Dan Kieran

by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)

  I don’t have a pension. I don’t believe in the secular afterlife. I think it’s time our relationship with work moved into the twenty-first century. There’s no point in saving for retirement if you have debts, anyway. My dad, who is a bank manager, told me that. Unless you are being offered a guaranteed interest rate for your pension that is higher than the rate borrowers are charging for your debt, of course, and that would be, for obvious reasons, impossible for any business to sustain. But still the government pleads with us to save for retirement. They’re even considering making us do it by force.

  But the answer lies in the opposite direction. There is a conspiracy of silence about the future. Sooner or later those of us under thirty-five will have to accept that retirement simply won’t exist for us. We’ll all be working till we drop. You simply can’t earn enough money to spend the way we do in Britain to keep the economy expanding and still be able to save enough to retire on. If you stop to think about that for a moment then your attitude to work will begin to falter. If at the start of our working lives we were all told that we would have to work until we dropped dead, then work, and our demands of it, would radically change. If all of us under thirty-five are going to have to work for that long then we’re all going to want to do something for a living that we enjoy. A business model of an ever-expanding profit won’t be realistic for a workforce that wants to work less, to have a greater say in how their lives are organized, and to see their children for more than nineteen minutes a day. If that didn’t happen, life would simply become too miserable. It’d become one long treadmill of work. Getting a job when you’re over sixty is hard enough now; how easy do you think it’s going to be if our slavish acceptance of a constantly expanding economy continues for another twenty years? If we don’t start to challenge the current work ethic soon, things will get much, much worse. Life will become nothing but work, if you’re lucky enough to find it, and poverty if you can’t.

  Of course some people will have retired with excellent pensions by then. MPs, for example, and no doubt the members of the CBI. Perhaps they’ll move to Dubai with all our retired footballers. They won’t want to be in the crime-ravaged Britain of the future where gangs of ‘extremist’ pensioners march on Downing Street every week to protest about poverty. Perhaps by then those of us without pensions who have the nerve to complain about it will start being described as ‘terrorists’, our actions having been deemed ‘economic sabotage’ that threatens the profitability of Britain.

  It may sound odd for someone who considers full-time work to be the main source of life’s problems to say that a hopeful future entails working for ever, but that is the reality, however unpalatable it may be. In which case, as I said, work will have to change or our society will continue to fall apart. The answer to this problem is the same as that for all the other great issues that loom over our politicians, which none of them want to discuss: sustainability. Some people - mainly men and women with beards, mind you -have been calling for it to save our climate for years. Sustainability may in fact be our only hope for any kind of future, especially when you start looking into energy security.

  You see, how we work, why our civil liberties are being eroded and the ‘war on terror’ all boil down to the same thing.

  Energy.

  Chapter 10. A Glimpse into the Future?

  Most of us know that in a few hundred years’ time climate change will really kick in and oil will run out. We don’t really want to think about what life will be like then because it reminds us that all of us and everyone we know will be long dead. I think we all realize that life is going to be something of a struggle in the years to come, but we’ll be well out of it.

  Or so we think.

  When it comes to our over-consumption of energy we are all behaving like a drunk in the bar at Douglas Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe, ordering more drinks than we can get down our throats because we assume we won’t be alive to experience the horror of our hangover. But some of us may live to feel that hangover. That couple of hundred years has been shrunk to anything between ten and fifty by the ever-expanding global economy, according to those who have been looking at the future of our energy supplies. For those of us who arc thirty and under, that means we will live to experience the energy hangover of our overworking, over-consuming age.

  The evidence for it is all around us if you stop and think about it. Newspapers and TV stations are falling over themselves to write and make programmes about the emerging markets of China and India and the new economic order that looms on the horizon. With this economic order the role of energy will become more and more important as the new powerhouse economics compete with the current major economic powers for the only resource that can help them expand economically and generate more global power - cheap energy. The problem is that these changes are occurring at a time when the amount of oil in the world is plummeting. ‘Peak oil’ was supposedly way off in the distant future. Now some people are beginning to think it could even have been in the past.

  The Iraq war perhaps gave us a window of opportunity to change the way we live, but many people think the government wasn’t honest with us about why we went to war so the moment was lost. We all know it was about oil; it’s become something of a cliche to talk about the nonexistent ‘WMDs’. Some have even started labelling Blair and Bush as ‘war criminals’, which is a trifle unfair really when they were only doing their jobs as CEOs of Britain and the US respectively. Once everyone was agreed that the war was about oil, most people thought the trail of blame came to a halt with a bunch of fat American men wallowing in money, but in reality the oil trail went way beyond George Bush’s pals. I’m afraid there is no conspiracy theory here. The person at the end of the oil trail is you.

  Even the most fervent petrol guzzler will now openly admit that our days of oil are numbered. After meeting Jim the energy man in the pub in Whitehall I started to read everything I could lay my hands on about oil and energy in general. It turns out that he was slightly hopeful when it comes to our energy supplies. The most wildly optimistic estimates for how long our oil supply will be able to keep our constantly expanding global economy afloat are around eighty years; the extreme pessimists say oil production has already plateaued and will certainly have declined by 2010. The hopeful middle ground is somewhere between twenty and fifty years, depending on the growth in demand from China and India in the years to come, and we all know how fast their economies are expanding. It’s obvious to everyone that our current global economy will continue to expand only if we can maintain a steady flow of cheap energy into the market. You can’t have out-of-season food or exotic fruits flown into your local supermarket for a couple of quid if the price of oil shoots up, or it runs out completely; you can’t keep getting T-shirts for three quid in Oxford Street if you can’t afford the oil required to get them here from the sweatshops of South-East Asia; and you can forget about flying to Europe for the price of a king-size Mars bar too. If our supply of cheap oil ends then every aspect of life as we know it will change completely. It literally becomes a matter of national security. I was told by a well-placed government source that during the oil blockade demonstrations of September 2000, Britain was twenty-four hours away from a state of national emergency. That blockade prevented petrol getting out into the country for a paltry seven days. Back then a barrel of crude oil was $35 and petrol prices in Britain were 80p a gallon. Recently a barrel of oil was over twice that price and petrol nudged over the pound-a-gallon mark. If we could barely cope with an oil shortage for a week then how are we going to cope with an energy-rationed future?

  Everything our lives are built on is threatened without a steady supply of cheap energy. We may not like the fact that our leaders decided to go out and secure control of the country with the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia by military force in order to stabilize our future economies, but we were the ones who demanded they do it by living the way we do. Tony and George just knew we wouldn’t be a
ble to handle the truth so they decided to assuage our collective guilt by calling the war ‘Operation Freedom’ and talking about spreading ‘democracy’. It would be nice if politicians were honest with us occasionally, wouldn’t it? Especially when it comes to a declaration of war. The prospect of a national emergency caused by running out of energy may have left us slightly less squeamish about liberating the Iraqi oil fields, especially if we thought about how taking no action would affect our future. You can see why it made sense to Tony and George though; after all, Britain and America have been behaving like this for years. We don’t need that Iraqi oil right now, but it was prudent to make sure we got control of it before our competitors’ emerging economies and growing wealth gave them enough clout to beat us to it at some point in the future. At the very least, if our leaders had told us this latest energy war was for our own good some people might still have decided to oppose the war and use the mobilization of public opinion to force the government to make us less reliant on such unstable parts of the world. Perhaps it could even have been the catalyst that made us start to question our slavish acceptance of the ever-expanding economy and prepare ourselves for a more sustainable and peaceful future.

  The future looks bleak whatever we do now. Global warming seems inevitable. Even if America voted in the most energy-conscious president imaginable it would not be enough to halt climate change. China has so much coal it makes no economic sense for them to use anything else to power their growing nation, and coal is the most polluting hydrocarbon energy resource on earth. If oil becomes more expensive they may well switch over to it completely for everything apart from transportation. The carbon dioxide emissions that will cause will seal our fate as far as climate change is concerned. That isn’t to say we should give up, but all we can do is try our best to limit the consequences.

  The reality is that we are simply running out of choices. We can no longer carry on as we are with our heads in the sand, working too hard and consuming too much and taking as much Prozac as we can lay our hands on until we run out of cheap energy or die of stress-related heart disease, whichever comes first. As I said, no-one knows for sure the timeframe for this, but it will certainly not happen suddenly. We won’t wake up one morning and suddenly find we’ve run out of oil. It is said that if you put frogs in boiling water they jump out, but if you put them in a pan of cold water and slowly bring up the heat you can boil them alive. That is the position we find ourselves in. When oil prices start rising we should consider ourselves warned. Unless we act, by the time big changes in our cheap energy supply do occur we will be too late to do anything meaningful about it.

  When our cheap energy supply looks to be coming to a close, things will really begin to change globally. According to Paul Roberts in The End of Oil, ‘moving to a gas (Liquid Natural Gas) economy is probably the only feasible way for the world to delay the effects of a changing climate while we figure out how to revamp our energy economy ... converting to this “bridge” fuel will be slow, painful and quite costly’. America will go out looking to secure their energy future, but this time it won’t be Iraq they’ll go after. The balance of power will have shifted away from the Middle Eastern OPEC countries to those with LNG, and the two nations that control half the world’s natural gas reserves are Iran and Russia. America and Britain won’t be the only ones getting twitchy about their energy supplies either. Natural gas is the next best fuel to oil in terms of being able to exploit the existing oil industry infrastructure like petrol stations and cars; other fuels, like hydrogen, would require trillions of pounds of investment in brand-new delivery systems that any company hoping to increase its share price in the short term could never justify spending. So China and India will no doubt start thinking of natural gas too. Ninety per cent of the transportation the global economy relies on uses oil, and despite it being costly, it is nevertheless possible to convert lorries and cars from oil-based petrol to a liquid natural gas-based equivalent. Even if transportation began to use electric power, that electricity has to be found from somewhere, and today LNG is used extensively in the production of electricity too. So it seems highly likely that every major global economic power with an energy crisis will begin to start flexing its muscles in the near future under huge pressure from their domestic populations to keep their economies, shares and pension pots growing, and LNG is what they’ll go out looking for.

  In fact it’s already happening. We get 25 per cent of our domestic energy from LNG today and prices are already rising, so if oil dries up we’ll no doubt be using a lot more of it in the future. This will leave us more reliant on places like Russia and Iran for our economic stability. By the way, Russia, the USA, China, the UK and India all have nuclear weapons but Iran does not, so you can perhaps understand why it is so desperate to acquire them. With that much at stake, and with each electorate (where there is such a thing) no doubt voting in right-wing governments of the kind you get in such economically uncertain times,- you could be forgiven for getting rather nervous about the prospect of a large-scale energy war between nations armed with nuclear weapons. This scenario is not limited to the quest to get hold of LNG either; a very similar battle will take place much sooner over the remaining supplies of oil in the Middle East. The US imports 70 per cent of its crude today and that figure is set to rise sharply unless Americans can reduce their appetite for energy. Nowhere else in the world is oil as plentiful, cheap and accessible as it is in the Middle East. If you look at the number of American military bases in the Gulf and the Caspian basin you can see how advanced the military build-up has already become. China is following suit. Russia and India are becoming nervous. No large economy of the future can afford to be jostled out of the way by American demand if it hopes to be a player. The current unrest in the Middle East may well be seen as a trifling squabble compared with the energy war that could potentially kick off. We may look back at the invasion of Iraq and see it as just the first in a whole series of energy wars. That may sound alarmist, but it’s hardly as though world powers with huge military forces have ever been scared to declare war to secure cheap energy supplies and increase their economic power. It’s a while since we’ve had three major global powers, let alone four (the USA, Russia, China and India).

  This scenario also gives us the one guaranteed way to increase the likelihood of global terrorism. To maintain their global dominance, despite their own dwindling cheap energy reserves, the USA is pushing forward with its policy to militarize space.49 As you can imagine, all other nations with nuclear weapons are rather nervous about America being able to attack them at twenty minutes’ notice from the heavens. Thanks to US policy, these countries are making more and more nuclcar weapons in an attempt to safeguard their own positions. There’s only one way to make it more likely that terrorists will get hold of WMDs and that’s if the countries that harbour them build more and more. In the future the terrorist threat may become far more compelling than it is today. Massive nuclear proliferation also makes mistake firings more likely, especially in the relatively inexperienced fledgling nuclear nations. The looming energy crisis certainly has the potential to create the kind of global unrest we don’t want to imagine. And thanks to the ‘war on terror’ all of this is much more likely to happen now than it was before George Bush and Tony Blair decided to attack Iraq. (Incidentally, on 3 October 2006 Environment Minister Ian Pearson revealed at a summit of the world’s twenty most polluting nations how serious the British government is when it comes to energy independence. He pledged £500 million to increase investment in renewable energy sources over the next five or six years. A few weeks later it emerged that the Iraq war had so far cost the UK taxpayer £4.5 billion and the projected cost of the 2012 London Olympics had risen to £9 billion: a bill that included a £400 million payment to the developer to ensure the building programme doesn’t ‘over-run’.)

  Then there’s the possible future water crisis. In August 2006 a report was published predicting the return of cholera to London, a ma
ss migration from Africa that could lead to civil unrest all over Europe and economic meltdown in China — by 2015. All thanks to a global shortage of clean water. This report did not come from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth or any of the other environmental pressure groups that are sometimes criticized for trying to shock the public into paying attention. The people who bankrolled this report had motives that are far more credible than mere ethical principles. It was funded by two hundred of the world’s largest food, oil, water and chemical companies including Coca Cola, Shell and Procter and Gamble, who are becoming rather concerned about how the planet’s dwindling fresh water supplies might damage their future profits. The International Water Management Institute confirmed that global demand for water has increased by six times in the last hundred years and will double again by 2050. Meanwhile, 2 billion people around the world are living in areas where the water table is already falling rapidly and rivers are drying up. This problem is particularly pressing for agriculture because global food demand is set to increase by 50 per cent by 2025. To make matters worse, analysts are predicting lower rainfall over the next twenty years because of the effects of climate change.50