World scarcity of oil and gas creates chance to accelerate response to climate change
by Press Release
Call for establishment of fossil fuel buyers' cartel
The recent peak in oil prices was due to the depletion of the world's reserves rather than temporary supply problems in a number of countries, Feasta, an Irish-based research organisation claimed at the COP-10 climate conference in Buenos Aires today. (Monday, December 13th)
"The climate change discussions taking place here are based on the assumption that there is plenty of oil and gas still available to power the world economy," Richard Douthwaite of Feasta said. "That's just not true. The world's production of oil is about as high as it will ever go and natural gas production will stop rising in the next ten years."
Almost half of all the easily-extractable oil on the plant had already been used and gas stocks were depleting fast, he said. As a result, the total amount of energy available from both fuels would decline after 2015 at about 2% a year, perhaps half the rate required to bring prevent a catastrophic climate change.
"The big problem is coal. There's plenty of that and it's a really dirty fuel. If we can stop coal production increasing to compensate for the reduced supplies of oil and gas, we will have taken a giant step towards solving the climate change problem," Douthwaite, an economist, said.
He was speaking at the launch of a Feasta document, The Three Crises: Oil Depletion, Climate Change and International Debt. This proposes the establishment of an international organisation to limit coal production and to allocate the remaining oil and gas supplies on a fair basis between the peoples of the world.
"We need to take action now because high oil and gas prices threaten to collapse the world economy and this would do serious damage to both energy producers and consumers" Douthwaite said...cont'd
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