大象传媒

Climate Change has been the continuous experience of the Globe for the past 4 billion years. Since the last 鈥済lacial maximum鈥�, only 24,000 years ago, the sea level has risen more than 120 meters. During the exceedingly short, development of Homo Sapiens, vast areas of the Earth have already been inundated. At one point, roughly 15,000 years ago, the sea level rose 20 meters in only 500 years, a period no longer than that between Henry VIII and our present Queen. At that time, most of what is now the North Sea and English Channel and when the UK was not an island at all, supported large populations of Neolithic proto-Europeans. Archeological remains show unmistakable signs of frequent violent death as these early men were forced to abandon their land in the face of the rapidly rising sea level, leading to neighbour wars. Chaos indeed!

More recently, within the past five thousand years, the Sahara Desert and Arabian Peninsula have been utterly transformed from lush grasslands into desert. Carthage and later, Roman Libya, were flourishing less than 3 thousand years ago. These were not built for their desert views! There are abandoned cities from Saudi Arabia's "Empty Quarter" to Egypt鈥檚 Western Desert that demonstrate that within recent recorded historic times, a rich, agricultural living was made by the people living there. There is no plausible reason for any CO2-related cause for this enormous climate change which was, in any case, only the latest of four inter-glacials during the last 450,000 years, during most of which the Earth has been shivering in what we call 鈥渋ce ages鈥�. It is clear from this incontrovertible evidence that the natural forces of nature make a complete mockery of even the notion of 鈥渇ighting climate change鈥�. Since there is precious little we can do to understand, let alone reverse the process, we must instead prepare for it.

There are 6 billion people on the planet, growing to 8 billion within the next 15 years or so. All quite legitimately aspire to the life-style that everyone on Earth can view on satellite TV or the internet. Given this fact, there are other, much worthier causes that may be 鈥渨innable鈥� and produce actual benefit for humanity.

At the top of the list must be the need for new supplies of low cost energy, the abundant availability of which has been a direct cause of the population explosion that has taken place since the industrial revolution. Without continued access to low cost energy, the outlook for humanity is bleak, most especially those billions of folk that are already at or below starvation level. No amount of 鈥渄ebt relief鈥� can supply these with the affordable fertilizers and irrigation that are all that stand between the very poor and their certain death by starvation. Both depend on low cost energy, especially hydrocarbons, or some yet undiscovered alternative, without which all the gains made in agricultural productivity during the last hundred years will disappear from Earth in just a few decades.

During the last hundred years, we have extracted and used at least half of our original endowment of low cost, 鈥渃onventional鈥� oil, while fecklessly flaring most of the now valuable associated gas. It is no longer disputed that the extraction of the remainder will be much more expensive and that the financial and energy cost of extracting usable hydrocarbon products from the 鈥渧ast鈥� bituminous resources of Alberta and Venezuela, are likely to put these beyond the economic reach of the poor. Already high (that is to say, more realistic) gas prices are closing many fertilizer factories despite the rising World price for fertilizers.

Alarmingly, the IEA, astonishingly still relied upon as a source of energy wisdom, foresees that the burden of supplying the extra oil 鈥渘eeded鈥� to satisfy demand must come from OPEC. Yet it is plain that most OPEC countries are at production plateau or decline. OPEC cannot possibly supply the extra oil needed to compensate for the falling production that is taking place in most oil producing countries, including those bordering the North Sea.

Meanwhile, 鈥渆nvironmentalists鈥� and bureaucrats are proactively impeding a solution that, while neither solving the World鈥檚 energy crisis nor beating 鈥渃limate change鈥� could extend oil and gas supplies another few decades while permanently sequestering enormous amounts of industrially produced CO2. Every effort is being made by what I can only term as 鈥淕lobal Warming" bureaucrats to impede carbon capture and its use for enhanced oil recovery, despite that it is a completely safe and proven process throughout its value chain.

So where do our priorities and duties lie? Are we going to assign our resources to an un-winnable and ruinously costly 鈥渨ar against global warming鈥� or to the possibly winnable mission of revolutionizing the way that we produce and use energy? If we do not win the latter, the entirely foreseeable risk is a population collapse within the next fifty years that is certain to cut CO2 emissions beyond the wildest hopes of the Climate Change activists.