Climate Change with Oil and Gas Depletion

Left to right: Paul Mobbs, Prof Seamus Garvey, Brian Davey

This lecture took place on Wednesday 6th June 2007, 7.30pm, at The Mechanics Institute, North Sherwood Street, Nottingham. The speakers were:

Paul Mobbs

Independent environmental consultant and author of ‘Energy Beyond Oil’ (Troubador Publishing Company 2005). Visit www.fraw.org.uk/ebo.

Brian Davey

Living within Limits Consultancy (LwL), ecological consultant and member of Feasta (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability).

Chair - Professor Seamus Garvey

Director of Research at the University of Nottingham School of Mechanical Materials and Manufacturing Engineering, Faculty of Engineering. (Professor Garvey has a particular interest in renewables.)

The event was organised by Health in Your Environment with the support of Climate Action Network Nottinghamshire, Nottingham City Council and Greater Nottingham Health and Environment Partnership.

In 2007 the UK became a net importer of oil and gas. Oil, which provides a third of our energy, will become scarce and therefore very expensive within the next fifteen to twenty years. Gas will follow, and eventually coal will also go into depletion. Paul Mobbs argued that - whether because of the dwindling supply of fossil fuels or because of climate change - individuals and organisations should be preparing now for a significant contraction in the economy. Brian Davey outlined the local implications in this scenario of the future.

AUDIO CLIPS

You can listen to the speakers being interviewed by our reporter Catherine Adams.

• Paul Mobbs (6:36, 6.0MB mp3)
• Prof Seamus Garvey (7:13, 6.6MB mp3)

Here are the speakers' presentations.

• Callie Lister from CANN welcomes the audience and sets the event in context. (2:37, 1.2MB mp3)
• Seamus Garvey also welcomes the audience, says a little about the University of Nottingham's work in energy-related technologies, and introduces Paul Mobbs. (2:16, 1.0MB mp3)
• Paul Mobbs' talk. (26:13, 12.0MB mp3)
• Brian Davey's talk (25:41, 11.7MB mp3)

Audience questions:

• 1 - The role of tidal power (1:49, 0.9MB mp3)
• 2 - Oil sands as an energy source (1:23, 0.7MB mp3)
• 3 - Potential of different forms of nuclear power (2:08, 1.0MB mp3)
• 4 - Energy return on nuclear power (1:00, 0.5MB mp3)
• 5 - How much of an issue is food? Energy costs to deliver each calorie we eat (1:45, 0.8MB mp3)
• 6 - Methane - worse than CO2? (1:39, 0.8MB mp3)

RESOURCES

Presentations

Brian Davey's presentation (7.6MB pdf)

Links

Paul Mobbs' Peak Energy "Wakey Wakey" tour site has a lot of information related to the content of his talk. The information section on that page gives a short introduction to the issues, and you can download handouts on a range of topics. It also contains PDFs of presentations that aren't quite the same as the one he gave here but use much of the same material.

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