[A-List] Cross Your Fingers and Carry On

[Bill Totten]

Why does the government refuse to make contingency plans for peak oil?

by George Monbiot

The Guardian (April 14 2009)


Here's how the British government describes the risk of a smallpox
outbreak. "We are currently at alert level 0. Smallpox remains
eradicated. No credible threat of a smallpox release." {1}

So, in response to this non-existent threat, it has published 122 pages
of central plans{2, 3}. Each of the nine English regions maintains a
Smallpox Diagnosis and Response Group, which in turn supports five
Smallpox Management and Response Teams, one of which is on duty at all
times. There are smallpox centres all over the country, and lists of
doctors, nurses and support staff prepared to run them, laboratories
ready to multiply vaccines and planning committees involving scores of
different agencies.

The plans, in other words, must have cost millions. They use thousands
of hours of specialist time every year. But step forward the man or
woman who believes the government should abandon them.

The chances that this extinct disease might break out here are extremely
remote - one in a million perhaps - but they cannot be dismissed while
the US and Russia disgracefully refuse to destroy their stockpiles.
Stealing, weaponising and distributing the virus would require
capabilities beyond those of any known terrorist group. The government's
plans are almost certainly a waste of time and money. But they are a
waste of time and money that makes sense.

This is what government is for: to prepare for the worst, however
unlikely it may be. The UK, like all rich nations, maintains an
elaborate network of agencies to defend us from unlikely events: the
Ministerial Committee on Protective Security and Resilience, the Civil
Contingencies Secretariat, the Domestic Horizon Scanning Committee, the
National Risk Register, the Capabilities Programme Board, the National
Recovery Working Group, the Regional Resilience and Emergency Response
Division, the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response and endless
departmental and regional bodies.

But this great state safety net is full of holes. The government has a
strangely unbalanced approach to risk, over-emphasising some
contingencies - terrorism, anarchy, attacks by rogue states - while
underplaying, even promoting, others. It was Gordon Brown, for example,
who told the bankers of the City of London in his Mansion House speech
of 2004 that "in budget after budget I want us to do even more to
encourage the risk takers" {4}.

There is one respect in which the government's approach seems utterly
bonkers: a threat with a high likelihood of occurrence, for which it
refuses to make any plans at all. I've been banging on about this for a
while, with my usual absence of results. But now I've received a letter
which makes its dismissive response look like outright lunacy.

There is nothing certain about the hypothesis that global supplies of
conventional petroleum might soon stop growing and then go into decline.
There is a large body of expert opinion, marshalling impressive
statistics, which is convinced that peak oil is imminent. There is also
a large body of expert opinion, marshalling impressive statistics, which
insists that it's a long way off. I don't know whom to believe. The key
data - the true extent of reserves in the OPEC nations - are state
secrets. Anyone who tells you that oil supplies will definitely peak by
a certain date or definitely won't peak ever is a fraud: the information
required to make these assessments does not exist.

In February 2008 I sent a freedom of information request to the
Department for Business, asking what contingency plans the government
has made for the eventuality that global supplies of crude oil might
peak between now and 2020. The answer I received astonished me. "The
Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically
for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020".{5}

As it revealed in a parliamentary answer, the government relies
primarily on the International Energy Agency for its assessment {6}.
When I made my first request, its cavalier attitude chimed with the
IEA's. But at the end of last year the agency suddenly changed tack. Its
World Energy Outlook report upgraded the annual rate of decline in
output from the world's existing oilfields from 3.7% to 6.7% {7}.
Previously it had relied on guesswork. This time it had conducted the
world's first comprehensive study of decline rates, covering the 800
largest fields.

The report also contained a word the agency had hitherto avoided: peak.
It proposed that "although global oil production in total is not
expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is
projected to level off towards the end of the projection period". {8}
When I interviewed the IEA's chief economist for the Guardian, he
tightened this up: "in terms of non-OPEC, we are expecting that in
three, four years' time the production of conventional oil will come to
a plateau, and start to decline … In terms of the global picture,
assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional
oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around
2020 to a plateau as well … I think time is not on our side here".{9} He
told me that we would need a "global energy revolution" to avert this
prospect. Nothing of the kind is happening.

So I sent the British government a new request: in the light of what the
IEA has revealed, what contingency plans has the government made? The
response has now arrived. "With sufficient investment, the Government
does not believe that global oil production will peak between now and
2020 and consequently we do not have any contingency plans specific to a
peak in oil production". {10}

I just don't get it. Let's assume that there is only a ten per cent
chance that the International Energy Agency and everybody else
predicting that global oil supplies will soon peak or plateau are right.
That still makes peak oil about 100,000 times more likely than a
smallpox outbreak in the United Kingdom.

As the report by Robert L Hirsch, commissioned by the US Department of
Energy, shows, the consequences of peak oil taking governments by
surprise are at least as devastating as a smallpox epidemic. "Without
timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be
unprecedented". {11} Hirsch estimated that to avoid global economic
collapse, we would need to begin "a mitigation crash program twenty
years before peaking". If he's right and the IEA's right, we're already
ten years too late. But my conversations with government officials
suggest to me that they wear the absence of plans almost as a badge of
honour, like the Viking beserkers who went into battle without armour to
show how mad they were.

The only explanation I can suggest is that the concept of insufficient
oil cannot be accommodated within the government's worldview. Its
response to a smallpox epidemic accords with its messianic tendencies:
government as superman, defending us from nutters carrying vampire
pathogens. The idea that we might be undone by an issue as mundane and
unresponsive as resource depletion just doesn't fit.

But at least we know where we stand: we'll have to make our own
contingency plans. Does anyone have a spare AK47?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1.
http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

2. Department of Health, 15th December 2003. Guidelines for smallpox
response and management in the post-eradication era, Version 2.
Downloadable at
http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

3. Department of Health, 15th December 2003. Appendices. Downloadable at
http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

4. Gordon Brown, 16th June 2004. Speech to Mansion House.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/speech_chex_160604.htm

5. BERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request, Ref 08/0091.

6.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080402/text/80402w0045.htm

7. International Energy Agency, 2008. World Energy Outlook 2008, page
43. IEA, Paris.

8. ibid, page 103.

9.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/dec/15/fatih-birol-george-monbiot

10. DECC, 23rd March 2009. Response to Freedom of Information request,
Ref 09/0277.

11. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005.
Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management.
US Department of Energy, page 4.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/04/14/cross-your-fingers-and-carry-on/


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