What The World Needs Now

Sunset: an oil refinery in Kazakhstan

I do hope you realise you're getting all your energy from a non-renewable source?

I'm sure you've been wondering about the long tube and the squishy thing it's attached to (it's called a placenta). Well, in fact that whole arrangement is a kind of power supply. It's quite a sweet deal, really. You get all the meals you need for the whole duration of your stay in there piped directly to you, without ever once having to get up to go to the fridge or answer the door to the pizza guy.

I'm afraid it's not going to last forever, though. When you get out, I'm afraid the placenta thing kind of expires and you have to graduate to new dining arrangements. But don't worry, I know the placenta has convenience going for it, but eating on the outside is going to be a lot more fun. You'll see.

Anyway, the reason I bring up the matter of your energy supply is by way of analogy with our supply here on the outside. You see, we use a non-renewable source too. And although the pipework is a bit more complex, it's a lot like yours inasmuch as we depend on it pretty much absolutely.

Sorry, I'll try to be more specific. There's this stuff called oil, right? Oil is a thick, black liquid found underneath the ground. Scientists think oil probably began to be formed millions of years ago when tiny aquatic creatures died and sank to the sea bed. A layer of sediment, which gradually hardened into rock, was then laid down on top of the organic goo that used to be the creatures.

Over a very, very long time, the heat and pressure underneath the rock made the goo into oil. Bound up inside the chemistry of the oil is all the energy that the trillions of tiny creatures absorbed from the sun over millions of years. It's an enormous amount of energy, and because it's so highly concentrated and relatively easy to release (you just burn it, basically), we've been using oil to power almost everything we do.

In fact, we've built a vast, global economy whose existence was possible only because we can do things like travelling 500 miles through the air in a single hour, or assembling a computer that can assemble a computer, things we've only been able to do because we've had oil. Or, more accurately, because we've had enough oil to make it cheap, which allows the whole global economy thing to keep expanding.

And expanding is exactly what it's been doing, at least for the last thirty years or so. Every year, the people who keep the economy going are able to do a little bit more flying and assembling and so on because they made some money doing these things last year and so they can afford to buy more oil.

I know what you're thinking. Why can't the economy just stay put for a while? Why does there always have to be more flying and assembling and buying of oil? Unfortunately, the need for constant expansion is built into the system underlying the whole global economy thing, which is called capitalism. We'll come back to capitalism later, probably when we're trying to figure out how to pay somebody to take care of you while we're out working.

So, the economy keeps growing, and needs more oil each year to sustain that growth. The trouble is, the oil is running out.

I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? It comes from compressed microorganisms and it takes aeons to make. There can only be so much of it down there. You probably saw this coming, and you're just a foetus. No offence.

Well, we didn't see it coming. We've been having too much fun with with the economy. If we fancy a kiwi fruit, which contains about 50 calories of energy, we can have one flown in from New Zealand, consuming about 5000 calories of energy in the process. If we need to bring our child to a crêche, because we need to go out and assemble more assemblers so that we can afford to have more pieces of fruit flown in from a different hemisphere, we can just hop into an SUV, a vehicle the size of a small whale, and consume more energy on the way than would be required to care for the child at home for an entire week.

Of course, some people did point it out. A chap called Marion King Hubbert first came up with what's now called the peak oil theory back in the 1950s, but it all seemed like a lot of fuss over something that was a terribly long way off. Even if it did happen--it was probably just a Communist plot, but just supposing it did--well, by then it would be the twenty-first century and we'd have jet packs to get around and enormous computers built into mountainsides to figure out ways to fuel them.

But the twenty-first century is here, and there's no sign of the jet packs. The computers are powerful alright, but they've got smaller, not bigger, and they're mostly used by people sending each other movies of cats falling from tables. And the oil really is running out.

I shouldn't mock the jet pack optimists, I suppose. I tend towards the optimistic view myself. That is, I do believe it's well within the limits of human ingenuity to devise technologies that will eventually allow us to to replace our oil-based ones.

The trouble is, ingenuity is only a part of it. The scientists and engineers we need to start being ingenious about this have to eat kiwi fruits and drive to crêches too, which means that someone has to pay them to be ingenious. As long as there's still money to be made the old way, the economy doesn't have any interest in this kind of ingenuity.

Governments are a litte bit better. The government of Sweden recently announced that that country will be completely free of its dependency on oil by 2020. The government of Ireland, on the other hand, seems to be banking on the jet packs.

So, enjoy the free grub while it lasts. Pretty soon, you're going to have to start thinking about where your next kiwi fruit is coming from.