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— June - July 2010
’ when global oil supplies will
start to decline. I do know that another resource
has already peaked and gone into freefall: the
credibility of the body that’s meant to assess
them. In late , whistleblowers from the
International Energy Agency alleged that the
IEA had deliberately upgraded its estimate of
the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten
the markets. A paper published by research-
ers at Uppsala University in Sweden shows that
the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it
assumes a rate of extraction that appears to
be impossible. The agency’s assessment of the
state of global oil supplies is beginning to look
as reliable as Mr Greenspan’s blandishments
about the health of the financial markets.
If the whistleblowers are right, we should be
stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by sur-
prise; if we have failed to replace oil before the
supply peaks then crashes, the global economy
is stuffed. But nothing the whistleblowers said
has scared me as much as the conversation I
recently had with a Pembrokeshire farmer.
Wynn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of
acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency
on fossil fuels since . He has installed an
anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar pan-
els and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has
sought, wherever possible, to replace diesel
with his own electricity. Instead of using his
tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the
digester onto nearby fields. He’s replaced his
tractor-driven irrigation system with an elec-
tric one, and set up a new system for drying hay
indoors, which means he has to turn it in the
field only once. Whatever else he does is likely
to produce smaller savings. But these innova-
tions have reduced his use of diesel by only
around %.
According to farm scientists at Cornell
University, cultivating one hectare of maize in
the United States requires litres of petrol and
litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of
modern farm labour has been purchased at the
cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can
change the way maize is grown, a permanent
oil shock would price food out of the mouths
of many of the world’s people. Any responsible
government would be asking urgent questions
about how long we have got.
Instead, most of them delegate this job to
the International Energy Agency. I’ve been
bellyaching, for the past two years, about the
British Government’s refusal to make contin-
gency plans for the possibility that oil might
peak by , and I’m beginning to feel like
a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I
am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World
Energy Outlook recently published by the IEA
expects the global demand for oil to rise from
m barrels a day in to m in .
Oil production will rise to m barrels, it says,
and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we
want the oil, it will materialise.
The IEA does caution that conventional oil is
likely to “approach a pla-
teau” towards the end of
this period, but there’s no
hint of the graver warning
that the IEA’s chief econo-
mist issued when I inter-
viewed him last year: “we
still expect that it will
come around to
a plateau … I think time
is not on our side here.”
Almost every year, the
agency has been forced
to downgrade its forecast
for the daily supply of oil
in : from m bar-
rels in , to m in
, m in ,
m in and m
in . But according to
one of the whistleblowers,
“even today’s number is much higher than can
be justified and the IEA knows this.”
The Uppsala Report, published in the jour-
nal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum
global production of all kinds of oil in will
be m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s fig-
ures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for sup-
ply, the world’s new and undiscovered oil fields
would have to be developed at a rate “never
before seen in history.” As many of them are in
Save Farming
Food supplies are at risk from over
dependence on oil
george monbiot
phOtOs: getty iMages
“even if a field the size of all
the oil reserves ever struck
in the USA were miraculously
discovered, it would delay the
date of peaking by only four
years.”
Monbiot
politically or physically difficult places, and as
capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing
existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and
the use of new techniques for extraction, the
researchers find that “the peak of world oil pro-
duction is probably occurring now.”
Are they right? Who knows? Late in ,
the UK Energy Research Centre published a
massive review of all the available evidence
on global oil supplies. It found that the date
of peak oil will be determined not by the total
size of the global resource but by the rate at
which it can be exploited. New discoveries
would have to be implausibly large to make a
significant difference: even if a field the size of
all the oil reserves ever struck in the USA were
miraculously discovered, it would delay the
date of peaking by only four years. As global
discoveries peaked in the s, a find like this
doesn’t seem very likely.
Regional oil supplies have peaked when
about one third of the total resource has been
extracted: this is because the rate of produc-
tion falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to
shift. So the assumption in the IEA’s new Report,
that oil production will hold steady when the
global resource has fallen “to around one-half
by ″ looks unsafe. The UKERC review
finds that just to keep oil supply at present lev-
els, “more than two thirds of current crude oil
production capacity may need to be replaced by
… At best, this is likely to prove extremely
challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk
of a peak in conventional oil production before
.” Unconventional oil won’t save us: even
a crash programme to develop the Canadian
tar sands could deliver only m barrels a day
by .
As a report commissioned by the US
Department of Energy shows, an emergency
programme to replace current energy sup-
plies or equipment to anticipate peak oil
would need about years to take effect.
It seems unlikely that we have it. The world
economy is probably knackered, whatever we
might do now. But at least we could save farm-
ing. There are two possible options: either
the mass replacement of farm machinery or
the development of new farming systems,
which don’t need much labour or energy.
There are no obvious barriers to the mass
production of electric tractors and combine
harvesters: the weight of the batteries and
an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both
advantages for tractors. A switch to forest
gardening and other forms of permaculture
is trickier, especially for producing grain; but
such is the scale of the creeping emergency
that we can’t afford to rule anything out.
The challenge of feeding or billion peo-
ple while oil supplies are falling is stupefying.
It’ll be even greater if governments keep pre-
tending that it isn’t going to happen.
This article was first published in the Guardian.
www.monbiot.com
phOtOs: getty iMages
Also in this section
Paul Keogh interview
One-off-housing
Oil: never when you want it
— June - July 2010
Architecture
the current president of the Royal
Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) several
times and always found him affable but I think he
is nervous about this interview, especially after
we get started and some particular themes are
beginning to repeat. A couple of times we have
to adjourn as policies are consulted and thoughts
collected. But the overall effect is to reinforce a
sense of someone who’s still passionate about
architecture and architectural policy, analytical
and serious-minded.
The incumbent grew up in Rathfarnham, had
an ordinary suburban childhood and attended
Synge St school in the nineteen-sixties with a
colourful cohort as diverse as Niall Stokes, edi-
tor of Hot Press magazine and Dermot McCarthy
who is now the country’s most senior civil serv-
ant. Keogh says he was part of the rowdy half of
the class - and I suspect that he has been com-
pensating for this ever since. If you were in the A
or B stream you didn’t study art which was desir-
able for getting in to architecture - so he did it on
Saturday mornings. Thankfully now the think-
ing has changed and, for example, RIAI members
work with schoolchildren in a competition
to design the ideal space for learning. He became
fascinated in architecture when a family friend
got involved in re-designing the local youth club
and he became focused on getting the points to
study it in college.
He attended UCD in the seventies. His first-
year tutors were Shane de Blacam - “one of our
greatest architects” and Cathal O Neill - “a leg-
endary teacher who’d worked with Mies van
der Rohe”, who took over the school after it had
been through some infamous ups and downs in
the late ‘s. O’Neill was most notable for bring-
ing in talent - Shelley McNamara, Yvonne Farrell,
Shay Cleary and Jim Coady – all taught Keogh in
his final years in UCD: “A crack opened and the
light came in”. It is clear that Keogh believes this
generation has changed the face of Irish archi-
tecture, even if the public does not necessarily
see it that way.
interview
Necessarily reflective.
Paul Keogh, the President
of the Architects Institute
interview michael smith
