Rethinking Lifestyle

Much as I appreciate the contribution our public broadcaster, the CBC, makes to our understanding of our world, there are times, it seems, when they can’t resist the temptation to be sensational rather than informative.

It seems CBC reporters succumbed to that temptation recently when they reported on the World Energy Outlook 2012, a report just released by the International Energy Agency. The story I heard on The National was that the US is facing a reversal of fortunes with respect to oil. We should anticipate a US oil boom by 2020 and that the US will become the world’s largest oil producer again soon after that.

I just about fell off my chair! This was so contrary to everything we have been hearing. After I regained my balance I did some research. The report is available online.

I found that, as reported, the Outlook projects that US oil production will go up in the years ahead. This will result from more hydraulic fracturing or fracking. But this is not the main message of the Outlook report! The main message of the Outlook is that “Taking all new developments and policies into account, the world is still failing to put the global energy system onto a more sustainable path.”

So why such grossly misleading reportage? The temptation to be sensational? Pressure by vested interests? Your guess is as good as mine!

Of course the news story as presented plays right into the hands of those who have always said that human ingenuity is such that we will find an alternative to oil once we need to. “After all, the stone age did not end because we ran out of stones”, they say.

True, human ingenuity has led to the development of fracturing technology. Those early petroleum users, as they scooped up black goo from surface puddles, could not have dreamt that their descendants, hundreds of years later, would be drilling horizontal shafts several kilometers long, a kilometer or more below the soil surface to extract oil from shale deposits.

But those early petroleum users also did not dream that those same descendents, would only be able to access oil by employing complex technology such as fracking or deep sea drilling.

So yes, a legacy we pass on to the next generation is that we have developed fracking technology, and that we are now able to access oil deposits in the Alberta oil sands, in shale deposits and under more than a kilometer of ocean. This is no mean feat!

The offsetting legacy is that the only oil remaining is hard to get at.

Tragically, so much of the oil we have consumed, we have, in fact, squandered. We have treated the oil we have, not as a scarce resource, but as a limitless resource. We have paid for the cost of extracting the oil, but have factored in nothing more. We have welcomed a cheap oil policy, as put forward by our governments. We have been, and continue to be, disastrously short-sighted.