Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-03-15-Speech-4-023-000"
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"en.20120315.6.4-023-000"2
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"Mr President, be careful what you wish for because you may get it. This old saying is very true about reducing our use of hydrocarbons. By 2050 we will have a low-carbon economy for the simple reason that we will largely have run out of carbon.
All the increases in non-conventional hydrocarbons, including from environmentally catastrophic shale oil and gas fracking, are only just about keeping up with the worldwide decline of conventional oil production. The long emergency of peak oil has begun. Those who think we can deal with it by building wind farms and eating nut cutlets may mean well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The biggest threat is to food production. In agriculture, before the age of oil, for every calorie of energy invested by man, horse or ox, the average return was one-and-a-half calories. On that small surplus our ancestors built their cathedrals, painted their Rembrandts and wrote their Rights of Man.
Oil-based agriculture uses far fewer people to produce far more food. Its ratio is twenty-to-one. That is an input of 20 calories of oil energy for machinery, fertilisers and pesticides for every calorie of food produced. Today’s globalised world is a house of cards, built on the suicidally-unsustainable use of finite fossilised sunlight. This is the real carbon crisis which we need to address. If we continue to fail to do so, today’s children will look back in despair at all the time and energy that our generation wasted trying to kill the wrong pig."@en1
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