Jeremy Leggett on peak oil, at 5x15

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Jeremy Leggett on peak oil, at 5x15

20 Sep 2010

Speakers: Jeremy Leggett

“This is a story about risk”, says Jeremy Leggett, author of Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis, “the risk that in our oil-dependent – nay, oil-addicted – world, our general expectation that supplies of this lifeblood will keep growing in pace with demand will be disappointed.” This could happen “within just a few years, and on our watch.”

It is announcements like this that have closed doors on the “peakist” and “alarmist” Leggett. Like the former BP man Collin Campbell, who had earlier warned of the peak-and-then-collapse scenario, Leggett was ignored. The doors of oil industry CEOs and government economists swung shut again and again on his pleas for a taskforce to carry out a risk analysis. But this year, at last, Leggett and others published a report that couldn’t be ignored. The report examined the effect of the credit crunch on the looming energy crisis, and garnered a lot of coverage. Leggett says that the government finally has to pay attention.

Professionally, Leggett was groomed for a role on the other side of the oil industry – as a young geologist at Imperial College in 1978, but he later joined Greenpeace, and for some years could be seen at any site of disaster or danger related to the oil industry, “waving a flag of warning.” The report that resulted from Leggett’s first book predicted an “energy famine” for oil consuming countries, and a crisis worse than the credit crunch and worse than the two preceding energy crises. This came out in October 2008 at a time when people only wanted to write about sending Wall Street to jail.

Now that the new report by this taskforce is finally garnering some attention, Leggett is still unconvinced that anything will happen. He thinks that we will simply wait, and waiting we will find out what who was right. His parents, who came through the other side of the ‘30s, have taught him about a certain “human resilience”, and he is pinning his hopes on this weapon to bring to the battle against apocalypse...