Peak Oil Goes "The Full Monty"  

The Daily Mail has a strange article by "Full Monty" scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy on his new miniseries Burn Up - Even oilmen believe our planet is burning up. If you've got an eye for tinfoil hooks you'll find some of the lines in this one intriguing.

As I dug around the oil industry, I came across another extraordinary elephant in the room that nobody dared mention, but which will become crucial in the fight to prevent irreversible warming: Peak Oil.

This is what they call the moment when we start running out of the stuff.

When I started on this journey, three years ago, oil was 50 dollars a barrel and the Peak Oil theorists were dismissed as alarmist fringe elements. We were apparently at least 50 years away from Peak Oil. Anyone who dared to say different was simply laughed at.

But then I met a man employed by the oil industry to collate data on oil reserves, and he told me that already we are not producing enough oil to meet demand, and even if output were increased, it would be used up by growing demand from China and India.

So, I asked, what did this mean?

'A global crash,' he said, 'at a guess somewhere between 2008 and 2010.'

I left his office on a beautiful, globally-warmed day with house prices soaring and the financial markets blossoming. Clearly, the man was nuts.

But who is nuts, now? Oil has hit 147 dollars a barrel, house prices are plummeting and the stock markets are going through the floor. And yet, still, is anyone listening?

Somehow, I had to turn a mass of complex science and politics into something people would want to watch, but how could I dramatise carbon dioxide, an enemy you can't see, smell or touch?

It would be like Spooks without the terrorists, The Wire without the drug dealers.

I found the answer in men like John Ashton, Tony Blair's 'climate tsar'. A former diplomat, he now shuttles between China and Europe, patiently negotiating, encouraging, persuading the Chinese, soon to become the world's biggest emitters of CO2, to sign up to emission reduction targets.

You are unlikely to see his name anywhere, for that is certainly not his style, but if we ever get ourselves out of this mess, it is people such as John who will have saved us.

And that's what gave me the key to Burn Up: the lies and duplicity of the denial industry pitched against people desperate to prevent runaway climate change.

I concealed a mass of factual science and politics inside the Trojan Horse of a racy thriller.

And where does this leave me? What does Cassandra have to say about the chances of humanity solving this most dangerous of puzzles?

You might be surprised to know that I believe there is still hope.

As Rupert Penry-Jones's character says in the film: 'Oil. Oil is everything.' Its all-consuming use has caused the problem and now its scarcity might just save us.

A spiralling price that triggers a global power-down could buy us the time to stop the warming. In fact, it's happening right now.

Will it work? We're about to find out.