BURNING THE MIDNIGHT OIL

Rosamund McDougall

Advisory Council, Optimum Population Trust

They say that the last minutes of a car crash play time at a different speed. There, in slow motion, a juggernaut is coming up behind you, and here you are, trying to get out of its way. But it’s too late. You were only looking in one rear mirror and you didn’t see it coming, and there’s no exit route.

That, perhaps, is the way we have all missed population growth rumbling up behind us as oil begins to peak and decline. Only at five minutes to midnight, taking a look in that other rear mirror, do we realise that behind the first juggernaut is another one, and that if the first one crashes and the other does not slow down fast, the result may be extinction.

The first danger - that of possible rapid depletion of the energy resource that keeps humans fed, warm and mobile – has now been recognised. But the one that has crept up behind has been caught in a blind spot of man’s own making. It is the relentless compounding growth in the numbers of those who need energy. World population has more than doubled from 3 billion in 1960 to 6.6 billion today, and is still growing. More than 75 million people, nearly the population of Germany, are being added to those who need energy every year.

Arguably, it’s our own narrow vision that has created this problem. We could have looked more closely at other rear mirror, but we decided not to look again. The need for population stabilisation and decrease seems to have been an issue too difficult to deal with, masked as it is by a cloud of political and religious prejudice and unquestioning faith in technological solutions. Best to concentrate on the immediate threat and leave that one for later.

Now, at what some oil depletion analysts may believe to be five minutes to midnight, is not too soon to look at some of the simplest implications of continuous population growth on energy supply. Accepting that for climate impact reasons clean energy needs to be substituted for fossil fuel energy even if further large oil reserves are discovered, the issue is only whether it can be done in time.

Many say yes, but so far the signs are not encouraging. While world renewable energy supply grew by an average 2.3% a year from 1971 to 2004, population growth increased the number of energy consumers by 1.6% a year. Against a background of rapid globalisation and urbanisation, populations have also migrated from less developed regions of the world to more developed regions with high-consumption lifestyles, and these lifestyles have proved more difficult to modify than the energy optimists believed.

Some renewable forms of energy are entering the mainstream – for example, wind – but at current technology are less effective in energy conversion terms than fossil fuels, and tend to occupy large areas of land or sea. There are still considerable technical and economic problems with solar photovoltaics and hydrogen fuel cells; and the yields from biomass required for renewable liquid fuels such as methanol are low in terms of land use and net energy capture. Meanwhile, nuclear fission carries the burden of storing dangerous radioactive wastes, and the first prototype nuclear fusion plant is still at least 30 years away.

This fuel substitution trajectory moves at a creeping pace. In the UK, the British Wind Energy Association hopes to have 8,000 MW of rated capacity available to electricity suppliers by 2010, to provide ‘at least 8%’ of total electricity supply. But to achieve this 8% target, one turbine of 1.65MW would have to be installed every day until 2010. With only 17.5% of final energy consumption (by fuel) provided by electricity in the UK, it can be seen what a tiny fraction of the total will realistically come from wind. Nor is there a great contribution from the theoretically vast energy reserves from ocean waves and tides.

The oil depletion trajectory, however, is moving at increasing speed – or, more accurately, the price at which flattening supply meets growing demand. In 2006, the price of crude breached $75 a barrel, nearly four times its level of $20 at the start of 2002. In 2004, according to the Department of Industry (DUKES 2005), “overall primary fuel consumption was not met by indigenous production, and the UK became a net importer of fuel.” The decline in self-sufficiency is steep, with UK production falling 8.5% in 2004 alone.

Yes, the UK – and energy-starved Europe - could pay for its higher energy imports with future earnings from its exports, such as those from the highly successful financial services sector. But signs are that economies worldwide are beginning to feel the inflationary pressures of rising energy costs, and for those without substitute fuels the experience will be painful. Meanwhile, UK population growth has surged to more than 300,000 a year (adding demand from an extra city the size of Cardiff) and is projected to swell by 10 million (another London) within 60 years.

Is it worth looking in that other rear mirror again? The population policy of gradual decrease suggested by the Optimum Population Trust for the world as a whole and for the UK, might allow an extra minute in which to take averting action before what some see as an inevitable crash between population and energy resources. At OPT, we’re optimists – we think it can be done.