Climate change versus soaring global demand and prices of base products.
Don’t be fooled by the environ/political herd mentality because “The Day After Tomorrow” scenario cuts both ways.
More than one thing is happening to this little planet because of humankind. Yes – it seems to be heating up because of carbon/methane emissions. But consider our old friend oil for a moment, beyond being a culprit in that story.
Because oil is running out. Forget the old canard of peak oil and when we reach it. It is cheap oil which matters. Cheap oil which sustains the vast bulk of the way we live, move, communicate, travel, work and above all – eat.
And cheap oil is going. Could already have gone. Just when the Chinese and Indian middle classes want little cars, not bikes. And meat, not noodles.
Yes the oil companies are trumpeting the new Gulf of Mexico finds – but what BP won’t tell you is how far below the surface that oil lies. It will make North Sea crude look like the black gold which oozed through the Kuwaiti desert sands just a few generations ago.
Even now in recessionary depths oil is at a 12 month high around $80 odd per barrel. It will go only one way from hereon in. It will pass 90 again, then 100 and so on. It will not be a blip. It will be life. And what price then your kiwi fruit in Safeway? Your EasyJet weekend in Prague? Your bunch of flowers plucked only yesterday in Kenya?
Well – they’ll all still be around, for a while, but will get increasingly expensive in a world which gets increasingly more local. Don’t believe me – ask people who really make it their business like, well, like Walmart for instance.
These people know the days of buying five shirts for your child’s school uniform for a few quid because they’ve been shipped in by bulk carrier (powered by cheap bunker fuel) are beginning to end. They are now looking at really old fashioned things like local textile mills in the USA, close to stores.
How cheap can they go? Well a hell of a lot cheaper than now but never as cheap as China. Cheap enough though to stay in the game when China has fallen off the market.
One example for you but so goes the world. And the lesson for Copenhagen? Well in a world of soaring demand but increasingly expensive base product, the end-user will pay at the pump, at the airline desk, at the shipping line.
And the implications for Copenhagen – there will be forces out there which will cut the output of oil burning emissions rather more quickly than governments are able to do. What needs to happen though is serious planning for this, rather than unrealistic and divisive whimsy about cutting carbon emissions by unreachable percentages.
And yes, you’ve got it. Much planning and hot air is being expended on the former theory – almost no serious governmental planning is being done on the latter, pressing reality.
The greener world will come because the length of a drilling bore from an oil rig and the craving for what comes out, just as much as the limited powers of politicians divided to pieces – as ever – by special interests, votes, sustaining power and the clash of values between waning western economies and emerging eastern ones.
– Get new posts from the Copenhagen: Deal or No Deal blog emailed to you. Sign up here for free (link takes you to Google’s Feedburner service). An email is sent daily when new blog posts have been added.