Last week, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued what was probably the most important climate change report to date. In the report, the panel presented the strongest evidence yet for human-caused global warming. After 20 years of debate, it seems that even long-time skeptics are finally being forced to acknowledge the undeniable facts. Even Exxon Mobil has done a climate turnaround, admitting that human-caused warming is real and pledging to stop astroturfing the issue; and President Bush actually mentioned global warming in his State of the Union address.
But global warming wasn’t the week’s only important energy-related story. On the peak oil front came the less-noticed but highly significant news that production from Mexico’s supergiant Cantarell—the world’s second largest oil field—had declined by a stunning half million barrels per day last year, a “virtual collapse” according to The Wall Street Journal. To put this news in perspective, consider that out of some 4,000 actively producing oilfields in the world, the fourteen largest account for over 20 percent of total world production, and that the average age of those fields is 43.5 years. Last year Kuwait announced that its Burgan field (which is either the second or third largest field in the world, competing with Cantarell) is also in decline. Combined with equally-stunning declines in North Sea oil production last year, Cantarell’s news led Matthew Simmons to say last week (more definitively than I’ve heard before) that the world had indeed passed peak oil.
In short, the race is on between the two most serious threats to industrial civilization; one which threatens to destroy the world economy and render most of our technology useless, and the other which threatens to make the planet uninhabitable for human life itself. Because the two issues stem from the same problem—the modern world’s utter dependence on fossil fuels—it would follow that activists in both camps should coordinate their efforts.
But as Richard Heinberg pointed out in his most recent newsletter, climate change and peak oil activists “often talk past each other.” Climate change activists, Heinberg wrote, tend to feel that peak oil is “a trivial concern by comparison” to the potential catastrophe of runaway global warming. On the other hand, peak oilers tend to believe that “the economic and geopolitical chaos that may be triggered by declining global fuel supplies pose the more timely threat.”
Despite the fact that Heinberg’s essay is intended to be “exploratory and descriptive rather than polemic,” one can’t escape the fact that Heinberg is one of the highest profile peak oil activists. His descriptive approach is admirable, but if it is true that peak oil and global climate change are in competition as the most serious threats we face, it is also the case that there is no parity between the two when it comes to public awareness. The fact that Heinberg even feels compelled to address the issue is evidence of that fact—I have seen no comparable discussions from the global warming “side” of the issue. (Al Gore, for instance, has mentioned peak oil, but never really explained it).
Ignoring or downplaying the threat of oil depletion in favor of focusing on climate change may be a major mistake, however, because there no question that depending on how it plays out, the reality of depletion changes the dimensions of the climate change issue dramatically.
Up to now, the IPCC has based its projections on the same official, business-as-usual models which show oil consumption continuing to rise exponentially into the middle of the century—a projection that the peak oil camp sees as flatly absurd. If oil peaks in the near term, as many peak oil activists expect, then the climate change problem will not be determined by our rate of oil consumption, but by how we attempt to replace it.
It is a tragic accident of geologic history that of the three major fossil fuels, coal, the dirtiest and most carbon intense, is also the only one which remains abundant. As oil declines, will a panicked world attempt to burn (or convert to liquid fuel) as much coal as possible to keep its industrial machine running? Or will a global economic depression triggered by peak oil choke off the current massive growth in coal consumption, as Chris Vernon at the Oildrum suggests?
Coal isn’t the only problem. Will the push for biofuels in the first world cause the rapid deforestation of the third? Or will declining oil and natural gas supplies force even the first world to chop its own forests just to keep warm?
It has been said that from a climate change perspective, the only thing worse than peak oil is no peak oil. But depending on how things play out, the reverse may in fact be true. Whatever happens, one thing is sure: from here on, we cannot count on business-as-usual.
marks a political sea-change that is as significant as any particular proposal Obama may have articulated.
Posted by: cheap jersey | June 29, 2011 at 05:46 AM