Britain faces 'oil crunch' within five years, Richard Branson warns

amcluesent

An oil crunch more serious than the financial crisis threatens to strike Britain within five years, Sir Richard Branson and other business leaders have warned.

"Consumers face a spike in costs for heating, transport, food and other goods, according to the report entitled ''The Oil Crunch - a wake up call for the UK economy''.

It said the challenges facing the UK would exceed those presented by the financial crisis and said the poorest in society were most vulnerable to potentially significant increases.

The report comes amid general fears about future energy security and costs in the UK. Sudden supply shocks would ''quickly reverberate throughout the UK's supply chain'', according to Dr Robert Falkner of the London School of Economics, who compiled part of the report.

Energy watchdog Ofgem has warned electricity and gas may become unaffordable for an increasing number of households unless drastic action is taken to secure power supplies."

All playing out as expected - "The fact that Britain is technically bankrupt has not registered with the bulk of the population. It will only register with them when energy gets too expensive for them to heat their homes or to drive a car."

FACT - some of the elite are discretely signalling to the sheeple that the jig is up. In 10 to 15 years we'll look back and wonder how we missed so many clues that the West was commencing final collapse.

Kohoutek

It's rapidly emerging that peak oil is not a conspiracy or fantasy, take the CEO of the largest oil company in Latin America saying peak oil has occurred in 2010 for example (http://www.theoildrum.com/topic/supply_production)

Most people in the oil industry must know what's coming. The idiots in power all over the Western world still don't.

purch

Is Richard Branson the same Richard Branson, boss of such environmentally friendly eco businesses such as Virgin Atlantic, and the new Virgin Formula 1 team :eek:

Thanks for the help Beardie !!!

HammerSmashedFace

Saw this the other day, of course it's good for such a public figure to talk of this subject but to be honest for anyone who doesn't have their head in cloud cuckoo land, they should be wising up to this by now, it's been common knowledege since I started taking an interest in the subject matter about 6 years ago.

TBH I laugh everytime I hear 'man made global warming' or 'carbon reduction' or any of the other terms used. Why ? Because man made global warming is code for peak oil, it's the terms they try to use to convince people to reduce their energy intake.

Tell people that if we could pump every single last drop of known oil out of the ground (which we can't for reasons I won't go into here), in 37 years we would be pumping our last barrel, there would be certain amount of shock, as everything we consume in a world of 6 billion people from food to baby nappies uses the black gold.

So in my estermation we have about a decade before !!!!!! starts hitting the fan, can a solution be found within that time that will scale upwards to the global population ?, no chance.

Really2

purch wrote: »

Is Richard Branson the same Richard Branson, boss of such environmentally friendly eco businesses such as Virgin Atlantic, and the new Virgin Formula 1 team :eek:

Thanks for the help Beardie !!!

Don't forget the trips to space http://www.virgingalactic.com/:eek:

Kohoutek

HammerSmashedFace wrote: »

So in my estermation we have about a decade before !!!!!! starts hitting the fan, can a solution be found within that time that will scale upwards to the global population ?, no chance.

chucky

did the bronze age end because they ran out of copper or tin?

ILW

Can someone please tell me why it is considered a good thing to be able to fly half way round the world for a tenner, but very bad to drive to the shops without being taxed to the hilt on petrol. Am I missing something?

The_White_Horse

if it wasn't for the lefties and their hatred of clean nuclear power, this may have all been avoided.

the stupid ignorant lefties (the ones now bleating about man made climate change) are the ones to blame for our complete reliance on fossil fuels from abroad.

Hateful short sighted ignorant lefty filth.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

HammerSmashedFace wrote: »

if we could pump every single last drop of known oil out of the ground (which we can't for reasons I won't go into here), in 37 years we would be pumping our last barrel, .

If by "known oil" you mean crude, then yes.....

But only if we NEVER found another drop of oil. Whereas in reality we find more every day.

And only if we didn't utilise any of the other techologies for extracting oil from shale, or oil substitute hydrocarbons from coal, natural gas, etc, many of which can adequately replace crude as ingredients.

And only if we didn't switch our electrical generation to renewables, nuclear, coal, etc, to reduce or prioritise consumption.

Oil is consumed so vastly, only because it is so very cheap.....

Other than aviation fuel (and Branson already has a company that is working on Aviation fuel substitutes) and some petrochemicals, which together represent about 30% of current consumption combined, or so I've heard, there are viable alternatives available for almost every other use.

As oil becomes more expensive, using alternative technologies will become financially viable. As they become more used, they will drop in price.

Oil won't run out in my lifetime..... It will become much more expensive. But whatever we use to replace it will become much cheaper.

bernard_shaw

Kohoutek wrote: »

That graph's a bit 1 or 2 dimensional. As we all know, there's a lot more to it than that - here's a bit more futurology for ya. It's not all doom and gloom.

Well worth downloading and printing out at high quality.

http://www.nowandnext.com/PDF/trends_and_technology_timeline_2010.pdf


from http://www.nowandnext.com/