Madam, – Much as I enjoy John Gibbon’s weekly sermons, his offering of January 8th was more worrying than amusing (“Plan for oil crisis by setting high ‘floor price’ for fuel”).
Addressing one of the ideological pillars of eco-fundamentalism – “peak oil” – Mr Gibbons predicts that in a few years civilisation as we know it will grind to a halt, because the oil will be gone.The only evidence supporting this thesis is a speculative report produced by the International Energy Agency.
An independent-minded journalist would think twice before referring to such a document. There are now dozens of these “reports” being churned out every week by scientists who have abandoned rigorous analysis and accepted instead the fat salaries and research grants from what has become a global-warming industry.
But Mr Gibbons is not independent-minded because he is himself effectively part of this industry, now worth billions of dollars – a coalition of multinational energy corporations, carbon-credit traders, academics, politicians, media commentators and so on. To challenge this lucrative consensus is to invite a monstering from the eco-fundamentalists as a climate-change denier, somewhere between the SUV driver and Michael O’Leary in the league table of environmental evil-doers.
Mr Gibbon’s solution to the onrushing catastrophe is to set “a permanent floor price for motor fuels”, which he seems to think would have the happy effects of raising cash, lowering carbon emissions and sending a “price signal” to the public that “reducing our chronic oil dependence is the only game in town”.
Well, I don’t know what town Mr Gibbons lives in, but it cannot be Dublin. Or Cork, either. Indeed if your columnist believes it is a good idea artificially to raise the price of the one commodity every family, factory and hospital in this country depends on during the worst global recession since the early 1930s, then I wonder what planet he lives on. Environmentalism is a secular faith and perhaps in his religious ecstasy Mr Gibbons has become blinded to the reality that we who drive cars or centrally heat our homes with oil do not do so out of addiction to luxury, but because we have no other choice.
A significant section of the scientific community rejects the view that climate change is exclusively man-made and can be mitigated or evaded by returning our society to a kind of pre-industrial utopia of lentil-farming and bicycle travel.
In any case Mr Gibbons may soon see his vision realised. On the same day that 1,900 people lost their jobs in Limerick the Minister for Energy, Eamon Ryan, announced on RTÉ's Morning Irelandthat "this year we will see the introduction of a carbon tax...the reality is that it is going to happen".
In economic terms this is the equivalent of a drowning man being thrown a concrete block. – Yours, etc,