Worried about 'peak oil'? The International Energy Agency's (IEA) annual report, 'The World Energy Outlook 2008', admits for the first time that 'although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil ... is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period'. When The Guardian's environmental columnist, George Monbiot, pressed IEA director Fatih Birol on that opaque phrase, the actual date turned out to be 2020.
The IEA's previous reports, which assured everyone that there was plenty of oil until 2030, were based on what Dr Birol called 'a global assumption about the world's oilfields': that the rate of decline in the output of existing oilfields was 3.7 per cent a year. But, this year, some of the staff actually turned up for work occasionally and did a 'very, very detailed' survey on the actual rate of decline. It turns out that production in the older fields is really falling at 6.7 per cent a year.
There are still some new oilfields coming into production, but this number means that the production of conventional oil - oil that you pump out of the ground or the seabed in the good, old-fashioned way - will peak in 2020, 11 years from now. Dr Birol assumes, or rather pretends, that new production of 'unconventional oil' will allow total production to match demand for another decade, until 2030, but this is sheer fantasy.
The IEA presumes that demand for oil will rise indefinitely, so the price of oil only gets higher after 'peak oil' but, in technology, nothing is forever. Set into the front doorstep of my house (and most other 19th-century houses in London) is an iron contrivance called a boot scraper. It is a device for scraping the horse manure off your boots before coming into the house, and it is worn into a shallow curve by half a century of use.
London in the 1890s had 11,000 horse-drawn taxis and several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses a day. There were at least 100,000 horses on the streets of London every day - each producing an average of 10kg of manure.
As the cities grew, even more horses were needed and the problem grew steadily worse. One Times writer in 1894 estimated that, in 50 years, the streets of London would be buried under three metres of manure.