The UNEP and the IEA launched last week an interesting initiative to halve the amount of oil consumed by cars by 2050. Even if this seem interesting as it due to cut by six billion barrels per year the oil consumption, I am wondering.
Indeed: even if the demand for cars is due to explode, environmental issues and scarcity of resources – oil, metal, water… – is due to pose serious problems by half century.
Various means will be used like energy efficiency or alternatives fuels. To learn out more on this iniative, please check out the press release and brochure.
Well, that’s easy. By 2050 there’ll be less than half as much oil available to burn anyway.
Boasting about your measures to reduce oil consumption by 2050 is like some guy who just lost his job boasting about how he’s now spending less.
yeap. that’s why I was a bit astonished. I generally appreciate the works of the IEA and UNEP but that particular one got me doubting.
Anyway, at least they are willing to move in the right direction. It won’t do the trick but well, they’ll discover it soon enough with peak oil.
A useful comparison would be with the financial situation. Imagine that in 2007 someone – say, the IMF – had come up with a plan to halve world debt by 2050. Then in 2008…
It’s an institutional thing. You don’t get to say, “well, this whole thing is going kaput.” You just get to draw nice graphs with a gradual trend one way or the other.
There’s an old saying that if a turkey were to draw a graph of their food consumption over the year, they wouldn’t reach quite the right conclusion about what was going to happen to them at Christmas. Thus for example we get an associate editor of a major national newspaper saying, we couldn’t see this coming. Well, maybe he couldn’t, but plenty of people did.
Unfortunately he, like too many others, were putting their fingers in their ears and saying, “la la la I can’t hear you! We’ll be rich FOREVER!” Likewise, with our fossil fuel consumption. We’ll just keep on truckin’, forever and ever. Honest. The Market! will provide – after all, it’s done such a good job of providing stable credit, hasn’t it?