Climate Change

The need to respond to climate change presents much the same issues as the coming oil shortage. As people begin to face up to the effects of climate change – as they inevitably will as the catalogue of resulting disasters accumulates – they will realise that our current dependence on oil must change.

Estimates of the extent to which we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels again vary in the range 60%-80% – that is, countries like the UK must reduce to using between 20% and 40% of current consumption by the middle of this century, if not sooner.

In practice, it may be that such a reduction is forced upon us by the shortage of oil, although climate change activists argue strongly against that particular complacency. For a discussion of the issues see for example Mayer Hillman’s excellent How to Save the Planet.

Climate change is the single greatest threat facing humanity. We say relatively little about it here simply because the solution – reducing our use of fossil energy – has already been discussed in relation to the threat of “peak oil”.

One key threat in relation to peak oil is an increase in the use of coal, tar sands, methane hydrates etc. The world does have considerable reserves of coal – at current rates of use the world has around 200 years’ reserves, the UK about 50 . But burning more coal will only add to greenhouse gases.

Coal is more “carbon-intensive” than oil (ie releases about 13% more per unit of energy than oil), but the more important point is that coal’s current contribution of about 17% of UK energy is about the level to which we need to reduce greenhouse emissions. That is, if we stopped burning oil and gas but kept coal use at the present level, that would be about the level which the world could sustain.

Worldwide coal accounts for about 25% of energy needs, which again is about right or possibly too high. (Also, of course, if we sought to use coal for all of our energy needs, the UK reserve would be exhausted in 10 years – and we shouldn’t expect anyone else to sell us theirs!).

Oil recovered from tar sands is again more carbon-intensive, particularly because of the huge amounts of energy (currently natural gas) needed to extract it. Exploiting methane hydrates, proposed by some as a “magic-bullet” cure to the world’s energy shortage, could be catastrophic in terms of global warming.

The other “solution” often advanced is to build more nuclear stations. Again, we do not see this as a solution. A massive number of stations would be needed just to source all our electricity, let alone the other 80% of our energy needs.

The risks of accidents from that many stations would be huge (though, as James Lovelock has pointed out, still a much lower risk than global warming). The world’s remaining stocks of uranium are limited and if used at this rate would only last a decade or two.

And lastly, the problem of storing nuclear waste, while major for an advanced industrialised society, becomes much greater if we imagine a “collapse”, after which we may lack the resources and skills safely to look after such waste.

Source: www.eafl.org.uk April 2005