Preface: Tick Tock

‘Until about 1800, our species had no safety margin and lived, like other animals up to the limit of the food supply, ebbing and flowing in population.’

Jeremy Grantham, investment specialist

For almost all of our species’ 200,000-year-long history, man’s relationship with the Earth was no different to that of any other creature. Humans have a unique ability to create and communicate, which gave our early ancestors significantly more control over the environment and allowed them to build sophisticated societies. Yet, in respect of what they took from the world and how they interacted with it, they were very much like the birds, bees and chimpanzees: all their energy was provided directly by the sun. Sunlight captured by photosynthesis was converted into food and fuel. They ate roots, grains, fruit and cereals to provide them with energy (or to feed to animals, which, in turn, they also ate). They burned wood to keep themselves warm and vegetable oil or animal fat to provide night-time light. It was a successful strategy for survival and over tens of thousands of years the human population spread across six continents. However, locked in to this natural solar cycle, there was a limit to how many people their lifestyle could support, and the total number of inhabitants fluctuated between just 300 million and 500 million, with this variance in the sustainable maximum accounted for by the usual suspects: war, famine, plague and pestilence.

Then, 350 years ago, everything changed. We began to supplement our energy needs with coal and oil; the same captured sunshine, but this time millions of years old, preserved in fossilised form deep underground. In less than two centuries the human population had exploded, doubling in size to 1 billion people. It has continued to grow ever since, but the rate of change has increased significantly. It took 100,000 years to reach the first billion people: today we are adding further billions at a rate of one every twelve years. The result is a huge squeeze on all natural resources. Over the next two decades we will witness a 50 per cent increase in demand for energy, food and water.

We are now living through our fourth century of exponential population growth, but the solutions of the past that have allowed us to cope – burning more oil, gas and coal; expanding the amount of land under cultivation – simply won’t work any more. Our stocks of fossilised sunlight are dwindling, we are running out of fresh water and of places that we can appropriate for farming. Looking to the future, the key question is not simply, How many people are there going to be?, but rather, How are they all going to live?

In 2012, the Royal Society sought to address this issue in a publication called People and the Planet. This report’s frank conclusion was that in the developed and emerging economies, consumption has reached unsustainable levels and must be reduced immediately. It claims that the increase in population will ‘entail scaling back or radical transformation of damaging material consumption and emissions and the adoption of sustainable technologies. This change is critical to ensuring a sustainable future for all.’

We have been here many times before. The whole of human history is essentially the story of population growth and increasing competition for resources. Since ancient times wars have been fought over land, water, food, fuel, metals and other resources, while many civilisations have also faced destruction as a result of disease, famine and shortages. Where we have overcome these challenges in the past it is invariably ingenuity and innovation that have provided the solution. And we will require those qualities in abundance, because we have never had to tackle problems of this magnitude before, nor on a global scale.

What it will take to sustain a world of 9 billion people is the subject of this book. Achieving this goal is possible and realistic, but it will not be easy. It will not happen by accident and it will bring changes for all of us both in the way that we live and in what we consume. It is without doubt the biggest challenge of our age. This statement is not intended to belittle the impact of climate change, but the repercussions of global warming will play out along a timescale of decades; we have some time to adapt and respond to the consequences. In contrast we are already living with the results of explosive population growth: rising fuel and food prices, wars, immigration, famine, energy shortages and economic uncertainty. These issues affect us all today and all are a direct consequence of adding 1 million people to the population of the developing world every five days.

Big problems require radical solutions, but there are genuine grounds for optimism. Fundamentally, we need to reconnect the global economy with the sun and live within our means, just as we did in the past. Capturing a single hour of the sunlight that reaches the Earth – a tiny fraction of our star’s output – would meet our global energy needs for a whole year. Harnessing the power of the sun will allow us to meet the increasing food and energy needs of the world’s population in the context of an uncertain climate and global environment change.

To discover how we can achieve this requires a change in the way that scientists think and work, crossing the traditional boundaries in both the pure and applied sciences and engaging in collaborative research and innovation. Thankfully this is already happening, and in the later sections of the book we explore how the fruits of this activity are already being used in this endeavour: mathematicians are unlocking the secrets of how the sun actually generates its energy so that sunshine can be captured to fuel and feed the world; physicists are developing photovoltaic devices to convert this sunshine into electricity that we can use in our homes and businesses; chemists are investigating how plants and algae could be used to produce alternatives to fossil fuel in the form of biogas and biodiesel; biologists are learning to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis itself to achieve a better yield from crops that will require less fertiliser, water and pesticide; and engineers from all disciplines are working out how to put the results of all this research into practice. Success will require a concerted effort across the spectrum, not just from academics but from policymakers and private enterprise as well, to bring to market as quickly as possible the products that can make a real difference.

Our message is profound and optimistic, but not profoundly optimistic. Success entails that a world containing 9 billion people will have to be very different to the one we are living in today. Different, but not necessarily worse. Sustainable routes to food and energy security can be found, but time is of the essence. The clock is ticking.

1 Seven Billion and Counting

‘The constant effort towards population, which is found even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased.’

Thomas Malthus, essayist

On 30 October 2011 the world welcomed its seven-billionth citizen: Danica May Camacho, a Filipina, born in the early hours of the morning at the Dr Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila. She was chosen by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to officially mark this milestone and draw attention to the economic, social and practical challenges of managing the world’s rapidly growing population.

The fact that these challenges require such a grandiose PR stunt to make them newsworthy at all is testament to the fact that we find them so easy to ignore. For most of us, the Official Day of Seven Billion was a story to be forgotten as soon as the agenda moved on to something else. Danica May Camacho herself, briefly the most famous baby in the world, is likely to live out the rest of her life in the obscurity endured by twelve-year-old Adnan Nevic of Bosnia Herzegovina and Matej Gaspar, a 24-year-old Croat, respectively the world’s six- and five-billionth inhabitants. It’s easy to understand our indifference. On first inspection, there seems very little truly new to say on the subject. The quote from Thomas Malthus that opens this chapter sounds like it could have been uttered last week rather than 1798. This is because the fundamental issue remains the same: too many people/not enough resources. One could be forgiven for thinking that little else has changed since Malthus penned his Essay on the Principle of Population; the same dire warnings about famine and drought, the same apocalyptic forecast of global wars that will bring about the collapse of civilisation, and the same list of unspeakably miserable consequences for us all: none of which has come to pass. However, this scepticism is misplaced.

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Fig. 1: World population growth since 1750. (Source: UNFPA)

It’s true that all our lives have played out through a period of explosive population growth, but that doesn’t stop it being extraordinary. Indeed, this is also the only period of explosive population growth in human history. We have taken just 84 years to go from 2 billion to 7 billion earthly inhabitants and, unless we take some decisions about how everyone is going to have to live, we will soon reach a point where the global population becomes unsustainable. While forecasting is a notoriously contentious and difficult discipline, among those who are looking to the future there is a consensus that global population will continue increasing until the middle of the century, at which point it will peak and plateau at somewhere between 9 and 10 billion. From less than 2 billion to 9 billion people in little more than a lifetime; the blink of an eye when set against the 200,000 years that our species, Homo sapiens, has been on the planet.

It’s tempting to believe that a simple presentation of the facts will be enough to shake us from our complacency. Certainly, one would assume that was the rationale of the UNFPA when it conceived the idea of Citizen Seven Billion, but unfortunately there’s more to our indifference than this. It’s not just that over-familiarity makes this story easy to ignore, it’s that most of us choose actively to ignore it. We feel reassured by the trappings of our advanced society with its central heating, running water, supermarkets, ready meals and fuel-injected cars; at a comfortable remove from the sources of food and energy. Yet despite our apparent sophistication, in evolutionary terms we have barely set foot out of the forest. We are the same nervous, skittish creatures that were once hunted mercilessly by leopards, wolves and cave bears, with the same reactions to fear and danger.

While we have the intellectual capacity to think about the future and ponder, ‘What might happen if …?’, we are much more focused on the present; driven by today’s needs rather than tomorrow’s consequences. As a result we have evolved to be remarkably good at ignoring ‘What might happen if …?’, especially if we suspect that thinking about it might prove terrifying. The smoker enjoying the first cigarette of the day; the commuter racing down the motorway at 85mph and the student choosing an evening out over a night of revision, are all aware of the possible consequences of their actions at a nebulous point down the line (lung cancer, a car crash, examination failure) but that only makes them easier to disregard. We treat these as things that will happen to other smokers, other drivers and other revellers, not to us. In these cases and many others, this wilful ignorance is bliss. We behave in exactly the same manner when confronted by less personal or unspecific dangers; it’s really just a question of the scale of our denial.

As far as threats with terrifying, immeasurable consequences go, global warming takes some beating. In 2007, Al Gore visited the University of Sheffield to host a conference on climate change. We were fortunate enough to receive an invitation to attend. Whatever your political views, there’s no denying that Al Gore is a very capable and engaging public speaker. Over the course of 90 minutes, the former US Vice President performed a live version of his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, during which he clearly laid out all the evidence for human influence on global climate change and explained its consequences. His compelling argument and powerful delivery certainly made for a fascinating lecture, but also for one of the most dispiriting things we have ever seen.

Gore had two stated objectives for An Inconvenient Truth. He wanted to leave audiences believing that global warming is the biggest issue, but he also wanted to persuade them to change their behaviour by making them believe that doing so could help to reverse its effects. To that end, he concludes the film with the following call for action:

Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will.

While there’s little doubt that he achieved his first objective, he has been much less successful in changing our behaviour. For a week or so following the live lecture, we felt deeply depressed about not only the future, but the futility of our own efforts to reverse the effects of global warming (switching to low-energy light-bulbs, unplugging electrical appliances when not in use, driving at 60mph instead of 70mph – that sort of thing) in the face of the two coal-burning power stations that were being opened in China each week. Within a fortnight, however, we were back to our usual chipper selves, thanks not to thinking of creative solutions to reduce our own carbon footprint, but simply to not thinking about it at all.

Of course ignoring the problem isn’t going to make it go away, but then neither will worrying about it. The most frustrating aspect of all the challenges we face – not just climate change and population growth, but food and energy sustainability as well – is that we already have all the science and technological solutions to avert disaster; what we lack is the social and political will to implement them. Moreover, if a combination of complacency, fear, and wilful ignorance makes it difficult for us to motivate ourselves and our politicians towards effective action, conversely it provides a fecund opportunity for those wishing to persuade us, however disingenuously, that everything is going to be all right.

One doesn’t have to look very hard to find climate change ‘sceptics’ who focus on minor flaws in the science that ‘undermine the entire argument’. Just because there are naysayers doesn’t mean there needs to be a debate. For example, despite all evidence to the contrary, if you type ‘smoking doesn’t cause cancer’ into Google, your search will yield 143,000 results, all purporting to prove that it doesn’t.

It is noteworthy that almost all the scepticism about climate change comes from the conservative right. Surely if the data was so equivocal, one would expect dissenters across the political spectrum? Yet, for whatever reason, this is not the case. These outliers often find a platform for their views that is vastly disproportionate to their credibility, because what they claim is much closer to what most people want to believe is true: that the status quo will be maintained. It’s certainly what we’d like to believe is true, but unfortunately, in the face of all the evidence, that is impossible to do.

Our fear of change prevents the adoption of potentially life-saving technologies such as nuclear power, concentrated solar energy and genetically modified plants and animals. We can argue about how much oil is left until finally someone is right and there isn’t enough; and we can argue about whether to genetically modify crops until there’s nothing left to eat. Alternatively, we can act now.

We will certainly reach a point from which it will be impossible to recover, but we are not there yet. It really doesn’t need to end unhappily. And now for the good news – there is something that we can do about it.

Science and technological innovation have driven global prosperity. Since the Enlightenment of the 18th century they have proved consistently capable of meeting the ever-increasing demand for energy and food. In the past 40 years alone, the amount of land used for agriculture has increased by only 8 per cent, while food production has doubled. This success is almost entirely due to chemical and biological breakthroughs and innovations: providing more effective pesticides and fertilisers; improving crop and meat yields through breeding programmes. We must ensure that the fruits of this process of invention are sustainable.

The challenges we face in the next 40 years are complex and difficult, but they are not insurmountable. A study published in January 2011 by the UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers suggested there are no scientific breakthroughs required to manage a global population of over 9 billion people:

There is no need to delay action while waiting for the next greatest technical discovery or breakthrough idea on population control … [There are] no insurmountable technical issues in meeting the basic needs of nine billion people … sustainable engineering solutions largely exist.

There are key areas that we need to focus on to ensure food security. The huge improvements in crop yields have to continue, but they are eminently deliverable. We must make less profligate use of our fresh water supplies; and develop genetic solutions to crop protection and rely much less on chemical fertilisers and pesticides. We need to develop a system of agriculture that is holistic, part of the richer ecosystem rather than the wilfully imposed cereal monoculture we have today that operates outside it. Livestock and marine food production can continue only within the context of sustainability. We can also make a big difference by choosing to live less wasteful lifestyles: currently in the developed nations, over a third of all food that is harvested is simply thrown away.

Providing energy security is rather more complex, particularly because almost all of the fuels we use presently are the major contributors to climate change. We have around two decades to de-carbonise electricity generation, which will require significant investment in emerging technologies and processes. Achieving holistic solutions will require scientists from different disciplines working together across traditional boundaries.

Project Sunshine is the story of how we are going to provide sustainable food and energy for a global population of 9 billion people. The answers lie in a range of ongoing research across many disciplines: from solar physics, photovoltaics and photosynthesis to plant physiology, biochemistry and ecology. This research is typically disparate, very detailed and difficult to digest. We will provide a real solution only by pulling it all together and putting it into context. This book aims to do exactly that.

All of our energy comes from the sun. Fundamentally. We need to understand how the sun works, how it provides us with that energy, and learn how to use some of that energy to power everything that happens on earth in real time, rather than relying on ancient sunshine stored in coal, oil and gas. In part, this is about unlocking the mysteries of electrons, molecules and genetics, but we also need to take a much grander view, to understand how carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous are traded on a global level. And so our quest will begin and end with mathematics and theoretical physics. By bringing the many pieces of research together and synthesising them, we can get a true picture of how we are going to live – and going to have to live – in the future. There’s no point in worrying. The future is going to be very different, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be scary, or even worse. There’s no reason to fear that you’ll be living out a real-life version of The Road any time soon.

To show how we can safeguard the future we need to understand how our world became the place it is today – chemically, geologically, ecologically, climatically and economically. We need to understand where all our food and energy comes from, to help us decide what we need to live and what we can live without. Among all the animals, we have the unique ability to change the environment for the benefit of the species, but if humankind is to survive and prosper we will have to do this more effectively and sustainably. We will have to start living within our means again, rather than beyond them: to go forwards we need to go back to a solar economy.

2 Weathering a Perfect Storm

‘There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected. You can’t think about dealing with one without considering the others. We must deal with all of these together.’

John Beddington, chief science advisor to the UK government

In 2009, the UK Office for Science published a paper called Food, Energy, Water and the Climate: A Perfect Storm of Global Events? Written by John Beddington, the UK government’s chief science advisor, A Perfect Storm is a harrowing document. At least it is if you take it at face value, which is exactly what the media did. In summary, the report highlights the fact that the world’s projected population growth by 2030 will lead, together with the incumbent economic and environmental factors, to a 30 per cent increase in demand for water and a 50 per cent increase in demand for food and energy. The press went to great lengths to ensure that the scale of these challenges was not understated. Good news sells few papers and in that regard A Perfect Storm made for excellent copy. Yet there’s another way of looking at the information contained in the report. Beddington’s erudite analysis of the challenges is certainly not bedtime reading for those of a nervous disposition, but the report’s real success, and one rarely noted, is that it highlights everything that we need to do: as the starting point for a strategy to address these challenges, it could not be better.

A Perfect Storm describes not the end of the world, but a starting point for its salvation. It’s definitely not the best place to start from, but the most important thing is that we do know where to start. The implications of population growth will not prove to be as easy to ignore for much longer. New inhabitants are being added at the rate of 6 million each month (the equivalent to a city the size of Rio de Janeiro) and they will not be spread evenly. In the developed world outside the USA low birth rates mean that indigenous populations are in decline in many countries. By 2020, there will be more people over the age of 60 than under 20 in many European states. Conceived in the 1940s, the UK’s welfare state, which served as a model for many other countries, was designed to cater for citizens who worked for 50 years, paying national insurance while they did, then spent a few brief years in retirement drawing it out before cost-effectively and expediently passing away.

Without reform, this shift in demographic is going to put national health and welfare systems under enormous pressure. Today most people can reasonably expect to live for another 20 or even 30 years after retiring. This means that over the next 30 years, there will be more and more people leaving economic productivity and entering retirement, but conversely fewer and fewer people of working age to look after them. There will also be fewer people to pay for national insurance to meet the increased demand for healthcare and welfare.

The key points here are that we already know this – it’s not some nasty surprise waiting to pounce – and we have 30 years to sort it out. To do that we need to plan for this future today and completely rethink the way that welfare is funded. Yes, there will be more responsibility on individuals to plan and pay for their retirement and healthcare, and services we take for granted today will become much more expensive, but we have the luxury of being able to decide now what we want to deal with this future problem and how we want to pay for it. We don’t have to fire-fight or come up with policies on the hoof.

While Europe deals with its burgeoning pensioners, many parts of the developing world are dealing with the opposite problem: explosive population growth that is outpacing economic growth. In Africa the continent’s population is set to double from 1 billion to 2 billion by 2030, by which point half of its inhabitants will be under the age of 20. Similar rapid expansions are being experienced across much of the developing world, provoking other transformational changes, most notably urbanisation, as people migrate to cities from rural areas in search of work. Half the world is already living in cities, but this will increase to 60 per cent by 2030. There will be at least 29 ‘mega cities’ with more than 10 million inhabitants by 2025. That is ten more than there are today. All of these additional people will require food, water, shelter, energy and a host of other services. The inevitable competition for land that this will create is foreshadowed today by increasing purchases of real estate in developing nations by some countries with hot and dry climates and limited water supplies – notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia and China – and also by multinational corporations.

Our challenge to ensure food security for a global population of 9 billion in a manner that is equitable, healthy and sustainable is simple to understand: we must grow much more food on the same land, using less water, fertiliser and pesticides than ever before. Achieving this in the face of rapidly dwindling natural resources will be no walk in the park, but it is possible. Science and technology will make the most significant contribution, providing practical solutions across the board from engineering to biotechnology, but success will also demand behavioural changes of us all. In future, we will need to manage our lives and societies much more efficiently than we do at the moment.

2008 saw the sudden end of a 20-year economic Golden Age for almost all of the world’s leading economies. It’s easy to be critical with hindsight, but at the time most governments, financiers and economists were of the view that perpetual and sustainable affluence was a realistic objective – ‘the end of boom and bust’ no less. The Credit Crunch brutally dispelled our beguilement by the arcane chicanery of banks and other financial institutions, bringing the blunt realities of commodities markets into sharp focus. Wheat and maize prices rocketed before finally settling down at three times their 2005 levels, thereby marking the end of two decades of low-cost food for consumers. Although prices are less volatile today, cereal stocks remain stubbornly at a 40-year low, which, together with the increasing demand for food, energy and water from the emerging economies, will continue to put pressure on food prices for the foreseeable future. Increasing the yield of cereal crops using existing, proven technologies is both practical and realisable in the short term. This should be the goal for every one of the world’s agricultural ministries.

Not every nation was plunged into recession in 2008. Those states operating more traditional economic models – based on production, manufacturing and government intervention, rather than leveraged borrowing, notional property values and unfettered money markets – continued to perform well, particularly those with large populations and plentiful natural resources. Brazil, Russia, India and China are known collectively as the BRIC countries. These states have all embraced global capitalism and adapted their political systems to facilitate rapid growth. It is expected that they will become the dominant suppliers of manufactured goods and services over the coming decades, with Russia and Brazil also becoming the dominant suppliers of raw materials. The BRICs’ burgeoning prosperity is a further, powerful driving force behind the demand for energy. Since 1900 real income has grown by a factor of 25, and primary energy consumption by a factor of 22.5. Natural resources are in decline and competition for what’s left is going to increase as 1 billion super-consumers of the OECD are joined by a further three billion from the BRICs.

Economic success, within the BRICs at least, will lead directly to an increase in prosperity, lifting tens if not hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But this positive outcome will only add to our list of challenges. When wages rise in developing and middle-income countries, we find that people consume more meat and dairy products, which in turn causes rapid growth in demand for agricultural commodities to feed the extra livestock. The continued pressure on cereal stocks is due in part to the rising consumption of meat and dairy, especially in China and Brazil. There are no signs that cereal prices will flatten out any time soon, indeed it’s reasonable to expect that they will continue to increase, as incomes grow in India and sub-Saharan Africa; places where per capita meat consumption today is low. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) projects that farms will be required to produce around 40 per cent more food to meet the demand in 2030 than they did in 2008. Yet even this startling estimate – the equivalent of an annual increase in productivity of 1.5 per cent – is not the whole story. Meat demand will double by 2050 and all those additional animals will also need feeding. Each of these production targets has further implications for supplies of land, water and most importantly of all, for supplies of energy.

This pressure on agriculture to produce more with less will make the biggest contribution to a 45 per cent increase in demand for energy between 2006 and 2030. Notwithstanding the real situation regarding how much oil is left in the ground, mitigating climate change means that an alternative to fossil fuel will be required to make up the (significant) shortfall. Biofuels can be used for transportation, while biomass can be burned to produce heat or electricity. This will, however, provide even greater competition for land, water, food and energy. Again, the majority of this demand for energy is going to come from within the BRICs and notably from India and China, which between them contain approximately half of the world’s people.

Like food, water demand is a function of population, incomes, diets and the requirements of irrigated agriculture, but also of industrialisation. Heavy industry – like the kind powering growth in the BRICs – requires lots of water. Agriculture will find itself increasingly competing for water and land not just with commerce, but with the cities it’s being asked to feed. Mid-range estimates suggest that the demand for fresh water by agriculture alone will be 30 per cent higher in 2030, while the total global demand could be as much as 60 per cent higher by 2025. Shortly, we will find water being treated like any other commodity and subjected to the same market forces. The notion of a free natural resource will be consigned to the history books and bottled water will become a fact of life rather than a fad or affectation. Today 1.2 billion people are already living in areas affected by water scarcity; this figure will increase significantly in future. There are already early signs of things to come. Water conflict occurs between two or more neighbouring countries that share a trans-boundary water source, such as a river, artesian basin or lake. In the case of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the dispute is over access to the Aral Sea. With no satisfactory diplomatic solution on the horizon, relations between the five nations are increasingly hostile.

Our entire industrial and agricultural system relies upon a constant supply of oil. We use oil and liquid fuels at a rate of 89 million barrels per day (mb/d); demand in 2030 will be at least 25 per cent higher. There isn’t an infinite supply of oil, and even if we are finding more creative ways to extract what’s left, one day we will run out. It’s impossible to know for sure how much oil remains, but just because we may have underestimated the quantity in the past, that doesn’t mean we’re underestimating how much is there now. Unfortunately we won’t know for certain until we reach a point where we can’t extract enough to satisfy demand. ‘Peak oil’ is the term used to describe this point: when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters into terminal decline. The Day of Peak Oil is even more difficult to estimate than the Day of Seven Billion – we can ‘see’ the people, but the world’s reserves of oil remain hidden from us. The idea of peak oil is based on observations of production from existing oil wells and fields combined with estimates about the likelihood and size of undiscovered reserves. We may have already hit peak oil. The International Energy Agency believes that 2006 was the peak year of production for conventional crude oil, and even the most optimistic estimate forecasts that production will decline after 2020.

An uneasy balance also characterises the oil market. Most or our oil comes from the more politically turbulent areas of the world, while demand fluctuates dramatically. During recessions, industry and consumers use less oil so the market softens; likewise the price increases during periods of growth when demand is greater. Other factors such as the weather can also dramatically affect the price. January 2012 was a typical month, with tensions surrounding Iran counteracting a weaker economic outlook. In Europe the late onset of winter weather pushed prices for Brent Crude to six-month highs in early February, trading at $117.50/barrel. In contrast, slower than expected demand from industry led to rising stocks at some storage depots, pressuring the price of West Texas Indeterminate – a lighter oil variant than Brent – down to $99.50/barrel.

The key point is not just that the supplies of oil are decreasing, but that the global demand for whatever is left is increasing. Global oil demand rose to 89.9 mb/d in 2012, a rise of 0.8 mb/d (or 0.9 per cent) on the previous year. Whichever projection about how much oil is left turns out to be true, it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to increase production much beyond 90 million barrels a day; a lot less than we are predicted to need. Oil, regardless of how much remains, is going to become a lot more expensive.

During 2012, the controversial process known as fracking, which liberates natural gas trapped within shale deposits, picked up media coverage and is seen by many as a greener alternative to petroleum and coal. The key point is that it might well be ‘greener’, but it’s not ‘green’. Yes, natural gas is the least carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels, but it’s a very long way from being carbon-free. Even switching exclusively to natural gas, abandoning oil and coal altogether would do nothing to stop global warming and the effects of climate change, which would continue unabated, with devastating consequences for us all.

Clearly we need an alternative to oil to power our homes and industries and to fuel our trains, planes and automobiles, but our reliance extends much further than many of us think. The plastics we take for granted are all currently derived from petroleum, and it’s at the heart of modern agriculture. That means that our alternatives to oil will have to do more than provide power and transportation; oil is used to create artificial fertiliser, so we need to dramatically increase the yield from land and produce crops that don’t need it.

Finally, all these challenges must be dealt with against the backdrop of climate change. Extreme weather, rising global temperatures and rising sea levels will further impact food production and water supplies across the world. The areas likely to be hardest hit are those most important for food production: the mega-deltas of the Nile, Amazon, Ganges, Yangtze and other major rivers. The oceans, already over-exploited, will become less diverse as whole ecosystems vanish completely.

Can we weather the perfect storm? The answer is unequivocally yes, but in doing so we will create a world very different from the one we are living in today. Different – we can’t paddle out of this creek in the same canoe we came in on – but not necessarily worse. Things should be much better for most people, and the lives we must lead will certainly be less wasteful. The one thing we should not fear is change. In helping to achieving this, the most plentiful resource we have is also the one that is most under-exploited. Our sun can give us all the energy we will ever need. As we noted above, if we harness all the energy in just one hour’s worth of sunlight that reaches the Earth, we will be able to meet the planet’s food and energy needs for an entire year. Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric light bulb, pioneer of alternating current and the power station, certainly recognised the opportunity: ‘I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy’, he said. ‘What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait till oil and coal run out before we tackle that.’

It’s not beyond our ability to generate all the energy, food and water we need in a way that is affordable, sustainable and widely available. We know already how to increase crop yields five-fold and how to intervene so that waste can be practically eliminated. Nuclear and solar power can provide us with electricity, while biodiesel, harvested from vast third-generation photo-bioreactors connected to factories or on algal-diesel farms located in the world’s barren deserts, can be used to fuel comprehensive public transport systems and private vehicles. But in order to understand fully how we are going to live in – and enjoy – the future, we need to understand how we got here in the first place.

Contents

About the authors

Acknowledgements

Preface: Tick Tock

1 Seven Billion and Counting

2 Weathering a Perfect Storm