: how will you transport these materials from oil fields to the places you need them? How much will you pay? There's not enough oil to build solar panels for everyone in every country. And will your collapsing economy support those payments? If the cost of the barrel goes to $200 or $1000, would Britain outbid France? Who gets the lovely little oily solar panels? It's funny. We like to believe there’ll be flying cars, teleporters and Matrix-style eggs we can all jump in and live a fantasy life through VR for eternity. But the truth is, everything needs to come from something. And whether it's solar panels or wave energy, that something almost always is (or relies on, in some way) oil. Fracking The United States went on a bit of a fracking binge the last few years and managed to ween itself off foreign fossil fuels. Yay! But with domestic fossil fuels. Boo. It’s estimated that around 95% of oil & gas in America now comes from hydraulic fracturing. You’ve probably heard that wheeled out in our British energy debates, right? Simplistic crayon-eaters see it at face value and gurn "weLL wHy NoT heRe!?". “There’s energy right beneath us!” they froth, either out of stupidity or short term personal gain. In some cases it's hard to tell which. Steve Baker MP, for example, seems to operate somewhere between the two. He recently took a break from basking in the huge successes of Brexit (and opposing Covid safety measures) to champion fracking. Perhaps he wants to reduce emissions by impoverishing and killing his own citizens? The petite ERG and CRG starlet must know fracking won't offer the UK even a half-credible energy strategy. Is he stupid? Does he not understand the stats and figures he's no doubt privy to as co-creator of his latest effort, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group? *OR* is he a cold-hearted cynic furthering his own interests? We just don't know. And it's not for me to judge. But until my new Steve Baker Research and Scrutiny Group attracts the funding it needs I suppose I'll have to fill in: Baker took thousands of pounds from Neil Record - a Tory donor who heads up two think-tanks, one of which is a Climate Science denial outfit that takes a shit tonne of funding from BP *and* has a history of opposing Govt environmental policy. So, Stupid or Sociopath - draw your own conclusions. This is what's infuriating. A tiny bit of research yields the truth about hydraulic fracturing in Britain. Estimates put British reserves at 90-330bcm. We use 80-a-year which will go up every year. We can’t actually frack anything for 3 years (you'd have to wait for approvals, site planning, geology work) so nothing could start until 2025 or 2026. The maximum we could frack and deliver to the UK (assuming we don’t sell the energy overseas to a higher bidder) is 5-15 bcm per year. Which means at its peak, we could expect to solve about 20% of our energy problems with it. And even then, it would only last for 4 years. Follow Jim Grace on Twitter for more on that. So why are so many of the ERG and Covid Recovery Group and BP-funded think-tanks so keen on fracking? My guess is they know it won't solve anything but with the £50bn they'd make, they can buy a few solar panels and fuck off to an island or something. "I know I *said* it was going to fix everything but in my defence I only meant *FOR ME* " Nuclear Nuclear power is generated by splitting atoms of uranium (most commonly). The Nuclear Energy Agency estimatedthere’s enough uranium in the ground to power Earth for the next two and a half centuries! Yay! But only at current levels. Boo! Though there is the possibility, they say, that further exploration and extraction could double the estimate. Let's assume it does go up by another 100 years to 350. That all sounds quite encouraging, right? But if we doubled the (current) number of nuclear enrichment facilities the outlook would reduce, clearly. Now, if we doubled that again, the outlook would shorten dramatically. This is basic maths, I know. So now consider this: 10% of the world’s energy is nuclear. Only ten percent. So we’d need to times our nuclear output by ten to successfully power the world, as it is now. Put simply: if we use it to the extent that we need it, nuclear will run out in about twenty to thirty years. Lightening In my lesser, more desperate moments I started wondering if there could be any truth to the old “you could power London for ten years if you could just catch a bolt of lightening”. Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard that one, or if it was just my exhausted family trying to get me to run out in a field in a thunderstorm. But either way, there’s not much hope in harnessing energy from lightening bolts. I'm no electrician but the bits I've read about this method suggest the high voltage power of a bolt of lightening would need to be converted to a lower voltage power for it to be stored. Then you have the erratic life of the bolt. The unknown starting point. The impracticalities of having to drag huge trucks of infrastructure to specific points on the globe, in the hope some storm might pay off. In 2007, an American inventor, Steve LeRoy, was featured in the NYT claiming to have powered a bulb for twenty minutes using energy captured from artificial lightening. His method was later bought-out by Don Gillispie's Alternate Energy Holdings. They attempted to scale it using a tower, but casting aside most of the energy and storing a little bit in a capacitor. Depressingly in their trials, they couldn’t get it to work. Although they suggested it may do in the future. In terms of cost/benefit, though, the idea falls flat. By the time lightening bolts reach earth (or towers) they contain comparatively little energy. It was estimated you’d need dozens of those towers to power just FIVE 100w lightbulbs for a year. All that cost and effort for a small amount of fuel. In would replicate the problem of Peak Oil, rather than solve it. Perhaps if there were a stable way to harness energy from a literal thunderstorm, which rack-up around the same amount of energy as an atomic bomb - we'd be onto something. But that stretches the bounds of objective reality. It's up in the sky, blowing, shooting out bolts of lightening, cracking the sky with thunder and rain, it's hard to imagine a stable enough structure that could withstand the storm, harness and store the energy. And certainly one that could be developed, built and scaled in the time we have left. Some final, uplifting thoughts for you to obsess over this weekend: Collapse In the 2009 documentary, Collapse, Michael C Ruppert talked of the slow, gradual implosion of western society. The title of the film is a bit misleading. When we say the word "collapse" we get connotations of organised demolition, a former child-star on a bender or the failure of Lehman Bros. These are all relatively instant events. But Ruppert's clarification was important. In this instance, it will be, or rather it is, a gradual tearing apart of the fabric of our society. Also in the film was a heavily channelled David Attenborough quote: “Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist”. Then it will progress to petrol rationing. No drive Sundays. People may get graded in terms of how much fuel they're permitted to buy. Public services will be slashed. Taxes will go up as Govts fight to fund last minute energy programmes to both proverbially and literally keep the lights on. Before finally, eventually, the whole thing does stop and we grind to a halt. And at that point even the most basic components of a civilised society: schools, hospitals, police and prisons will break down. "Jesus, Aid. This is fucking grim. I thought you were a comedian, tell me a joke, cheer me up FFS" Oh, on occasion I can still feel what I think I remember was once "hope". Maybe we could scale down areas of society? Perhaps we could adjust? But it really feels like the time for action was probably in the 80s when scientists starting ringing the alarm bells. Where we’re at now kinda feels too late. I mean, if Govts all miraculously agreed, right now, that we have to leave what’s left in the ground there, so as to stand any hope of creating new products, new ambulances, fresh tyres for planes, toothpaste and so on - and we all moved to EVs and solar and wind - it may just about save a smidgen of our civilisation. But then what about other countries who can’t afford to build nuclear power plants or magically generate money to pay for an offshore windfarm? Do they collapse into civil war and famine and death? And do we just allow that to happen? Sometimes I wonder if it's not a weird, perhaps convenient coincidence that right at the moment our Climate irreparably breaks is the same moment we run out of fossil fuels. It almost feels like the Earth is setup to run out deliberately, before we can fuck it up too bad. Maybe that's a positive? I also wonder if - where I panic that there's seemingly no official plan for dealing with Peak Oil, and I spiral into depression when we remember things like Barack Obama famously shying away from even acknowledging it as a concept - I then see things like Cop26, Greta Thunberg, Western leaders making more and more of a push for change - and I wonder if they all know that we do have a serious problem with Peak Oil, with energy strategy - and it's just being marketed back to us in a slightly less scary (though still usefully terrifying) way. I mean, if you had to convince 65m Brits to stop using so much goddamn petrol, what would you do? Tell them Oil's going to run out and civilisation as they know it will collapse, "so please use less"? Or would you try to frighten them a bit with tsunamis and bushfires? I'm not saying Climate Change isn't real. I'm positive it is. But I do wonder to what extent it's being used to try to put band-aids around Peak Oil. "So where does this leave us? C'mon man, give me SOMETHING!? THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING POSITIVE!?" Well, honestly, I don't know. I guess things will change. More instability will follow. A lot of people are going to get hungry. More will die. Viewed in this context, things like Brexit don't even matter and Covid variants will probably remain in the township or fort they first develop in. Your friend Mark who always annoyed the piss out of you will probably be murdered for the contents of his fridge. You'll never have to commute to the office again. You almost certainly won't have to worry about how you're going to pay for your nursing home. If you're Jacob Rees-Mogg it's quite likely we'll be returning to something resembling Victorian Britain. If you're not Jacob Rees-Mogg, you'll be able to murder him and it'll be infinitely easier to get away with it. And finally, I suppose the best thing of all, you won't have to read buzzkill blogs like this.
