Page 40 - BBC Focus - August 2017
P. 40
OPINION
“HERE WE ARE IN THE
2010s WITH VAST PROVEN
RESERVES OF OIL”
2 Of Population. For the next century land was
indeed scarce. Humanity only expanded by
putting the plough and the cow on to the prairies,
the steppes, the pampas and the outback.
Yet the area of land needed to support an
individual human shrank dramatically in the
20th Century, as tractors replaced horses; coal and
oil replaced wood fuel and hay; and synthetic
nitrogen fertiliser (fixed from the air) replaced
manure grown on other land. Since 1960, the
acreage of land needed to produce a given quantity
of food has gone down by 68 per cent. Prof Jesse
Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculates that, Mill, politician William Gladstone (who later
even with conservative assumptions for became prime minister) promised to start paying
population, technology and economic down the national debt while coal lasted, citing
development, humanity will be able to release at Jevons’s “grave and urgent facts”. Something had
least 146 million hectares from farming over the gone badly awry in Jevons’s assumptions,
next 50 years – an area more than seven times the however. Today, the world is consuming over 30
size of Great Britain. times more coal each year than it did then, yet the
Such land sparing is already happening in many amount of remaining coal is sufficient to last
rich countries: New England is now mostly forest, thousands of years at current rates of use. Under
whereas it was once mostly farmland. Meanwhile, the North Sea alone, there are billions of tonnes of
the United Nations Food and Agriculture it. We are likely to stop using coal long before we
Organization said in 2015 that net deforestation run out of it.
has just about ceased: “The net annual rate of Oil was the next resource thought to be in
forest loss has slowed from 0.18 per cent in the imminent danger of exhaustion. In 1914, the
early 1990s to 0.08 per cent during the period United States Bureau of Mines predicted that
2010-2015”. American oil reserves would last for 10 years. In
1939 the Department of the Interior said
BURNING ISSUE American oil would last 13 years. President
In the late 20th Century, fossil fuels were thought Jimmy Carter announced in the 1970s that: “We
Slow-moving
to be in danger of running out. As long ago as and gentle, could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in
1865, the economist William Stanley Jevons Steller’s sea the entire world by the end of the next decade”.
cows were an
predicted that the coal on which British industry easy target for Yet here we are in the 2010s with vast proven
depended would soon run short. In his pamphlet human hunters reserves of oil and even more unproven ones,
The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning The Concerning The thanks to new technologies for extracting it.
Progress Of The Nation And The Gas was long thought to be the scarcest of the
Probable Exhaustion Of Our fossil fuels, but not any more. In 1962, M King
Coal Mines (1865), he wrote that Hubbert, a widely admired expert on fossil fuel
“It is thence simply inferred that reserves, predicted that gas production in the
we cannot long continue our continental United States would peak before 1980
present rate of progress”. He and by 2020 would have fallen to minimal levels.
went on to say that British In fact, today, natural gas production is at record
people “must either leave the levels, thanks to shale gas.
country in a vast body or remain
here to create painful pressure SHORT SUPPLY?
and poverty”. The track record for other minerals is no better. In
This led to the ‘coal panic’ of 1970 Scientific American published an article by PHOTOS: GETTY X3
1866. With the encouragement of f f a distinguished nuclear chemist, Harrison
political economist John Stuart Brown, who argued that we would have run out of
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