The end of the oil age

Joseph was imprisoned. He had been betrayed and sold into exile by his own brothers. His salvation and his freedom lay in a dream. The story in the Book of Genesis tells of how Pharaoh had a troubled dream one night. In his visions he saw seven fat cattle as he stood by the river. The fat cattle, rising up out of the water, were joined by seven scraggy and mean looking cattle. They all stood on the river-bank. The dream ended with the lean cattle eating up the fine, well-fed ones. Pharaoh woke up. He later returned to sleep and the dream recurred with seven full ears of corn and seven thin ears as the central symbols. The dream-story ended the same way. Pharaoh was mighty troubled by these nightly visitations and found nobody among his staff who could competently explain them to him. Joseph made his name and his best career move by explaining to Pharaoh that seven years of good fortune were to be followed by seven years of ill-fortune and famine. Pharaoh elevated him, gave him a wife and followed his advice to stockpile food against the lean years. Egypt alone was prepared for the seven years of famine that followed, as foretold by Joseph.

It is unlikely that real famine will hit our end of the world but it looks as if the years of plenty are receding. The credit crunch has been followed by an oil squeeze. We are all feeling the effects as transport costs rise and food and heating bills spike. It may help to reduce our collective carbon footprint by making us reflect on our use of fossil fuels and on our dependence on oil. The crisis has not so much hit us in the pocket as mugged us at the pumps. It has forced us to reflect on our relationship with the energy sources of the past; those we now enjoy; the possibilities of an oil-free future and the end of the oil-age.

The last time I remember such a crisis was in 1973. The problem then was a scarcity of oil. I was in boarding school in Newry and we were asked by the College authorities to encourage our parents not to feel that they had to visit us. The head of the oil producing countries organisation, OPEC, was Sheik Zaki Yamani. We had a joke that he had told the countries of the West, ‘Ya Mani – or no oil!’ The Sheik made a prediction a few years ago that sounds startling coming from such a source. He said, “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil”.

My earliest memory of a pre-oil age is of my grandmother gathering sticks or ‘brosna’ as she called it, using the Irish word. She collected small, brittle twigs from under the nearby ditches and stored them overnight in the plate-warming, bottom oven of her ironically named Modern Mistress Range. These sticks were used in the morning to kindle the fire that was the focus of the household. Gathering sticks was a common chore as was ‘splitting sticks’. Many people still say that they prefer the drama of a real fire in their sitting rooms over the push-button illusions that gas or electric fires present. As children we used to play outside in the summertime, often building fires of wood as we camped and cooked eggs or tinned beans for ourselves. Our mother knew when we had been sitting around the camp-fire for when we returned in the evening she would tell us that we smelled ‘like the tinkers’.

The fuel most commonly in circulation then was paraffin oil for the various lamps that were used inside or outside. Every household also had a supply of ‘methylated spirits’. This was used for lighting the Tilley Lamp; for cleaning the windows with dampened, crushed newspaper; for singeing the down off a freshly-plucked chicken or for removing stains. It was also abused by street-drinkers, sometimes with terrible results. With the coming of the mechanical age and the TVO Tractor, with its twin-fuel system, farmers needed small amounts of petrol to kick-start their tractors before turning over to Tractor Vaporising Oil when the engine got going. The widespread use of diesel came later. Switching over to TVO, following the high-octane, petrol-fuelled beginning, came to be used as a simile for those men whose drinking habits began with a couple of ‘half-ones’ before switching over to bottles of Guinness.

The largest fuel stock back then was probably the coal-pile. Some households bought coal by the ton and a ‘ton of coal’ was a common prize in raffles. Coal, slack and shingles were piled up outside, covered over with a few sheets of tin or galvanised iron and brought inside as needed. It was liberally burned in the ranges and fireplaces of the time with their huge, inefficient fire-boxes and roaring chimneys. Turf was not widely used, although older people had worked at ‘saving’ turf and families still had turbary rights in assigned strips of nearby bogs. Nobody worried about their carbon footprint or about global warming. The price of a barrel of oil on the international market was thought to be only of interest to sheiks. Ten shillings worth of petrol at the village pumps went a long way. The only ‘tiger’ around then was the ‘tiger in your tank’ of the popular petrol advertisements. As we Celtic Tiger cubs reel from the effects of price hikes, it’s good to remember that our dependence on the ‘black gold’ of the Arab world, like every dependence, had a beginning and may well have an end.