Environment: Let us not paint too bleak a picture of our impending energy crisis. In theory, the solar power shining down on just 1 per cent of Earth could easily power the whole industrialised world.
The same sun drives our weather systems and, with the right wind turbines in place, we could become the energy moguls of the 21st century, as we trap power from winds blowing across our island. By the end of this century, Irish farmers could be jostling with the Arab sheikhs in Harrods, spending money made on new bio-energy crops which should grow so well here.
Paul Roberts's book provides a comprehensive overview of why we have to change the world energy order and how we might achieve that transformation.
He starts by outlining a similar shift that started on January 10th, 1901, when two brothers drilled a well 1,100 feet down into a hill in Spindletop, Texas, and had to jump aside as a geyser of black oil shot several hundred feet into the air. They had uncovered another form of solar energy, collected 50 million years previously in massive plankton blooms, which had grown in sunlight before dying and drifting down to become fossilised in sedimentary rock. This rock was then heated underground and turned into a complex liquid hydrocarbon, which was finally able to escape its covering cap of rock via this first deep drill-hole.
In the intervening 100 years we have constructed a massive distribution infrastructure that allows us to use oil to grow our food, transport ourselves, keep ourselves warm and keep the lights on. As the title of the book suggests, we are now coming to an end of this cheap form of energy. New oil discoveries peaked as long ago as 1962 and we are now approaching a peak in global oil production. Within a decade, supplies are expected to dip below demand and prices will start to rise sharply as people scramble for the remaining reserves.
The situation is complicated by the unfortunate reality that most of the remaining oil lies in a small number of states in the Middle East. While al- Qaeda may refrain from blowing up the oil pipelines in Saudi Arabia, there is every chance that its supporters in that country will overthrow what they see as a corrupt regime and take control of the oil supplies.
Our dilemma is made worse by the fact that world demand for oil is increasing by nearly 3 per cent each year. There is no way we can tell the 2.5 billion people in the developing world, whose sole energy source is the burning of wood or dried animal manure, that they cannot use the remaining cheap oil to escape their grinding poverty. Nor can we expect China to abandon its plans to triple car production in the next six years, especially when sales of gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive vehicles are rocketing here.
We are only starting to become aware of how the burning of coal, gas and oil is changing our climate. Each gallon of petrol we use results in about 5lb of carbon dioxide (think of one of those bags of barbecue charcoals) being put into the upper atmosphere, where it reflects heat back to earth, in what is known as the greenhouse effect.
Roberts's book provides a good analysis of the new technologies that may get us out of this bind, although I would argue that the author shows a (perhaps natural) bias towards those solutions that will go down well in his own country, the US.
He argues that natural gas could provide a transition energy source as oil becomes scarce, while acknowledging that it also has problems with emissions and with security of supply. Like an emergency medical drip, it could keep the fossil-fuel economy going for a couple of decades while we invest in alternative energy infrastructures.
He also puts faith in so-called "clean coal" technologies, which are expected to extract gas from coal while the remaining carbon residue is put into long-term storage. While such a move might give a lifeline to the US coal industry, critics would argue that the technology is untried and would most likely be very expensive and dirty.
Less controversially, he outlines the prospects for a new "hydrogen economy", based on the splitting of water by electrolysis to provide hydrogen for use in clean fuel cells. Unfortunately, while the technology has leapt forward in recent years, we still seem to be long way from its widespread application.
The author acknowledges the type of policies adopted by the German government, which has supported new wind, solar and biomass technologies in the expectation that they will become cost competitive within a few years. However, he might have given more detail on how we could rejig our electricity distribution system to suit the dispersed and variable nature of renewable supplies. Smart switching devices in every home could turn off unnecessary appliances in peak hours while thousands of small local suppliers feed power into the grid. The same circuitry would switch on small-scale energy storage devices when the wind is going full tilt and energy is cheap.
Such simple energy conservation measures will be the cheapest and easiest first step in reducing our fossil-fuel dependency in electricity generation. When it comes to replacing oil in transport we return to the vision of an Irish farmer queuing up at Harrods with the other oil sheikhs, who would no doubt at that stage be "sucking bio-diesel".