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Ireland sleep walking’ to oil crisis
Brian O’Mahony, The Irish Examiner
Falling energy supplies and the threat posed to Ireland by declining oil stocks should be top of the political agenda for the next general election, said NTR [formerly National Toll Roads] chief executive Jim Barry, whose company is a major player in the alternative energy sector.
Speaking at the launch of the sixth international conference on Peak Oil, to be held in UCC on September 17-18, 2007, Mr Barry said: “I believe Ireland is sleep walking its way into an energy crisis. What goes for Europe goes quadruple for Ireland. We are at the end of a 3,0000 kilometre gas pipeline from Siberia … you look out 20 years we have no sustainable sources of energy of any critical level.”
Meanwhile, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, led by Dr Colin Campbell, had made the theme of next year’s conference in UCC “The eventual depletion of fossil fuels, especially oil, and the consequences of this depletion on society.”
Speakers at the launch of the conference in Dublin yesterday included Richard Hardman, director of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre and ASPO president Jeremy Gilbert.
(1 Dec 2006)
Mind the gap – the black hole at the heart of the UK’s energy supply
Press Release, Logica CMG
UK ENERGY GAP: much larger, much closer and more expensive than reported
• By 2015 the energy demand in the UK could exceed supply by 23% at peak times
• The impact of the ‘real’ energy gap on GDP will be equivalent to £108bn a year
• £3.7k a year cost for every working adult in the country
• Powercuts are now just as likely in the summer as the winter
The Energy Review indicated that by 2025 energy demand in the UK may exceed the available supply by 30 per cent, but research by LogicaCMG suggests that a decade earlier the energy gap could already be 23 per cent at peak times. This shows that the gap is widening far quicker than anticipated, and will have a significant impact on UK business and households.
(21 Nov 2006)
This has been reported on widely. Reuters has an article critical of the report, UK energy groups dispute report on energy gap -AF
Scientist predicts Britain will triumph over global warming
Lewis Smith, UK Times
Bleak scenario of climate devastation
Earth’s millions will drift to north
The days of empire may be gone but global warming will make Britain the centre of the civilised world once again, according to James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory, which views the world as a self-sustaining organic system.
In a bleak prophecy he says that global warming will become so intense within a century that much of the world will become uninhabitable. The British Isles, however, is perfectly placed to become the most desirable location in the world in which to live and one of the few areas able to feed itself. It will be able to survive the devastating consequences of global heating, as he now terms it.
…Adaptation, Professor Lovelock said yesterday, is the only choice left as the world warms up and there is a rapid northwards shift of its population. Equatorial regions will become so hot that they can no longer sustain agriculture and will turn into deserts. Much of Europe will dry out so extensively that millions of people will be forced to make a new life closer to the Arctic.
The British Isles, small and surrounded by water, will remain cool enough to sustain a modern, technologically advanced nation, despite being 8C (14F) hotter on average. “The British Isles may be a very desirable bit of real estate because we are surrounded by the sea,” he said. “The summer of 2003 will be typical of conditions by 2100.”
Displaced millions will settle in Britain and Ireland and will have to be accommodated in skyscrapers that will make cities resemble the Hong Kong of today – which by 2100 will be uninhabitable, he said.
(29 Nov 2006)
It hardly seems fair, since the UK started the whole thing with the Industrial Revolution.
Also, it should be pointed out that Lovelock’s extreme predictions are not widely shared. For a perspective on Lovelock, see verstating the obvious? (WorldChanging) by Jon Lebkowsky.
-BA
