The collapse of oil prices: origins and impacts

This event, jointly hosted by the IoI Economy Forum and the Big Potatoes Energy Workgroup, will cover two distinct topics. First, the causes and consequences of rising oil prices, and second, a look at the interpretation of extreme weather events.

THE COLLAPSE OF OIL PRICES: ORIGINS AND IMPACTS

Just a moment ago, the world was supposed to be running out of oil. But as the price of a barrel of the black stuff has fallen from more than $100 to about $50 today, so talk of ‘peak’ oil has faded. Instead the doctrine has grown that oil, like other fossil fuels, is a massive, increasingly worthless ’stranded asset’ – and that that its price will be depressed for a long time, particularly as growth in China slows.

QUESTIONS

1) What weight do the various factors – China’s prospects, US shale oil, Saudi shenanigans, the commodities price cycle – have in explaining the collapse of oil prices?

2) For how long might we expect oil prices to stay low?

3) How were other forms of energy – biofuels, gas, coal, nuclear and renewables – doing before the collapse, and how are they likely to do now?

4) What are likely to be the main impacts of low oil prices on transport, petrochemicals, industry and services?

SPEAKER:

James Woudhuysen

EXTREME WEATHER

After the floods in Wales and the West Country, it seems, British popular feeling is more disposed to the idea that man-made climate changes today brings about a higher frequency and/or intensity of extreme weather events. Perhaps people are right to blame humanity for bad weather. On the other hand, such an approach might really be little more than an old folk tale.

QUESTIONS

1. In 2006, the poster for and cover of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth showed a hurricane rising out of a smokestack. Nine years later, what’s new about today’s alarm about extreme weather ?

2. In attributing extreme weather events to climate change, what arguments does the ‘attribution community’ use to underline human culpability for such events? Why? And which might we agree with?

3. More broadly: in what ways does it and what ways does it not make sense to understand the relationship between extreme weather events and climate change?

4. What is the best response to arguments that economic growth cannot insulate people from the effects of extreme weather?

SPEAKER

Joe Kaplinsky