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(C)2007
British National Party

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The background, the facts, figures, politics and analysis.

Apocalypse?

It is the worst case scenario anyone can possibly imagine. The extraction and processing of the finite fuels, oil and gas, are at the root of our industrialised and technological advanced society. Take the cheap oil and gas away and everything that is built on the availability of cheap, unlimited fuel collapses. Our complex, highly structured, regimented society depends ever more on the use of technology on complex logistics to ship goods around the world to meet consumer demands. Take away the power for that new technology and the world falls apart. What can we expect when we can no longer afford oil, when we can no longer run natural gas burning power stations, when the wheels of the UK economy literally grind to a halt.

Stranded

90% of all today's transportation systems depend on oil. There is no other commodity which could replace oil (in the form of petrol or diesel) as a fuel to drive the millions of cars, freight vehicles and trains on Britain's roads and railtracks. In fact the very roads themselves actually come from oil. 26 million tonnes of asphalt were produced in the UK in 1998 for use on British roads. Asphalt is not employed to make all road surfaces look dark grey but has been widely adopted as it is easily laid and rolled to give a smooth surface, enables easy drainage/run off, minimising skid risks, acts as a noise dampener and allows for coloured paints to be applied as road markings. No oil - no asphalt; no asphalt - no smooth water-proof road surfaces.

Perhaps more importantly aviation cannot be fuelled by any other source. Given the time and the money electric trains could replace all the diesel fleet of trains, given the time and money electric trams could replace conventional diesel driven buses, but no commercial aeroplane can possibly be run on any alternative fuel. So as oil becomes more expensive, budget airlines will cease to exist. Those two foreign holidays so many Britons consider as their "right" will become much more expensive.

Shipping all that food, all those electronic consumer goods from Korea and Taiwan, those cheap T-shirts and toys from China depends on oil. While shipping is far less energy consuming than aviation, those giant container ships are diesel and fuel oil guzzlers. Without a cheap supply of diesel and marine fuel oil Johnny doesn't get his latest animated piece of plastic at Christmas but then millions of food aid recipients in the Third World will literally go without their daily bread and butter.

How will you get to work? In fact will you have a job to get to? What happens when there is a fire in your home, office, factory? Will the local authority have the money to put fuel in the tanks of the fire tenders, will the health board have the money to pay the exorbitant cost of what small amount of diesel or unleaded to fill up the tanks of the ambulances, the GP's cars and the motorbikes of the paramedics? Will the police arrive in time to catch the burglars who have broken into your house while you were asleep? It is not like the "old days" when a patrol car could be dispatched but in a world where a gallon of petrol costs more than a weekly wage, the constables have a fair distance to walk or cycle from the station.

Famine

Every nation on the planet benefits from the advances made in dramatically boosting crop yields. Wheat and barley harvests in East Anglia are now nearly double what they were 50 years ago. Western nations have a food surplus which are used to either trade with other nations or given away to the starving of Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America. While some increase in crop yield can be attributed to selective breeding and fluctuations in climate, most of the increase in crop yield has arisen from the use of oil! Oil is not of course used directly on crops but pesticides are and many pesticides are derived from the processing of crude oil. Those pesticides are sprayed from booms attached to tractors and tractors use diesel which comes from the processing of crude oil.

The other major input in the crop production process is artificial fertiliser. This is made from ammonia which in turn comes from petroleum or natural gas. This artificial fertiliser is applied to Britain's fields using the same diesel burning tractors mentioned above.

The bags of fertiliser and the chemical drums of pesticides are likely to be made of plastic and again plastic packaging needs oil.

The UK remains one of the leading chemical producing countries and exports millions of tonnes of both fertiliser and pesticide around the world - aboard diesel driven ships!

Away from the farm, the contents of the typical British/American/Western European larder are likely to have been harvested, distributed, processed, packaged and redistributed through supply chains of wholesalers, supermarkets and delivered to one's nearest retailer by gas guzzling vans, artics or train. Keeping those perishable items chilled requires expensive refrigeration. Refrigeration units are energy demanding pieces of kit and depend upon oil or gas to generate the electricity to power them. What's more the source of the refrigerant; the chemical mixture that is pumped around and around the coils in the refrigeration kit, is also derived from either oil or gas.

Without oil there would be considerably less inorganic fertiliser production, almost no pesticide production and a radical change in the distribution of those types of fertiliser and pesticide that are not dependent on crude oil. It means an end to cheap processed foods, an end to apples being shipped in from Chile and South Africa during a British winter, an end to Egyptian strawberries being available for Christmas desserts.

More significantly it means a drop in crop yields, which will lead to higher food prices in the west and less food aid to donate to the Third World.

Poor

The world's wealth in the 20th century and opening years of the 21st century has been created by debt. A business with a good idea and which could show growth would seek a loan from a bank. That the bank never had the cash to lend to the customer but merely extended credit to the customer is not the point. The customer could get the credit needed to buy the equipment, rent the factiry unit, pay his wages and as long as his sales grew he was happy, the banks were happy, the staff were happy and his own customers were happy. But when growth stops and show no signs of recovering, the banks pull the credit, the customer cannot pay his suppliers, pay his rent, pay his wages and his business suffers. A simplistic overview but it does show that in modern economics growth is needed for businesses to survive. It should not have to be like that. After all we can all think of the self-employed window cleaner who does say 20 houses a day at £5 a time and takes £100 in cash a day. He cannot grow, he might have to work the extra hour or take someone else on to assist but he makes a reasonable living from doing what he does. That is human scale economics. The same applies to most self-employed people, small businesses and others who do not need to resort to the banks for credit. The big businesses need growth to satisfy firstly the big banks and secondly the other element in this the instituional investors, speculators, pension funds and insurance funds.

War

President Bush lies when he says he has sent teenage recruits from Iowa and Idaho to Iraq in order to create a safe democratic country now devoid of the tyranny of Dictator Saddam Hussein. Bush is not planning a war with Iran just so that the home of the once great Persian Empire will embrace American style democracy. Bush's Troops do not continue to occupy Afghanistan just so the people there can grow opium poppies without being troubled by the Taliban. These three countries are key players in the oil based geo-political landscape.

"We now have the second largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia," Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh announced last July (2004). He said that discoveries in the country's south western deserts showed the Islamic Republic sitting on 132 billion barrels of proven reserves, a jump of 17 billion barrels.

BP puts Iraq in 3rd place for proven crude reserves with 115 billion barrels.

America is currently blackmailing nations to support its continued occupation of Iraq. Non American troops are being dispatched to the troubled region in exchange for oil deals.

Afghanistan has very little oil, it has some gas worth having but its great wealth lies in its strategic position, capable of carrying a much debated pipeline from central Asia to the Indian Ocean via Pakistan. America's foreign policy does seem to indicate that the Whitehouse knows fine well about "Peak Oil" and that American troops are being deployed to safeguard the world's oilfields. China's current demand of 7 million barrels of crude a day, rising to 8 million barrels a day by the end of the decade is likely to spark off hostilities with competitive countries, principally America. Tensions are rising in Nigeria and noises are coming from the Oval Office about fighting the war on terrorism in the region.

Strange is it not that the places where "terrorism" abounds are precisely those places which have bountiful amounts of crude! Perhaps Uncle Sam will descend on Africa's largest oilfields to protect the Nigerian infrastructure from "terrorism". America is facing a sustained backlash from angry Muslims in Iraq. It will likewise face the same challenge in the more populous Iran and if it tries to take on the emerging superpower of China the backlash might lead to full scale military activity.

When the smaller poorer nations of the world cannot get their hands on the black stuff to help feed, clothe, transport and employ their own burgeoning populations are they going to wait for aid to come, wait for outside assistance and hope the price of crude falls once more, are they going to remain quiet and just on with things or are they going to fight their neighbours to seize whatever energy resources it can?

Pestilence

We quite rightly place great pride in the advances in medical science in the past 50 years. The risk of catching a deadly disease in a dirty hospital aside, which is more a political issue than a health issue, in the UK we have greater longevity, are less likely to succumb to the diseases that plagued our grandparents and can rely on our medical services to rescue us, treat us and give us all the medicines money can buy to prolong our active lives. How do you keep the donor organs at the right temperature? How do you power the magnetic scanners which are used to detect tumours, keep an eye on growing babes in the womb?

And what of those petrochemically derived pills and medicines, the analgesics, antihistamines, antibiotics, antibacterials, sedatives, tranquillisers and those plastics in all disposables used for maintaining sterile conditions; specialised plastics used in heart valves; common items such as isopropanol (rubbing alcohol); polyethylene and poly-vinyl acetate used in tubing, sheeting, splints, prostheses, blood bags, disposable syringes and catheters?

We take our water supplies for granted. Fresh clean potable water comes out of the tap whenever we ask for it. An awful lot of oil went into getting that water to the tap. Reservoirs need to be maintained, pumps need electricity, the water treatment works need a lot of electricity, to get the water in the first place needs concrete pipes, concrete is manfacutred using a lot of oil. The pipes have to be delivered by truck to the building sites, the trenches are dug using oil fuelled diggers and so it goes on. Water isn't just for drinking. It is used to flush the loos in milions of homes, offices, schools and hospitals. Unflushed human waste is pretty unpleasant, not just the stench. Can you imagine the huge potential for the spread of some pretty nasty diseases; there is going to be a big demand for treatment of cholera, dysentry, gastro-enteritis, hepatitis.

Oh and the rats...with crumbling sewers and a lack of "fresh" human waste passing through the sewers yes the rats will have a wonderful time as the emerge from the sewers looking for the titbits that keep them breeding. Rats carry Weil's disease which gives rise to flu like symptoms and leads to heart failure if not treated. It wasn't the rats that caused the outbreaks of bubonic plague in the middle ages, it was the fleas that the rats carried, but when you are dying in agony as the lymph nodes in your neck, armpits and groin have swollen to the size of a walnut you will not be too interested in the method of carrying the disease! A good strong cat might be a useful pet and possible life-saver!

Without oil we all go back to a time of greater hardships; uncontainable epidemics, hospitals which cannot be heated or air conditioned, no rescue helicopters or airlifts, no mass produced vaccines or painkillers. Death comes closer to those without oil. How are we going to cope?

Vulnerable

The entire complex centralised societies of the west are wholly dependent on cheap fuel. Those surveillance cameras on every High Street, inside every rail station and public building are there to help deter criminals, make commuters and everyday shoppers feel safe and in the worst case scenario, if someone is attacked, mugged or murdered then well there is the camera footage to help identify the culprit and provide evidence in any trial. A database of fingerprint images and DNA samples of hundreds of thousands of criminals exists, easily accessible by any authorised police officer. Well perhaps....

Apart from the token bobby pounding the beat (in pairs of course...21st century society is far too dangerous for a lone police officer to go out on patrol) those police cars - from the humble patrol Astra to the gas guzzling Range Rovers, the favoured vehicle of traffic cops, they need oil and lots of it. Starve a constabulary of petrol and diesel and how are the officers going to deal with the local teenage louts.....the corporate fraudsters...the drug barons whose fortunes will increase as society falls apart and the weak, lonely, the redundant, the business failures and atomised seek solace in bootleg alcohol and whatever mind numbing substances they can lay their hands on? Of course there is always the Army, but an army these days drives rather than marches, can a few score thousand professional soldiers keep the peace on British streets?

A mass attempt by the populace to storm a food distribution depot close to the M62 might be dealt with by a few hundred armed infantrymen, but if the scene is multiplied across two hundred depots in twenty counties and a further hundred High Streets and a score of coastal ports as desperate, genuinely desperate fathers, older brothers and husbands try and grab whatever food, medicines, drugs, alcohol for their crying, malnourished offspring siblings and family members. What if the working class storming the food distribution depots are the brothers, sisters, cousins of the twenty-something infantrymen armed with SA80s? Will the well trained British squaddie really fire on his neighbours, friends and family?

The cities will be dangerous places, conventional policing will be unable to contain the armed gangs who will control "their" areas. The wealthy can try and hide behind armoured gates and security systems, can establish their own armed gangs or buy protection from an armed gang. What of the rest of society? Even in today's oil booming consumerist society there are no go areas for unarmed police officers, housing schemes who are in thrall to the local "Mr. Big" often a pimp, a drug dealer and fence. If the police are not there to help, just who is going to look after the law abiding residents? Do we take the law into our own hands or do we all become easy prey to the armed gangs of pimps, drug barons and organised crime rings?

The nights will of course be darker, the local councils will not be able to afford the cost of electricity to power street lamps. The nights will be quieter too, as millions of exhausts are silenced, lying rusting in driveways and gardens across the country. Fewer people will frequent the city centres, those that do risk assault, attack and even murder. Living in a city is a real health hazard in a world without oil.

Conclusion

A darker, hunger filled, more dangerous existence. That is one possible view of life after oil, but does it really have to be this bad? Could there be some upside, some silver lining on this particularly gloomy looking cloud?

It might be apocalyptic but it might just be a time of opportunity for those that are aware, those that are prepared and those that can adapt. Don't have nightmares and see for yourself just what opportunities might open up.