The Ascent of Hubbert's Peak.

Back in a snowy and freezing United Kingdom after my trip to Madeira, I was greeted, on arrival at Gatwick Airport, by a posse of Sussex policemen armed to the teeth with Hechler and Koch sub-machine guns, for all the world as if I were Osama bin Laden in person. I thought the pilot of my Easyjet flight had made a mistake, or that perhaps we had been caught up in some weird space-time warp, and transported to a 1970s-style Latin American military dictatorship. I half-expected to see a framed photograph of El Presidente on the wall somewhere.

Getting from Gatwick to St Pancras proved difficult, because of engineering works, but I managed to get as far as London Bridge, and then caught the Tube through to St Pancras. I got held up there because of a fire on an earlier train, but managed to get home eventually. I haven't been out much since, because of all the snow, but at least I'm not completely cut off from civilisation.

In the meantime, my work with APPGOPO (the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas) continues. I note with interest that the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), not a body generally associated with the idea of 'peak oil', is now saying that world production is currently running at 85.472 million barrels per day, whereas total world petroleum consumption is 85.534 million barrels per day, a deficit of 62,000 barrels per day, or 22,630,000 barrels per annum. It seems to me entirely possible that the peak of Dr Marion King Hubbert's curve has at last been reached, and that daily crude oil production figures will be declining from now on.

Yesterday, it was announced by the National Grid that demand for natural gas had reached an all-time high in the UK on Thursday, 7th January (see Guardian/Reuters report) of 454 million cubic metres per day (up from the previous record of 449 million cubic metres per day on 7th January, 2003). The National Grid was forced to ask industrial users to consider alternative forms of energy, and put out an alert to its suppliers for additional supplies of gas. Only about 70% of our gas needs are still met from UK domestic sources. I, for one, do not want this country to be as heavily dependent as Germany and Italy are on the dubious beneficence of Mother Russia for its gas supplies.

We should, in any event, not be burning fossil hydrocarbons and continuing to increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2. The current level, 387.75 ppmv, is the highest it has been for 15 million years, as I have said on more than one occasion now, and I really do not think we want the climatic and oceanic conditions of the Pliocene to prevail, as they will do again with certainty, after an appropriate time lag. Rather, we should be using hydrocarbons as raw materials, not sources of energy, and reducing our population size and density to a level that makes sense both for ourselves and for the planet.

It is time for ecological common sense to prevail.