Lloyd’s of London: oil too risky to justify continued investments
June 10th, 2010 by Jim JustYou know peak oil has gone mainstream when insurance companies are saying the environmental and economic costs of fossil fuels are simply too high to justify on-going investments. But that’s a consequence of the disaster in the Gulf.
Jeff Rubin has recently pointed out the real legacy of Three Mile Island wasn’t the event itself, which happened back in 1979, but rather what happened (or more precisely didn’t happen) over the course of the next 40 years in the United States. Literally overnight, the near-meltdown of the reactor core changed public acceptance of nuclear power plants. No company in the U.S. has built a new one since.
BP’s Deepwater Horizon event may prove to have similar consequences. A major new report from insurance giant Lloyd’s and UK think tank Chatham House argues that a rapid shift towards low carbon energy sources represents the only way of tackling the energy industry’s soaring risk profile.
Commenting on the report, titled Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business, Lloyd’s chief executive Richard Ward, said that the environmental and economic costs of fossil fuels are simply too high to justify on-going investments.
The current generation of business leaders need to rethink their approach to energy risks or be left behind as energy becomes less reliable and more expensive. We need a long-term plan to reduce consumption and diversify our energy sources.
“Peakers” have toiled towards for decades now toiled to raise awareness of the precariousness of our predicament, working towards the moment when the rest of the world would finally realize that you can’t extract an infinite amount of oil from a finite planet. The moment will inevitably lead to another, when the implications of that realization begin to sink in. As seers such as John Michael Greer and James Kunstler have been saying repeatedly, the implications are that the technological, economic, and social arrangements predicated on endless supplies of cheap oil might be “a good deal less clever than they seemed”.
It beginning to look like the first moment has finally arrived. The second moment can’t be far behind.