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What happens when the oil stops coming?
by Denis Welch & Matt Nippert
Continued from page 1...
“In the long term,” says Hargreaves, “if you look at Sydney and Melbourne, that’s the way it’s gone. So why not in New Zealand?”
There is a slight but noticeable urban trend towards living in smaller, more central homes, like downtown apartments – a trend already noted in places like Tauranga, says Ralph Chapman, director of environmental studies at Victoria University – but it hasn’t reached Whitby yet.
In fact, they’re going the other way: the place is expanding, with a new subdivision being developed; and upmarket Wellington school Samuel Marsden Collegiate has expressed a vote of confidence in the town’s future by opening a new campus there.
David Strahan saw the way things were headed several years ago. In 2000, as a BBC reporter covering protests in Britain over high petrol prices, he witnessed first-hand what happens when modern economies begin to run out of oil.
Angry lorry drivers blockaded service stations, and “within a day or two,” says Strahan, speaking from London, “the entire country had ground to a halt. Emergency services were running out of petrol, nobody could get to work, and worst of all supermarket shelves were running out of food and not being restocked.
“That really alerted me to the absolutely critical nature of oil in modern society, and that’s when I came across this idea of peak oil.”
The experience led him to produce several documentaries about the oil sector and later quit his job at the BBC in order to write his book*, which contains a number of remarkably deflating conclusions – like scrapping all airport and road extensions immediately. “Spare capacity,” he writes drily, “will be available soon enough.”
Declining supply of crude oil will hit trade and tourism hard, he says, yet New Zealand, despite the warning signs over the past 30 years, is now more dependent on petrol and personal vehicles than ever. When carless days were introduced in 1979, we had 1.4 million private cars and vans using the equivalent of 50 petajoules of petrol.
Today, despite more efficient engines and popular concern over global warming, the number of private motor vehicles has almost doubled, to 2.6 million, and average household petrol use has shot up to 93 petajoules.
Oh, and it’s not just the petrol we get from oil that’s going to be in short supply. As the New Scientist recently reported, 3.6 percent of the world’s oil goes to make plastics, cosmetics, detergents, pesticides, paints, adhesives and a host of other everyday stuff.
Nor, says Strahan, are there any ready-to-deploy magic bullets that will solve the coming crisis and prevent deep cuts in energy consumption. Biofuels, much touted to fill the gap when supplies of oil from the ground decrease, will prove woefully inadequate. Meeting current global demand with plant-derived ethanol, assuming a three percent annual decline in crude production, would require entire countries turned over to sugar-cane production.
“You’d have to plant about 300,000 sq km – equivalent to the land area of Cuba, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea – every year,” says Strahan.
And, due to a quirk of economics, finding ways to be more efficient with a resource actually encourages more consumption of that resource. This paradox was first noted in 1865 by economist William Stanley Jevon, who found that the invention of the steam engine had led to a boom for coal.
Strahan writes: “Britain’s energy efficiency has doubled since 1970, and still total energy consumption has risen … It scarcely matters that modern refrigerators are more efficient than they were, if growing numbers of people choose models the size of a walk-in closet, along with plasma screen TVs and any number of new electrical gadgets.”
One thing we could do for a start, says Strahan, is to ensure that our homes are energy-efficient. German-designed Passivhaus homes are, he writes, “so well designed and insulated that they can maintain a temperature of 21 degrees in the depths of a continental winter without any form of heating except sunlight and the body heat of their occupants.”
He also argues strongly for the option rejected 28 years ago by the Muldoon Cabinet at the time of the second oil shock: rationing.
“If you had a policy of energy rationing,” says Strahan, “it would put in place all the right signals, and it would have the right incentives and constraints that we would be forced to constrain our energy consumption, first by doing things more efficiently, and second, doing things more frugally.
“If the last thing you heard on the television news was the price of carbon, or carbon rations, you’d be likely to immediately turn the television off at the wall.”
When faced, however, with the last major oil crisis this country has known (in 1980, the cost of imported oil went as high as $US90 a barrel in real terms), the National government of the day went for the least politically objectionable option. A ban on weekend petrol sales had proved ineffective, as former Cabinet minister Hugh Templeton recounts in his book All Honourable Men, so “Cabinet toyed with a host of measures, declined rationing and plumped for carless days.
“These were not to win political popularity … With prices soaring, they were essential; and the next election was still almost three years away.”
