High cost of fuels may help save the planet

PRICES at the petrol pumps soar.

Car owners can afford to drive less miles and less often. However, the cloud may, again, have a silver lining: with the price hikes and depleting reserves, the planet may be in the process of saving itself.

Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels cause the climate change which threatens us. However, as fuel grows scarcer and what remains grows more expensive, its use and, therefore emissions, will be reduced.

Kyoto protocols depend on good sense and goodwill. Some major polluters, notably the US under the Republican administration, is short on both. However, economics may triumph where conscience fails.

The effect of oil at $200, then $300 a barrel will render the earnest efforts of us environmentalists laughable. Not to say we shouldn’t all continue to respect the potential paradise we live in, and work towards protecting it. But carbon reduction is the most urgent step in this process and that seems set to occur without our intervention.

As for taking millions of acres out of food production to grow biomass for ethanol, that route seems to be a cul-de-sac from which we must swiftly return. The conversion of biomass to viable fuel is so expensive that there is little margin between the energy expended and the energy produced, while food prices rise as land is given over to fuel production.

Children will still be born however much fuel prices rise, and they will have to be fed. The spectre of a billion cars bought by the emergent Chinese and Indian middle classes has long haunted us. It may never happen. As in the West, families may be able to afford the cars but not the fuel to drive them.

The alchemy of our time is the development of a carbon-negative fuel. The alchemists/scientists working on a million-dollar cure for baldness would be better devoting their genius to finding a nil-carbon-output fuel.

Historically, we may now be on the cusp. Just as some authorities claim that we have reached ‘peak oil’ and it is now a depleting resource, so too we may have, unknowingly, reached peak environmental destruction. Globally, animal and plant species are disappearing at the rate of so many per hour; these extinctions may already be slowing down.

Perhaps even the seas may be saved as the power to harvest its deepest reaches and previously inaccessible grounds is halted by the sheer cost of getting there. Were a nil-carbon-output fuel to be invented, such fishing might well continue but the skies would clear, sea-ice reform, drought and desertification decelerate, hurricanes reduce, and extinction-by-poisoning, accounting for the decline of vast species, cease.

My sincere belief is that, in extremis, we will develop a carbon-negative fuel. We have painted ourselves into a corner with fossil fuel dependence but we are great survivors; a messiah of carbon-free energy will arise amongst us. Meantime, however, I look at the bright side as I fork out at the pumps.

Vis-à-vis carbon-credits and air miles, I met a family in west Cork the other night who had no interest in foreign holidays. The rain and the cold of late June didn’t bother them; they were immensely enjoying their summer break.

In 2007, they spent part of their holiday under blue skies in Portugal and part under grey skies in an Irish resort. When the sons, aged 9 and 11, were asked which they preferred, they declared overwhelmingly for Ireland. In Portugal, they’d found it hard to make friends across language and cultural barriers. They weren’t free: the environment and customs were unfamiliar and they couldn’t be let roam as they could at home.

In north Kerry, they met boys and girls from all parts of Ireland, explored rock pools and dunes and belted a hurley ball around a grey beach under a grey sky. Great gas!, they said. However poor our summer, they wouldn’t swop the freedom and the holiday pals for a place in the foreign sun.