New research points to risk peak oil presents to business

The sun sets behind an oil well sited in the middle of a soybean field in 2008 near New Haven, Illinois, USA. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

For many years, the most compelling issue driving sustainability efforts among businesses, consumers, governments and activists has been climate change. We are all becoming increasingly concerned with the impacts of rising temperatures and extreme weather events on our supply chains, cities, transportation networks, agricultural industries, and lives.

We have become increasingly alarmed about the results of burning too much coal, oil and gas; the consequences of excessive emissions resulting from some of the most useful substances humanity has ever harnessed. We have identified our most important struggle – to maintain economic growth while reducing carbon emissions.

Because our concern has been first and foremost the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, we have designed and sporadically implemented economic incentives to reduce carbon emissions. We issue carbon credits to companies that emit less carbon. We offer cash to countries who don't cut down their forests.

We have trusted that oil reserves would hold out long enough for a substitute to be developed, and focused on the impending catastrophe of climate change. Peak oil theories, so common a few years ago, were relegated to the back burner as gas and oil were discovered in US shale deposits, the Artic thawed, exposing the possibility of off-polar shore wells and much of northern Alberta was transformed into bitumen mines.

Source: Guardian Sustainable Business Blog