THE day after the M74 extension got the go-ahead, I passed a group of young people in the centre of Dundee with flasks, sleeping bags and fold-up chairs.
Not a campaign against Scotland's most expensive motorway but a 24-hour subzero queue for tickets to T in the Park.
Pondering my own naivety I was reminded of a German student who joined an anti-Apartheid campaign 25 years ago. We occupied a Barc
lays Bank secretarial pool instead of the bank's operations centre and disrupted "milk-round" interviews of a washing powder manufacturer after they swapped rooms with the sanctions-busting RTZ.
Achim returned to Germany in despair. His diagnosis was that British youngsters accepted the political status quo and poured discontent into the commercial music industry instead. In Germany, disillusioned youth got organised – in Britain, we just wrote songs.
This may account for the relative strength of our music industries. But it may also explain the near total absence of spirited debate about the nature of our post-oil future. And that future is coming our way – not next century, next decade or next government, but perhaps in two years' time.
"By some estimates, there will be 2 per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a 3 per cent natural decline in production. That means by 2010 we will need an additional 50 million barrels per day."
Not the words of a green evangelist but US vice-president Dick Cheney – while still CEO of Halliburton. Warnings like his have been largely ignored but a new film aims to bring oil production into mainstream debate just as Al Gore did with climate change.
A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash has no big money behind it, no former US presidential hopeful fronting it and, unfortunately, no audience-friendly editor finessing its bleak and uncompromising message – that our oil-based existence is about to end. Oil supplies are flatlining whilst demand is rising exponentially. No vast new fields have been found. And exploitation of new resources like tar sands is stretching our human and technical ingenuity to the limits. The world's oil production peak is past, we're currently running down the other side, but we're still behaving as if we were back in the good old 1980s.
The US oil boom buckled before the North Sea oil started to flow. In the 1950s the US produced half the world's oil and was an exporter. Today, it consumes a quarter of the world's oil and is an importer – only 2 per cent is "homegrown". The vulnerable position of the US has shaped their foreign policy ever since. Whilst Scots have been quick to see through George Bush's real motives in the Middle East, we've lessened our own dependence on oil not one iota.
Perhaps we think supplies still come from the North Sea? Perhaps we think they always will? And why wouldn't we? No elected political leader has had the considerable guts needed to tell us that a shortfall between demand and supply of 10 to 15 per cent is enough to shatter an oil-dependent economy and transform the way we live.
The only obvious indication of trouble has been the rising oil price. And yet, the public evidently thinks politicians can cap it. Today, business leaders are calling on the Chancellor to scrap intended rises in fuel duty. With prices rising from $68 to $90 a barrel, they argue, the government's share in tax and VAT has already soared.
In 1996, oil cost $10 a barrel. It costs $100 this year. And according to ex-OPEC analysts featured in A Crude Awakening the price of $200 may be just two years away.
It's almost impossible to imagine how a world without copious, cheap oil supplies will operate. Ironically, the archaeologists excavating Scotland's past along the M74 route can help. They've found an old pharmacy, a dentist's surgery, and the site of Caledonian Pottery – innovative in the 1880s for using gas kilns instead of solid fuel. Past worlds abandoned as times changed.
Hugh McBrien, consultant for West of Scotland Archaeology Service, says: "We showed some kids a teapot they couldn't tell us what it was. This generation can't recognise teapots because they've never seen their parents use one."
That's how quickly societies change. The essential becomes forgotten. The habit becomes the exception. So we'd better start documenting our oil junkie days now. The days we thought driving daily between cities was normal. The days we drove to malls for everything and jetted off to warm, exotic destinations without bringing back presents – because they were already available and cheaper here.
We are oil junkies. Without brave political leadership few of us will kick the oil habit – until rising prices force us. Perhaps we know that. And perhaps that's why retro TV like Life on Mars has become so popular – 40 and 50-year-olds love glimpses of the time before North Sea oil wealth transformed Britain.
At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, the baby boom generation grew up without central heating, microwaves or cars. Has our oil-fuelled affluence given us greater satisfaction?
Society thrived before cheap oil. And when government planners view oil as one important fuel source amongst many, we will thrive again.
The full article contains 894 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
