Oil is filthy stuff.
So much was obvious, even to the purblind, long before the Deepwater Horizon explosion turned the Gulf of Mexico into a noxious sump. Oil stinks to high heaven.
Oil fed through internal combustion engines fouls our air and poisons our children. Oil underpins obnoxious regimes and distorts the global economy. The finding and getting of oil is synonymous with corporate theft. And oil, above all, is warming the planet with consequences guaranteed to dwarf any conceivable benefit.
We should stop using the stuff. Even those who are sceptical of man-made climate change, or content to believe that the catastrophe will be someone else’s problem, can grasp that. The struggle to control a diminishing resource at any cost is a mug’s game. The wars, even if we do not use the word, have already begun.
The oil that was everywhere a century ago is hard to come by now. That was the lesson a car-obsessed America – and the rest of us – refused to grasp when BP’s rig blew in the Gulf of Mexico.
Most of the countries with most of the remaining oil are unreliable at best, unpleasant at worst. The alternatives are, as the industry might say, challenging.
So big oil hunts in places that were once uneconomic. They drill, these days, in the deepest waters, in brutal climates, where nature is wild and almost pristine. They promise to do no harm and they promise, just as BP promised, to manage any risk. Our trust in these endeavours, where it survives, is as remarkable as it is stupid.
But what are we supposed to say? A Coalition Government manned by environmentally-friendly LibDems says we must wean ourselves from fossil fuels. The same Government encourages – or does not discourage – Chevron from exploring the deep waters west of Shetland. The clear intention, as other firms queue for exploration licences, is to extract oil from 1600 metres below the sea’s surface. After Deepwater Horizon, that doesn’t sound too clever.
Environmentalists, busy Greenpeace protesters in the lead, will tell you as much. The frenzied, dangerous search for disappearing oil, they will say, is only making matters worse. An SNP Government confident that Scotland will derive all its energy from renewable sources by 2025 might lead you to believe, meanwhile, that there is no longer a need to gouge the seabed beyond Shetland.
It’s seductive. The world would be a better place without big oil and the petrodollar regimes. Global warming is not a fiction, a scam or a joke. We should be managing the transition from fossil fuels, as greens demand, if only to extinguish the mad conceit of an inexhaustible planet. If we fail, the consequences will be unspeakable.
I agree with every word. I agree until that supreme, petty parochialism common to all but the most dedicated kicks in. I’m sitting in a house whose heating system – not my choice, but expensive to replace – runs on oil. I can’t get from A to B, even with modest intent, without some version of the stuff. My food, your food, and most other things, depend on oil-based transport. So how would “transition” work?
Those who protest professionally on the future’s behalf argue that oil exploration, and hence extraction, must stop now, instantly, before it’s too late. Simple as that. These people are admirable examples of candour, mostly, but they stumble over one question: then what? This is rarely explored.
Alex Salmond, First Minister, is as sincerely supportive of renewable energy as any politician in these islands. As a former oil economist, he grasps the issues, past and present. As a nationalist, and rational, he views the prospect of an energy-independent Scotland – an energy-exporting Scotland, indeed – as a great prize. But he can do his sums where “transition” is concerned.
Mr Salmond, like others, comes up with a figure of £200bn as the required (private) investment needed to secure a renewable future. The First Minister reminds us that big oil conjured an equivalent sum to open up the North Sea’s oil and gas industries. But what obliges those firms to make the effort now, when profits can still be had from the black stuff and when, crucially, few of us possess workable alternatives to our oil-fired lives?
We’re stuck with fossil fuels, for now, in a million common, mundane ways. We were suitably horrified, of course, by the Gulf of Mexico disaster. We understand, some of us, that the need for a little more oil for just a little longer amounts to an excuse, a way to delay the inevitable transition, a guarantee that our lives and our world will be worse off in the long run. But after last winter, snow piled at the door, I won’t be switching off the heating. Sorry.
Renewables are imperfect. It should not be left to the oil lobby and its mouthpieces to say so. Wind farms, on shore or off, have their own environmental consequences and vast financial costs. The energy they supply isn’t cheap and is not, without going into arguments over base loads and the rest, entirely reliable. Solar is beyond the reach of most. Nuclear is troubling, yet probably inevitable.
Greens need to say what they really mean: the transition they have in mind is towards a kind of permanent energy austerity, with all the inequalities implicit in enforced rationing. The perplexed majority should be equally honest: it’s not going to happen. Energy efficiency is rational. But each time I look at a website or a magazine dedicated to environmental activism, I smell the paradox. What, other than passion, fuelled those energy-guzzling efforts? Oil.
If some future well explodes west of Shetland we will all know who to blame. Big oil should never be trusted. But big oil relies on its dependants, its clients, customers and patrons. That would be us, and our governments, each with our needs and necessities.
The choice between transition and catastrophe is too simplistic. There is such a thing, after all, as a catastrophic transition.