The age of oil is over - it's time to stop looking
Twenty years ago, as NASA scientist James Hansen was giving his famous early warning on climate change to a Congressional sub-committee, the planet was rocking out to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." Little did we know that Astley was talking about oil.
Unlike Astley, Hansen is still around and he's still not pulling any punches. He celebrated the anniversary of his now-legendary Congressional appearance by giving a speech at the National Press Club in Washington in which he warned that we are nearing the point of no return. When he told us we were in trouble 20 years ago, Hansen made headlines but failed to spur a complacent world to action. Now, as glaciers melt, the Arctic sizzles, and epochal droughts, floods and catastrophic weather events of every description plague the planet, only a few die-hard skeptics, oil company apologists, and scientific illiterates still deny what a child can see: climate change is real, it's here, and it's us.
Hansen has a number of ideas about what we need to do, including a moratorium on coal-fired power plants (in the US alone, 20 are currently under construction and 100 more are in planning stages) and a carbon tax on oil, gas, and coal. However, almost as an aside, he notes the madness of continuing the quest for oil: ""To go around drilling for the last drop of oil... will extend our addiction a little bit, but it will put us past the tipping point."
The sentiment was echoed in Thomas Friedman's New York Times column last Saturday in which he excoriates George W. Bush for playing lapdog to Big Oil and the Saudis at the expense of the planet. Friedman points out that Bush is using the current gas price panic as a lever to move forward with plans to drill in the Arctic National Wild Reserve, and inevitably to conduct exploration and drilling in any spot where the ground or sea floor is stable enough to support an oil rig.
What's the point of all this grand enthusiasm to find more oil? Well, no matter what you've heard, it's not to ease the current fuel crisis, because it will take decades for oil to get from the exploration stage to your neighbourhood pump. It's not to give the US long-term energy security, because ANWR and the off-shore areas that Bush wants to open up for drilling are estimated to hold some 10 billion and 18 billion barrels of oil respectively - meaning that even if every drop of it were recoverable, it would only be enough to supply current US needs for less than 5 years.
In fact, what more drilling principally does is allow oil companies to squeeze the last few dollars of profit out of the massive and expensive infrastructure that they've created to produce, refine, and deliver oil and its byproducts. For the rest of us, the continued use of fossil fuels will hasten the already disastrous effects of climate change, and put an economic chill on the development of renewable, sustainable energy sources like wind and solar.
What's astonishing is the zeal with which otherwise intelligent people can lead a charge towards certain disaster. By putting our limited resources into oil exploration rather than into the build-out of the next generation of energy technologies we not only doom ourselves, but do so in the stupidest way imaginable, like shipwreck survivors setting their lifeboat on fire to keep warm.
We stand at a pivotal point in human history - in another decade, probably less, it will be too late to halt the most calamitous effects of climate change, the ones that can destroy a civilization. If we spend that time desperately seeking ways to extend our oil addiction rather than to wean ourselves from it, we ensure the worst outcome possible. And the real irony? It won't make your fill-up a dime cheaper.
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