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Germany’s neighbour France is also looking to shake up how it supports renewables as the country begins its “energy transition” away from nuclear.

France will introduce a carbon tax and a law to cap nuclear-power capacity as part of a new energy bill next year to boost renewable generation, President Francois Hollande told an environment conference last week. Hollande has vowed to reduce reliance on nuclear to half of total output by about 2025 while also keeping down consumers’ bills.

Among other things, the energy law in 2014 will define how renewables are financed. Hollande said last week that the above-market guaranteed prices currently paid to green energy producers “can lead to a waste of public funds, profit-taking and speculative behaviour.” Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects the shift in renewable support may move towards a greater use of tenders to keep costs low.

A failure of economic strategy and leadership lies behind the near simultaneous collapse of market confidence in the eurozone and US economies. No need to blame the ratings agencies: governments in Europe and America have been unable to cope with the realities of global capital markets and competition from Asia – and deserve the lion’s share of the blame.



I’ve watched dozens of financial crises up close, and know that success means showing the public a way out that is bold, technically sound and built on social values. Transatlantic leadership is falling short on all counts. Neither the US nor Europe have even properly diagnosed the core problem, namely that both regions are being whipsawed by globalisation.



Jobs for low-skilled workers in manufacturing, and new investments in large swaths of industry, have been lost to international competition. Employment in the US and Europe during the 2000s was held up only by housing construction stoked by low interest rates and reckless deregulation – until the construction bubble collapsed. The path to recovery now lies not in a new housing bubble, but in upgraded skills, increased exports, and public investments in infrastructure and low-carbon energy. Instead, the US and Europe have veered between dead-end, consumption-oriented stimulus packages and austerity without a vision for investment.



Macroeconomic policy has not only failed to create jobs, but also to respond to basic social values too. Let me be clear: good social policy does not mean running big deficits. Public debts are already too large in both Europe and the US. But it does mean a completely different balance between cuts to social services and tax increases on the rich.



The simple fact is that globalisation has not only hit the unskilled hard but has also proved a bonanza for the global super-rich. They have been able to invest in new and highly profitable projects in emerging economies. Meanwhile, as Warren Buffett argued this week, they have been able to convince their home governments to cut tax rates on profits and high incomes in the name of global tax competition. Tax havens have proliferated even as the politicians have occasionally railed against them. In the end the poor are doubly hit, first by global market forces, then by the ability of the rich to park money at low taxes in hideaways around the world.



An improved fiscal policy in the transatlantic economies would therefore be based on three realities. First, it would expand investments in human and infrastructure capital. Second, it would cut wasteful spending, for instance in misguided military engagements in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Third, it would balance budgets in the medium-term, in no small part through tax increases on high personal incomes and international corporate profits that are shielded by loopholes and overseas tax havens.

It takes two Hitachi workers eight minutes to slice open the metal casing of the used air conditioner compressor. The prize inside: four wafer-thin magnets containing about 30 grams of rare earth metals.

Hitachi, Japans third-biggest company, uses as much as 600 tons of rare earth metals each year in products such as motors for Toyotas Prius hybrid. Hitachi is one of hundreds of manufacturers depending on rare earth shipments from China, which controls 97 per cent of world supply of the lightweight, malleable metals essential to hybrid cars, cell phones and hard disk drives.

Chinas decision this year to slash exports of the metals has driven up prices and spurred a drive among Japanese companies, the worlds biggest users of rare earths, to find other supplies. While trading houses Sojitz and Sumitomo consider investing in mines outside China, Hitachi said it expects recycling to meet 10 per cent of its needs by 2013 from almost zero now.

“We need to make sure we have a stable supply of these materials and recycling is part of that,” Kenji Baba, general manager of Hitachis resource recycling office, said this week at a test site north of Tokyo. “Now we have to work on bringing costs down.”

Inside the site in a warehouse in Matsudo City, Hitachi demonstrated the results of the one-year, $US1.5 million ($1.5 million) research project partly funded by Japans government. Four refrigerator-sized devices use saws to open up compressors without damaging the rare earth magnets inside. A separate conveyor belt feeds disk drives into a machine about the size of a ship container. The drives come out the other end in pieces ready for rare earth harvesting. Hitachi says the machines are the first of their kind.

Rising prices

Last year, Chinas government clamped down on its rare earth industry, setting production quotas to bolster prices. China said in July this year it would reduce export quotas 72 per cent in the second half to supply its own electronics industry and overhaul a mining sector blamed for causing widespread environmental damage.

The drop in output and exports combined with rising demand caused the price of neodymium used in batteries for Toyotas Prius to surge fourfold to $US80 a kilogram from $US19.12 in 2009, according to Sydney-based rare-earth miner Lynas Corp. Lynas is building a $550 million rare earths mine at Mount Weld in Western Australia.

Sojitz, one of Japans biggest importers of rare earths, last month agreed with Lynas to buy 8,000 tons to 9,000 tons annually from its Mount Weld mine over the next 10 years. ...

Copper processor Mitsubishi Materials Corp., which has recycling ventures with Panasonic and Sharp, last year started researching the cost of extracting neodymium and dysposium from washing machines and air conditioners.

“Were trying to reduce costs by automating the process,” said Isato Matsubara, a spokesman at the company. “How profitable the business can be depends on the prices of materials and getting our costs down.” ...

For recyclers, extracting components is the first step. Magnets from air conditioning compressors are 25 per cent rare earth metal and a chemical process is needed to refine out the rare earths, Hitachis Baba said.

“Weve succeeded in processing the metals in small quantities without using acids,” Baba said. “Now were working on methods to increase the scale.”

Even Chinas supply is not unlimited, some of the heavy rare earths it has will only last about 15 years, Ali Izadi- Najafabadi, a Tokyo-based analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said.

“So if were going to have a clean energy revolution and electric vehicles and other things, recycling would have to be part of the infrastructure,” he said.

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May I start with a bromide: a resource which is finite is not inexhaustible. If you think that over, it should not be a revelation. That was a bromide… some people think a keynote should never rise above a bromide….

Some five years ago in Italy I concluded a talk by saying that like the inhabitants of Pompeii, who ignored the neighboring volcano, Vesuvius, until it detonated, the world ignores the possibility of peak oil at its peril.

Two years ago in addressing ASPO in Cork, Ireland, I argued that the peakists had won the intellectual argument, except for some minor details about precise timing, but that by and large everyone recognized that there were limits on our capacity to increase the production of crude oil as we have steadily since World War Two.

[I also argued] that peakists were no longer a beleaguered minority, that they had won, and that consequently they should be gracious in victory.

There’s an old spiritual that is relevant here. The walls of those who doubted the peak seemed to be impregnable. Nonetheless, you marched around the walls seven times and then blew the trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

But acceptance by knowledgeable people is not enough. The political order should respond. Nonetheless, our willingness, let alone our ability, to do anything serious about the impending inability to increase oil output is still a long way off.

The political order responds to what the public believes today, not to what it may come to believe tomorrow. It is also resistant to any action that inflicts pain or sacrifice on those who vote. The payoff in politics comes from reassurance, perhaps precluded by a rhetorical challenge.

Still, the challenge is clear in both logic and in the evidence. Let me start briefly with the logic,

If something cannot be sustained, it will eventually not be sustained… ultimately it will shrink.

Secondly, you cannot produce oil unless you first discover it (a contribution by Colin Campbell).

Third, a resource that is finite cannot continually have its production increased.

What is the evidence?

First, we remain heavily dependent on super-giant and giant oilfields discovered in the 50s and 60s of the last century… I might add, of the last millennium. Only rarely in recent decades have discoveries equaled production. Mostly, it’s been one barrel discovered for every three barrels produced.

Second, old super-giants like Burgan in Kuwait and [Cantarell] in Mexico have gone into decline earlier than had been anticipated… and going into decline have been Alaska, the North Sea, western Siberia and the like.

Third, while it is not yet “Twilight in the Desert” (as you may have read) still we are well into the afternoon, even in Saudi Arabia. Even the Ghawar oilfield is increasingly hard to sustain.

Fourth, in 2004 we experienced our first demand-driven price spike, as opposed to the previous price spikes driven by supply interruptions. We still operate at about the level of production capacity of 2004.

Next, given projected decline curves running from 4 to 6 percent, and the projected increase in demand during the next quarter century, we shall require the new capacity equivalence of five Saudi Arabias.

Even the International Energy Agency, which previously had been sanguine, now suggests that we can no longer increase production of conventional oil in the course of this decade.

Note that it is conventional oil: that is all that Hubbert talked about. Somewhat disingenuously, the debate has been turned on him by talking about fuel liquids in general, throwing in tar sands, heavy oil, coal liquids, oil shale and so on.

But clearly, large conventional oil production is increasingly no longer part of the future unless there is a technological breakthrough, which Mr. Gilbert talked about just a few moments ago, raising the ultimate recovery rate from existing fields, which at this moment we cannot expect.

Of course, there are uncertainties which make timing predictions with regard to the peak risky. Iraq, which has been held back for a variety of reasons, may come along as one of those five new needed Saudi Arabias.

Offshore Brazil and offshore oil elsewhere are promising. Shale gas, which is apparently coming in abundance (but is not, of course, oil) may somewhat alleviate the pressures on liquid fuels.

But in general we must expect to get along without what has been our critical energy source in expanding the world’s economy for more than half a century.

Can the political order face up to the challenge? There is no reason for optimism.

We are likely to see pseudo-solutions, misleading alternatives and sheer sloganeering: “energy independence,” “getting off foreign oil” and the like. All of that sheer sloganeering we have seen to this point.

The political order (which abhors political risk) tends to rely on the Biblical prescription, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”