At last! I’m no longer classing myself as an ‘out there’ peak oil nutter as this is the week the things Bealers and I have been fretting about are suddenly Big News in the mainstream educated press.

(pic: The Economist – Derek Bacon)

Firstly Bealers came home on Saturday morning with a copy of The Economist with a cover page entitled ‘Britain’s Energy Crisis: How long before the lights go out‘ .

One of my bigger worries is around the unreliability of supplies of things we have become utterly accustomed to having all the time because they have always been there during our lifetimes. This article shows that before too long we may experience upsetting, unnerving and prolonged power cuts in the not too distant future due to politicians spending the last 30 years of North Sea power not talking about what to do when it runs out. I guess the journalist is hinting that it won’t just be occasional power cut like the ones we have round here on a windy night when a tree knocks into a rural overhead supply of electricity and very soon miraculously ‘They’ fix it for us), but really long ones where no-one knows when the power is likely to be supplied again and freezers defrost, lighting is not available and people have no access to tv or internet information.

Secondly I saw that that this week’s edition of MoneyWeek was running a key piece entitled:

Peak Oil: why we must take it seriously

Energy expert Dr Bakhtiari believes that oil production is entering a new era, during which it will undergo four stages of transition.

Finally as someone who takes no action to consume ‘news’ (or is it just infotainment these days which only provides people with stories which will sell newspapers and tv airtime?) my little toddler worked out how to turn the radio on for the first time this morning. She pressed the button just as the Secretary of State for Environment, Hilary Benn was telling the UK via the Today programme on Radio Four ‘We are heading for a perfect storm of food insecurity’ – the rocketing population of the planet, the seriousness of climate change and the increasing prices of petro-derived fertilisers (by this he means WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF OIL BUT IS NOT ABLE TO SAY ANYTHING IN CASE PEOPLE FEEL ANXIOUS ABOUT IT). Hilary Benn spoke in weak analogies of food ‘challenges’ and ended up being a comedy advert for GM foods but his opening gambit had me shouting out to Bealers ‘They’re finally talking about it on Radio 4 – come quickly!’

With the global increase in population of 2.5 to 3 billion in the next few decades – that’s a lot of additional mouths to feed. The challenge we have as a world and as a country is to increase food production at the same time as doing it sustainably because we know in particular that climate change is going to have an impact on our ability to do that and we know that food production is quite [QUITE?] heavily dependent on oil – we saw last year a big increase in food prices, in part because of the weather and the drought in Australia increasing the price of bread here in the UK but because the cost of oil went up and that effects fertiliser and fuel.

I think that was a wake up call. A lot of people maybe have taken food for granted and said that we’ll always be able to keep food production ahead of population growth (and we have succeeded in doing that in the past) but the circumstances in which we’ve got to do that again are going to become a bit [A BIT?] more challenging

I’m now wondering what has happened for these three pieces to be given such prominence. Has the memo finally gone to the people in charge round saying ‘Actually I think we should probably start talking about it after all’ or have we reached a tipping point where enough enquiring minds are worrying about the possible catastrophic scenarios of the future that we, and our progeny will face (and that many millions of people are already facing due to our wanton consumption and resulting destruction) to start writing about it  or has a load of data recently been released that proves we reached peak oil decades ago, the planet is about to run out of fresh water and all other resources we need to survive and its not going to be pretty if we don’t start reducing our impact with immediate effect?

Who knows but ‘m happy to see these things being broadcast and printed for a rare change.