No sooner do I finish my post this morning on high oil prices than I discover Gordon Brown in the Guardian, sharing our pain on energy prices (“…and I know that families up and down the country…” [cont. page 94]).
But his article is worth a read, for two reasons. First, while it doesn’t actually use the words “oil” and “peak”, it goes pretty close. Here’s a sample:
The cause of rising prices is clear: growing demand and too little supply to meet it both now and – perhaps of even greater significance – in the future…
Overall, by 2020, global demand for energy will rise by 50% [actually the IEA’s projection is a 50 per cent rise by 2030, not 2020, as Brown knows; but let’s not quibble]. It is the market’s belief that ever-growing demand will continue to outstrip supply that has pushed up the oil price.
And we are becoming increasingly aware of the technical, financial and political barriers to the production of more oil. Every country must find ways of being more efficient and diversifying supply. And as continuing high oil prices present us all with an immense challenge, the way we confront these issues will define our era.
Second, the article’s interesting because of the way it falls into a classic trap: confusing “oil” with “energy”. The article’s problem definition is about oil; the very first sentence says that “the global economy is facing the third great oil shock of recent decades”. So what needs to be done?
…we need to accelerate the development and deployment of alternative sources of energy, reducing global dependence on oil. Britain will increase its investment in renewables, including decentralised generation. We will build one of the world’s first commercial-scale carbon capture and storage coal plants and we have committed to a nuclear building programme to ensure that the UK’s emissions and dependence on fossil fuels do not rise as existing nuclear stations close.
So although the crisis is in oil – a liquid fuel for transport, in other words – the answer, we are told, lies with renewables, decentralised generation, carbon capture and storage and nuclear new build: with the power generation sector, in short.
This shows a pretty big lack of energy literacy. The only way these changes in the power sector will help British voters out on high oil prices would be if there was a massive roll-out of electric cars that could be recharged from the mains; or using electric power to electrolyse hydrogen on a massive scale to power cars. Not only is neither of these technologies anywhere close to commercial deployment in the UK, they’re also not even mentioned in the article.
Update: see also this post on electric cars.
