Jeremy Leggett: Peak oil is just five years away, and we must start to plan now to avert a truly ruinous crisis |

This is important. Personally, I think we may already have hit peak oil, but maybe we've a handful of years left. This is a serious call to prayer and action. Jeremy Leggett: Peak oil is just five years away, and we must start to plan now to avert a truly ruinous crisis: "First, continuing growth in demand in China and India is likely to drown out any reduction in demand from structural changes in the west. Second, the oil industry has – almost incomprehensibly – been investing less in exploration in recent years. Too much of the vast profit we saw from BP earlier this week goes on share buybacks. Third, the industry is relying on aged oilfields, aged infrastructure and an aged workforce just at the time when oilfields are becoming more difficult to find and are taking ever longer — sometimes more than a decade — to bring onstream even when found. Fourth, the oil- and gas-producing nations have massive and growing infrastructure programmes that increasingly cut into their scope for export. Fifth, we worry that Opec has been subject to the same irrational exuberance about delivery capacity as the international oil companies have been. If we accelerate the green industrial revolution, we believe we can soften the blow of the oil crunch, set up the recovery and get out of oil dependence surprisingly quickly."
Accelerate the greening of industry could be a Godsend at this point in history: a kind of Keynsian virtuous cycle moment. This is the kairos moment ...