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| Automobile: How the Car Changed Life |
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| MACMILLAN 2002 |
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| The Big Rollover |
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| One of the most interesting (and sobering)
aspects of writing this book was researching the Big Rollover. This is
the jargon term for the moment when world production of oil peaks. This
will probably occur around 2010 - in eight years; if the most optimistic
estimates are used, the moment may be postponed ten years, to 2020. There
will still be plenty of oil left - as much, in fact, as has already been
extracted. But from then on production will begin to fall, and what is
left will get progressively harder to extract. Meanwhile demand is rising
inexorably. Global demand for oil is currently rising at 2 percent a year.
Since 1985, energy use has risen by 30 percent in Latin America, 40 percent
in Africa and 50 percent in Asia. The US Energy Information Administration
forecasts that worldwide demand for oil will increase 60 percent (to about
40 billion barrels a year) by 2020. But by then production will almost
certainly be in decline. And what will happen then? |
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| What is surprising is how little discussion
of this fast-approaching event is taking place - perhaps because the consequences
are so enormous as to be almost unthinkable. As the oil blockades of autumn,
2000, showed, Britain is so geared to road transport that within four
days of petrol becoming unavailable, the entire country - hospitals, food
deliveries, schools, factories - ground to a halt. And the same is true
of every advanced economy. |
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| Of course oil will not become unavailable after the Big
Rollover: as much will be left in the ground as has been consumed over
the past 200 years. But - leaving aside the question of what burning all
this up may do to our climate - it is clear that the laws of supply and
demand - in this case rapidly rising demand and dwindling supply - will
mean the end of cheap transport: the sine qua non upon which our entire
society is predicated. What will be the effects upon work habits, property
prices, food prices? Should we be planning to expand our airports when
air travel, in particular, seems set to become a luxury? Oil is not only
cheap (aviation fuel is untaxed) but light and energy-dense: crucial for
air travel, and not true of any alternative fuel. Where, in Britain, is
the will to invest in public transport as a viable alternative to road
travel? And how, in the low-density autosuburbia of the United States,
would this be possible even if the will was there? |
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| The most usual response is to assume that something will
turn up - some alternative fuel, some way of using less fuel. And this
is of course true. Hybrid cars, alternating between internal combustion
and electric, are already available, and will do 100 mpg (though gas-guzzling
SUVs remain the public's vehicle of choice). Cars already exist that will
run on hydrogen, which is generally assumed to be the fuel of the future.
But where oil gushes out of the ground more or less ready to use, hydrogen,
like all the other alternative fuels (biodiesel, oil from coal) will have
to be manufactured - which takes energy and expense. Plus, it will have
to be manufactured in vast quantity. |
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| One of the few to address the question directly is
oil economist David Fleming in his article 'After Oil', Prospect, Nov.
2000 (http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk).
See also 'Kicking the Habit', New Scientist, 25 November 2000 - an excellent
overview of developments in this area. |
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| 'Ruth Brandon has written a superb popular history of the
car, leavening hard data and statistics with anecdotage, mini-biographies
and pithy musings on the state we're in, automobile-wise.' - Frank McLynn,
Glasgow Herald |
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| L.B.Magoon Are we running out of oil? http://www.hubbertpeak.com/magoon/ |
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| Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère, 'The End
of Cheap Oil', Scientific |
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| American March 1998. (http://dieoff.com/page140.htm) |
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| Rocky Mountain Institute, http://www.rmi.org |
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| www.oilcrisis.com/hubbert/ |
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| Ruth Brandon Jan 2002 |
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