In the current political climate, fossil fuels are deemed to have no redeeming features. The fact that everything we take for granted, from abundant food to high life expectancy and from clean drinking water to an absence of slavery, is based on fossil fuels is entirely overlooked. The transition to non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies – NRREHTs – is a matter of quasi-religious faith rather than science and data. And so we can delude ourselves into believing in a green, hi-tech future in which we “own nothing and are happy.”
The reality, of course, is that peak energy arrived sometime back in 2018 and was already trending down long before SARS-CoV-2 began prematurely ending the lives of millions worldwide. Less obviously, since the 1970s, the energy cost of energy had been rising remorselessly; so that less surplus energy has been available to power the wider economy ever since. That may sound technical, but in common sense terms, the lack of available energy translated into falling living standards and rising precariarity for an increasing part of the population.
For the last half-century, then, we have experienced what might be called “relative energy poverty.” This is evident in this recollection from Guardian columnist Ian Jack:
“I had the idea… when I was walking through a London square around the time of the City’s deregulatory ‘Big Bang’ and Peregrine Worsthorne coining the phrase ‘bourgeois triumphalism’ to describe the brash behaviour of the newly enriched: the boys who wore red braces and swore long and loud in restaurants. Champagne was becoming an unexceptional drink. The miners had been beaten. A little terraced house in an ordinary bit of London would buy 7.5 similar houses in Bradford. In the seven years since 1979, jobs in manufacturing had declined from about seven million to around five million, and more than nine in every 10 of all jobs lost were located north of the diagonal between the Bristol channel and the Wash . And yet it was also true that more people owned more things – tumble dryers and deep freezers – than ever before, and that the average household’s disposable income in 1985 was more than 10% higher than it had been in the last days of Jim Callaghan’s government.”
In strictly material terms, life in the first decade of the twenty-first century was better than it had been in 1973; when the first oil shock brought the curtain down on the post-war boom. But at the same time, there was a growing sense that ordinary working people were being left behind. The doors which used to lead to the routes out of poverty were being slammed shut; and debt was becoming the main means of obtaining consumer goods.
Then came the second oil shock. In 2005 – the year Britain became a net importer of oil and gas – global extraction of conventional oil peaked. Oil prices rapidly rose above the economy-crushing $80 per barrel, raising prices across the economy and throwing an army of borrowers into arrears. Turning to textbooks and models which are as grounded in reality as a newspaper horoscope, the central bankers raised interest rates. The ensuing wave of mortgage defaults certainly halted inflation in its tracks; but only at the cost of mortally wounding the global banking and financial system.
Paradoxically, low interest rates and quantitative easing fuelled a “search for yield” which, among other things, gave birth to the fracking boom in the USA:
“The most important element in the resilience of fracking is that the capital hasn’t gone away. Interest rates are still very low, and there’s plenty of money in the form of pension funds and other giant pools of capital sloshing around looking for a place to invest, and that has kept the capital flowing into the fracking industry.”
At a time when most of the world’s large conventional oil deposits were in decline, fracking appeared to provide us with access to centuries more oil – there still being more oil beneath the ground than we have ever consumed… in reality, almost all of it too energy-expensive to ever extract. By continuing to grow our total oil extraction, and by forcing prices down to a point at which a small amount of real economic growth – mainly in the developing states – was possible, fracking provided the illusion that we had overcome our energy problems.
In 2018 though, even unconventional oil began to decline:
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In 2020, as a result of various lockdowns and restrictions on movement of people and goods, oil extraction fell off a cliff. Unfortunately, the global oil industry is not something which can be switched off and switched back on again at will. Machinery and pipelines are damaged when they run below capacity. Drilling rigs are scrapped and engineers laid off when they are not needed. Equipment and materials supply chains brake down as just-in-time supply is disrupted. And wells themselves become clogged and damaged if they are shut down. This means that whatever else happens, the oil industry faces considerable costs just to restart production.
Shortages of oil have been visible for months; although they have only entered establishment media consciousness now that fuel prices are rising. In February, Dean Foreman at the American Petroleum Institute warned that:
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.....................................................................................................
Absent some yet-to-be-discovered source of low-cost, high-energy density power source, the relative energy poverty we have lived with for decades is going to flip into absolute energy poverty; with millions of people across the developed and developing states having to radically alter their way of life to focus solely on the continued production of essentials like food and clean water.
Even after the industrial revolution, a quarter of the population was involved in agriculture right up until World War Two. These were supplemented by seasonal workers brought in for the harvest. It was also common for people to supplement this by growing their own fruit and vegetables and by keeping chickens and rabbits. Today, less than two percent are employed in agriculture and hardly anyone produces their own food, save for hobbyists. The reason for the change? In a word; oil. The oil-based automation of agriculture freed the workforce to work in the modern “bullshit jobs” that we all know and love. Seriously though, without oil there is simply no way that we could have 7.5 billion humans on planet Earth. Indeed, the last time humanity lived entirely on renewable energy there were no more than half a billion of us. Which raises what should be the number one question of our age: can we feed 7.5 billion without using fossil fuels?
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consciousnessofsheep.co.uk
The reality, of course, is that peak energy arrived sometime back in 2018 and was already trending down long before SARS-CoV-2 began prematurely ending the lives of millions worldwide. Less obviously, since the 1970s, the energy cost of energy had been rising remorselessly; so that less surplus energy has been available to power the wider economy ever since. That may sound technical, but in common sense terms, the lack of available energy translated into falling living standards and rising precariarity for an increasing part of the population.
For the last half-century, then, we have experienced what might be called “relative energy poverty.” This is evident in this recollection from Guardian columnist Ian Jack:
“I had the idea… when I was walking through a London square around the time of the City’s deregulatory ‘Big Bang’ and Peregrine Worsthorne coining the phrase ‘bourgeois triumphalism’ to describe the brash behaviour of the newly enriched: the boys who wore red braces and swore long and loud in restaurants. Champagne was becoming an unexceptional drink. The miners had been beaten. A little terraced house in an ordinary bit of London would buy 7.5 similar houses in Bradford. In the seven years since 1979, jobs in manufacturing had declined from about seven million to around five million, and more than nine in every 10 of all jobs lost were located north of the diagonal between the Bristol channel and the Wash . And yet it was also true that more people owned more things – tumble dryers and deep freezers – than ever before, and that the average household’s disposable income in 1985 was more than 10% higher than it had been in the last days of Jim Callaghan’s government.”
In strictly material terms, life in the first decade of the twenty-first century was better than it had been in 1973; when the first oil shock brought the curtain down on the post-war boom. But at the same time, there was a growing sense that ordinary working people were being left behind. The doors which used to lead to the routes out of poverty were being slammed shut; and debt was becoming the main means of obtaining consumer goods.
Then came the second oil shock. In 2005 – the year Britain became a net importer of oil and gas – global extraction of conventional oil peaked. Oil prices rapidly rose above the economy-crushing $80 per barrel, raising prices across the economy and throwing an army of borrowers into arrears. Turning to textbooks and models which are as grounded in reality as a newspaper horoscope, the central bankers raised interest rates. The ensuing wave of mortgage defaults certainly halted inflation in its tracks; but only at the cost of mortally wounding the global banking and financial system.
Paradoxically, low interest rates and quantitative easing fuelled a “search for yield” which, among other things, gave birth to the fracking boom in the USA:
“The most important element in the resilience of fracking is that the capital hasn’t gone away. Interest rates are still very low, and there’s plenty of money in the form of pension funds and other giant pools of capital sloshing around looking for a place to invest, and that has kept the capital flowing into the fracking industry.”
At a time when most of the world’s large conventional oil deposits were in decline, fracking appeared to provide us with access to centuries more oil – there still being more oil beneath the ground than we have ever consumed… in reality, almost all of it too energy-expensive to ever extract. By continuing to grow our total oil extraction, and by forcing prices down to a point at which a small amount of real economic growth – mainly in the developing states – was possible, fracking provided the illusion that we had overcome our energy problems.
In 2018 though, even unconventional oil began to decline:
.................................................................
.................................................................
In 2020, as a result of various lockdowns and restrictions on movement of people and goods, oil extraction fell off a cliff. Unfortunately, the global oil industry is not something which can be switched off and switched back on again at will. Machinery and pipelines are damaged when they run below capacity. Drilling rigs are scrapped and engineers laid off when they are not needed. Equipment and materials supply chains brake down as just-in-time supply is disrupted. And wells themselves become clogged and damaged if they are shut down. This means that whatever else happens, the oil industry faces considerable costs just to restart production.
Shortages of oil have been visible for months; although they have only entered establishment media consciousness now that fuel prices are rising. In February, Dean Foreman at the American Petroleum Institute warned that:
...............................................................................................
.....................................................................................................
Absent some yet-to-be-discovered source of low-cost, high-energy density power source, the relative energy poverty we have lived with for decades is going to flip into absolute energy poverty; with millions of people across the developed and developing states having to radically alter their way of life to focus solely on the continued production of essentials like food and clean water.
Even after the industrial revolution, a quarter of the population was involved in agriculture right up until World War Two. These were supplemented by seasonal workers brought in for the harvest. It was also common for people to supplement this by growing their own fruit and vegetables and by keeping chickens and rabbits. Today, less than two percent are employed in agriculture and hardly anyone produces their own food, save for hobbyists. The reason for the change? In a word; oil. The oil-based automation of agriculture freed the workforce to work in the modern “bullshit jobs” that we all know and love. Seriously though, without oil there is simply no way that we could have 7.5 billion humans on planet Earth. Indeed, the last time humanity lived entirely on renewable energy there were no more than half a billion of us. Which raises what should be the number one question of our age: can we feed 7.5 billion without using fossil fuels?
............................................................................................................
Mere statistics
In the current political climate, fossil fuels are deemed to have no redeeming features. The fact that everything we take for granted, from abundant food to high life expectancy and from clean drinking water to an absence of slavery, is based on fossil fuels is entirely overlooked. The...
consciousnessofsheep.co.uk
