Crisis? What Crisis?

A friend of mine runs a fairly large plumbing firm and he tells me that he's inundated with boiler replacements at the moment. It seems that the soaring cost of fuel has finally driven people to look for new efficiencies. The Government has also announced that massive funds will be made available for insulation and draught-proofing. Inevitably there are those who pour scorn upon this initiative and would prefer the money to come directly to those who need it most. The fact that the money is being clawed back from excessive profits made by energy suppliers doesn't mean that it should simply be given straight back to them. Sooner or later we have to face the facts that fossil fuels are finite and that we should be doing everything in our power to avoid squandering them.

All efforts to appeal to people's social conscience have achieved insignificant progress compared to the 20% hike in prices we have seen recently and yet there's still a huge amount of waste. We are dancing on the Titanic, with people driving their obese kid's distances of less than a mile to school and sitting in stationery cars with engines running, often for quarter of an hour or more outside the school gates just to keep the single occupant warm. People do this in the certain knowledge that there is still plenty left underground. Even if there is, even if we are barely half way through the world's oil and gas reserves at just 7% growth in consumption (remember China and India here) we will double our consumption in ten years and that will be the end of that.

I know there are people reading this who don't believe the figures, by all means feel free to dispute them but do the math first. Most people have heard the story about the bloke who tricked a king into giving him a fortune by saying "Give me one grain of rice on the first square of the chess board and two on the next and so on". By the time you get to the 64th square you are into something very big. How big? A warehouse full? enough to cover the country? Don't try working it out on your calculator, it isn't powerful enough. The amount of rice is more than all the rice produced in the world. Stupid king, all he had to do was get a bloody great abacus and spend a lifetime counting.

So if we have an increase in fuel consumption of just 7% per year that will double our consumption every ten years. The amount of oil and gas we'll then consume in the following ten years will be more than we have consumed since we dragged the first barrel out of the ground. Most of us are like that king; we have no way of processing these figures even in our imagination. It is just too much to contemplate and we shut down. In fact even people who are paid to know these things are often unable to grasp what is really happening.

Despite all the rhetoric from the Government and local authorities, about saving energy we still aren't really serious. Public buildings, and offices are often overheated simply to allow people to wear summer clothing all year round. I was visiting a relative in hospital recently and the place was stifling with radiators pumping out heat on every floor and windows flung wide open in an effort to cool the building down. In the summer you see the reverse. The people working in my local filling station wear body warmers to avoid the chill brought on by the excessively cold air conditioning.

Of course the most conspicuous waste of all is the traffic jam which brings a special brand of misery to hundreds of thousands of people every day. Millions of litres of motor fuel (possible one in ever six tank fulls) are wasted while we sit waiting to move, and in the UK the answer to that seems to be to bring even more people into what is now officially the most crowded country in Europe. 350 people for every square kilometre is the average, and if you live in the South East it can be twice that. Ah well if we carry on like this we will double the population and the close proximity of all those extra people means that we won't be half so cold when the Russians turn off the gas.


Roger Bisby
www.selfbuilder.net