Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
evidence as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has built up
on climate change”.
Jeremy Leggett sees it as one of his roles to bridge the gap between the
peakists and the greens. As chief executive of Solar Century, he makes a
good bridge: he was an oil geologist who became a Greenpeace policy
activist before starting his own solar-development company. “There is a
curious cultural relationship between the peak-oil folk and environmen-
talists”, Leggett notes. “Some in the peak-oil camp are very dismissive
about environmentalists and just uninterested in climate change. While
some environmentalists are very resistant to the arguments of the peak-oil
geologists. This is partly a cultural resistance to having the stature of your
bogeyman [the oil companies] diminished by arguments you don't under-
stand. But it is also partly a fear that the argument about conventional oil
peaking will accelerate the panic into [using] unconventional fossil fuels
like Canadian tar sands.”
The green movement's nervousness about tar sands is understandable.
The 2009 recession has eased immediate concerns about full-throttle
development of tar sands. The International Energy Agency estimates
that some 1.7mb/d of the deferred capacity has been in Canadian tar
sands, out of a total capacity of 2mb/d of recession-deferred projects.
Notwithstanding this deferral, the green movement in general has a barely
veiled contempt for the desperation shown by oil companies in pursuing
oil-or tar-sands development. As Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town
movement colourfully puts it, extracting oil from tar sands is like trying
to suck old beer out of the pub carpet after the bar has run dry.
Partly to get peakists and greens to think more about each other's
preoccupations and the consequences of these preoccupations, Leggett
helped to form the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy
Security, which includes representation from the engineering (Arup),
utilities (Scottish and Southern Energy) and transport (Stagecoach and
Virgin groups) sectors. It produced a report in autumn 2008 called
The
Oil Crunch
, calling on the UK government to face up to the peak-oil prob-
lem, to expand oil and gas production in the short term, to accelerate use
of biofuels and electricity in transport, and to move ahead with nuclear
and renewables.
Expansion of oil and gas output - even just for the short term - looks
like heresy to greens. But, for Leggett, eking out conventional oil and gas
a bit longer is, along with investing in low-carbon alternatives, better than
an unplanned plunge into polluting tar sands or unfiltered coal. In other
words, it's better to plan than to panic.
