If you are the kind of person who believes the things the City says, you might by now be almost convinced that we don’t really need oil any more.
If you are the kind of person who believes the things the City says, you might by now be almost convinced that we don’t really need oil any more. Within seconds of the publication of the Stern report every analyst in town had become an expert on green energy, and investors were being advised to put their money in everything from wind, solar and wave power to fuel cells and biomass electricity plants, all of which were being put about as perfectly viable alternatives to fossil fuels. The problem is that, at present at least, they aren’t.
Wind power is famously inefficient. Wave power is a very nascent technology. Solar power is expensive. And the best of the lot, fuel cell technology, while making encouraging progress, isn’t there yet. Vast amounts of money are pouring into renewable energy projects — $50 billion worldwide in 2005, about 10 per cent of the total global investment in energy — and I’m sure that one day all that money will yield a return both to investors and to the planet in terms of an energy source that really is cheaper, more efficient and better for the environment than oil. It just hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t in the next decade. Whether the green energy lobby likes it or not, we still need oil and we need ever increasing amounts of it.
It doesn’t matter how successfully we in the West are bullied into giving up big cars, air travel, televisions on standby and nightlights for toddlers to reduce demand for fossil fuels and carbon emissions: any slack we create will be taken up by China in a matter of seconds.
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