For 15 years, retired geologist Colin Campbell has warned of the approaching end of the age of oil and the dire consequences for the world should that happen. Although experts hotly debate the issue, it has drawn little attention from the average consumer.
But now, with the price of oil reaching $50 a barrel, Campbell believes his warnings should finally gain credence.
The editors of The Wall Street Journal regard Campbell’s views as so newsworthy that they published a lengthy article about him and the controversy surrounding him in Wednesday’s edition.
“Dr. Campbell is at the center of a small but suddenly influential band of contrarians known as the peak-oil movement,” the newspaper reported. “They see cause for alarm in the fact that since the early 1980s the world has been pumping more oil out of the ground than it’s been finding. By as early as next year, they say, humanity will have reached a point of reckoning: It will have extracted half the oil it will ever get. Once that ‘peak’ is reached, Dr. Campbell says, global oil production will start falling, never to rise again.”
And that, the report continues, would mean the end of cheap oil. Consumers might continue to use oil for another century or so, but oil prices would steadily rise, forcing the world “to become radically more energy-efficient, shifting quickly to alternatives such as solar and nuclear power. If the switch wasn’t fast enough – an outcome Dr. Campbell thinks more likely – the global economy would screech to a halt.”
In short, if Campbell is right, our grandchildren and their children will live in a far different world than ours, and, unless new sources of energy are found, it would appear to be a not very attractive world.
“The perception of this decline changes the entire world we know,” Campbell said in an interview. “Up till now we’ve been living in a world with the assumption of growth driven by oil. Now we have to face the other side of the mountain.”
The article observed that “nobody really knows how much oil exists” or how much can be pumped, since much of it “lies in places with volatile politics, including the Middle East, Russia and Africa.”
Since the first oil well was drilled about 150 years ago, the newspaper notes, the world has consumed about 900 billion barrels. Campbell believes “the world will be able to pump out about that much more.” Given the rising rate of consumption, particularly in China and elsewhere in Asia, that’s hardly encouraging.
No, no, that’s far too pessimistic, industry spokesmen insist. One oil company estimates there may be as many as 14 trillion barrels of fossil fuel still in the ground (not all in conventional forms) and that much of it can be useful. The company’s shareholders hope that estimate is correct.
Although the peak-oil movement has yet to influence the energy policies of the developed nations, there is – as the Journal reports – new intensity to the debate because of the changing conditions.
Yet there may be a soft spot in Campbell’s warnings. The Journal notes “he has progressively postponed his predicted date, from 1995 to 2005.” This fact, the industry says, points to a problem with his peak oil theory, that it underestimates the power of technology to find more oil.
Even if that’s true, though, isn’t it time consumers became more aware of the debate and its importance to their world’s economic future?
