There’s a recently released climate change film that I’m urging everyone to watch at the moment. It neatly weaves together people and plots with science and politics, and is clearly designed to appeal to an audience of unusual suspects. It made me despair, but it also focused my mind. However, I’m not talking about the Age of Stupid, but a two-part drama made for BBC2.

‘Burn Up’ is a Spooks style affair that covers the run up to the all-important “Calgary” international climate summit, which will decide on a ‘Kyoto2′ treaty. There are spies, spin and seduction, but these do nothing to detract from some very well researched themes that run through the plot. Without giving away too much about the plot, the reason I’m a particular fan is that this climate change film doesn’t shy away from tackling the issue of peak oil as well.

As the recession has unfolded, the price of oil has crashed predictably downwards as the market expects countries to demand less for activities such as manufacturing. This provides everyone (but especially decision-makers) with a convenient reason to ignore the looming oil crisis for a few more months. The government are quick to forget the shock of last summer, when oil price broke so many records that the BBC news output began to look like a cut-and-paste operation (see 1,2,3,4,5,6,7). The impact during those months gave us the tiniest glimpse of how utterly dependent we are as a society on the black stuff. Food is the obvious example: grown using oil-fuelled machines and oil-based chemicals, often refrigerated and prepared using oil, centrally distributed by road and then wrapped in plastic. At best, an increase in the oil price means that all these processes get much more expensive. At worst, they just stop working.

There are many, many opinions on when exactly the crucial ‘peak’ moment is will occur. At its most relevant, this moment is when the ‘endless cheap and easy oil’ bubble bursts and this reality kicks the oil markets into a final frenzy, sending the price of oil to such a level that it is unaffordable to most. I’ve just got round to reading ‘Half Gone’, a 2005 peak oil book by Jeremy Leggett (no relation to Ian). At the time, his conclusion was that peak oil will occur at some point between 2006-10 (ie. now). Global recession might push that back a bit, but this gives you an idea of the urgency of the situation. Even the most optimistic put the crunch in the 2020s, just ten years or so away. My friend James, over on Two Doctors ‘foolishly predicts’ another petrol spike will occur this November if the recession turns into recovery.

Given all this uncertainty, it’s good to see our Patron lambasting the government for their complete lack of interest in producing any sort of contingency plan. As George points out, it’s ‘bonkers’ to spend millions on an almost non-existent smallpox threat while doing nothing about the inevitable decline in the supply of oil, a finite resource that currently fuels every aspect of modern life whether we like it or not.

Given all this, P&P’s new green campaign agreed at the Forum, ‘Transition Universities’, will hopefully begin to deliver this transformation in our universities and colleges. The campuses themselves must be as self-sufficient in energy and food as possible, but more importantly we should be angling our influential research departments to find transition solutions for everything from medicine to architecture.

You can currently buy the DVD of ‘Burn Up’ on Amazon for a discount price. If you use this link, Amazon will give P&P a donation!

Tags: BBC, burn up, climate change, George Monbiot, peak oil

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Environmental Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.