ABSTRACT

Ready access to sources of energy is obviously of critical importance to all living things and the ultimate source of energy for life on Planet Earth is our sun. Animals rely on the capacity of plants to trap solar energy in order to produce complex compounds made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms which then serve as the fuel for animal bodily functions through the processes of digestion. Humans, in particular, have learned how to burn plant material to produce heat energy and this has extended to using fossilised plant material – in the form of coal, oil and associated gases – to produce the heat that can be turned into electricity or used to drive motor vehicles. Just as animal digestion and metabolism produces unused heat and waste materials, the burning of fossil fuels gives off ‘excess’ heat and the gas emissions known to produce the global greenhouse effect. In other words, there are always ‘by-products’ arising from the generation of energy and some of them can be hazardous to life. The discovery of the greenhouse effect, discussed in Chapter 4, has stimulated the effort to find less polluting sources of energy for human consumption, including solar energy, ‘geothermal’ heat and wind power. This search is also driven by the knowledge that the planet’s stocks of ‘fossil fuels’ is ultimately finite while solar energy and wind power, in particular, are in unlimited supply and hence constantly ‘renewable’. There is some controversy over what really constitutes ‘renewable’ energy – given that all energy generation produces forms of

waste – and there is little prospect that humans will accomplish a wholesale shift to the use of non-polluting energy sources any time soon. However, the dangers associated with the use of fossil fuels – including the devastating impacts that oil spills can have on marine and coastal ecosystems – are forcing us to think more deeply about how to meet our energy needs in environmentally sustainable ways. The ‘spectre’ of Peak Oil was listed in Chapter 4 as being one of the growing ‘wicked problems’ of global sustainability. So much of what we do is driven by the burning of fossil fuels – from our modes of transport to modern methods for producing food – and so many of the plastic products that we use every day are ‘by-products’ of the petrochemical industry that it is very hard indeed to imagine how we might be able to wean ourselves off our oil dependency. This is undoubtedly why the notion of Peak Oil that was first articulated by US geophysicist M. King Hubbert in the late 1950s has been widely dismissed as being unnecessarily alarmist. However, it is important to remember that Hubbert’s warning was not based on the assumption that oil supplies are about to dry up, but rather that the cost of accessing enough oil to satisfy the growing demand for it would lead to relative oil shortages and big increases in oil prices. The Peak Oil warning refers to the availability of ‘cheap oil’ and this chapter will make it clear that the prediction Hubbert made for production and consumption of oil in the USA is now playing out on a global scale.