Why the Oil Barons Can’t Survive a Green New Deal

Stephen Richard — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 12:36:29 +0000

Primary Author or Creator

Craig Dalzell

Stephen Richard Mon, 11/15/2021 - 12:36

Additional Author(s) / Creators

Common Weal

Date Published

Thu, 11/11/2021 - 12:00

Category

Green economy

Type of Resource

Article

Fast Facts

The alternatives to oil are already apparent. The transition to a green economy will remove the demand for almost all oil based products.

More details

Will oil and gas extraction still be a thing at all in a Green New Deal world? I think I’ve shown here that it needn’t be at all. But even in the much more limited “Net Zero” world, the oil barons lose a huge amount of their power and influence.

There is precedence for that kind of economic phase-shift. The early 20th century saw the development of the automobile and signalled the end of the Age of the Horse. Untold numbers of people working in the “Horse Sector” from farriers to livery yards lost their jobs. In 1900, a photo was taken of 5th Avenue in New York, USA. In the traffic there are multiple horse drawn carts and only one car. By 1913, the same street was photographed with multiple cars and only one horse drawn cart. The US A ’s horse population peaked in 1915 and has declined by about 85% in the time since – coincidently roughly the same amount that the oil industry could decline even if all we do is eliminate it as a fuel. Horses still exist, but the industry is now very different from the one that dominated overland transport for millennia before that peak.

So to those who still want to get their hands on “Scotland’s Oil” I want to ask: What does the Scottish oil and gas sector actually look like if we shift the world such that the vast majority of its customers no longer exist? Will the North Sea be economically viable even in the most limited sense if that happens? If we try to keep it pumping, will we lose our economic edge to those countries – like Sweden – who are pushing oil out of even the most intensive “other” uses of oil? The oil barons of the 20th century are on the edge of going the way of the horse barons of the 19th. The choice for Scotland is whether we let them go…or we let them pull us over with them?

Resource Address (URL)

https://commonweal.scot/oil-barons-cant-survive/

Keywords

Oil

Green Economy

Green new deal

Language English