By Marga Mediavilla (also published in her Blog Habas Contadas)
I have been talking about this for the last 20 years, but I still find it hard to admit. No. I really don’t want to face it. I’d rather be maintaining my psychological balance, “taking care of myself”. I’d rather stay in the limbo of this “Sánchez era”, when the Spanish economy doesn’t seem to be doing too badly and we are recovering from the trauma of the 2008 crisis. I’d rather think I’m wrong, that things will move slowly and everything will be more gradual than we “doomsayers” say.
But the war has precipitated everything. And war cannot be avoided: what we have already had is enough. Many oil extraction, refining and transport facilities have been destroyed in the Persian Gulf these weeks, and in Russia too: the destruction of the terminal at Novorossiysk, reduces Russia’s oil export capacity by 40%. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen tomorrow, the damage would already be done. No producer will be able to replace the oil that has been taken off the market due to the destruction of the war.
80% of the world’s oil reserves are located in countries that have already passed their peak production, countries that cannot increase their production because their wells are running dry. Only Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, the US, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Russia are not already in decline. Almost all of the countries that could compensate for the loss of oil exports due to the war are affected by the war itself.
The decline in oil was going to happen anyway; we knew it couldn’t be delayed for many years, but the war has precipitated it. Global oil production peaked these weeks.
We are not prepared for this. Not even I am. I’d like to believe that Antonio Turiel is wrong when he says that we’ll see rationing, sky-high prices and an economic crisis in the coming months (no, please, economic crisis not again…). But… what else can we expect?
I have been studying the energy transition for almost 20 years as part of my university research at GEEDS. Now is the time to put into practice everything we have learnt from analysing millions of data, building complex models and reading countless articles… What can we say that might be useful at this juncture?
What is very clear to those of us who study the energy resources is that this is a long-term process and will not be resolved by measures such as subsidising petrol or releasing strategic reserves. War is not the cause; it is merely the trigger.
Fossil fuels were going to start declining, with or without war. First they would plateau and then fall gradually, probably before the end of this decade, as predicted in this report by the International Energy Agency and forecasted by geologists such as Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Mikael Höök and Antonio Aretxabala. We must start adapting to a world without oil.
We should have prepared for this decades ago. We knew it was coming, the signs were very clear, but we have done very little. The International Energy Agency, which is now offering advice on how to overcome the energy crisis, could have said 20 years ago that conventional oil production was plateauing and that this was a clear sign of depletion. But it did not. Around 2008, its executive director, Fatih Birol, began saying “let’s abandon oil before it abandons us”, but then he fell silent. He was probably told to replace that “radical” message with something milder, such as “we are going to decarbonise the economy by 2050”.
The second thing that is crystal clear to us is that this cannot be solved with renewable energy alone. Europe has managed to significantly increase its solar and wind power generation. That will help us avoid over-reliance on gas, uranium or coal—whose prices can rise on the international market—but electricity accounts for only 20% of consumption. The bulk of the challenge, the difficult part, will be replacing petrol and diesel. Energy storage is the great Achilles’ heel of our technology: the batteries in today’s electric vehicles have between 20 and 60 times less energy per kilogram than petrol. This is particularly acute for transport, especially for freight, heavy machinery and agriculture.
As we described in detail in this article published in 2020, electrifying lorries, tractors and heavy machinery is, in theory, possible, but it faces enormous technical difficulties that make it cumbersome, expensive and inefficient. Over 90% freight transport in Spain is carried out by road and we have no alternatives to this. Nor do we know how to electrify tractors; the only thing we know how to do is farm with reduced tillage (fortunately, organisations such as Agricultura Regenerativa Ibérica have been experimenting with this for years).
The train is the best electric freight transport. We should have invested in freight rail in past decades, but we haven’t: we have focused solely on the AVE high-speed rail link between capital cities. Could we try to revive the medium-speed network for freight? It could be a very useful measure in the medium and long term, even though we are late to the game on this.
We don’t have time to replace petrol cars with electric cars, but even if we did, we shouldn’t invest public money in it. Electric cars would land us in a number of messes: technological dependence on Chinese batteries, shortages of strategic minerals, charging infrastructure costs, rising demand for electricity… The only electric cars that might make sense are very light ones, more like motorbikes than SUVs. Now is the ideal time to question our mobility based on private vehicles and make the change we know was necessary. We must commit to public transport, to investing as much as possible in railways, and to making cycling safe, as the Netherlands and Denmark did in the 1970s, when they were pressed on by the oil crisis.
The third thing we know for certain is that we must not make the problem worse by causing further damage to nature. Just replacing, for example, domestic natural gas heating systems in Spain with biomass would require the extraction of some 17 million tonnes of timber each year, on top of the 11 million tonnes already being extracted. Natural regeneration amounts to around 21 million tonnes a year; extracting 27 would leave us without forests within a few years. Biofuels (liquid fuels derived from crops) are also a disastrous solution. The shortage of fertilisers caused by the war is threatening food production: we should stop burning food crops to move our cars! The use of biofuels in an energy-food crisis would have terrible consequences[1].
Neither electric cars, nor biomass, nor biofuels, nor renewables are the solution… so what is the solution then? The only solution is to face reality: we are moving towards low-energy societies, societies that will have to find ways to do the same things with less energy. We need more efficient processes and a more effective social organisation.
Rather than focusing on how to source energy for producing chemical fertilisers, for example, we should consider how to cultivate without them (fortunately, there are organic farmers who already know how to do this). Rather than subsidising diesel for transport, we should consider restructuring logistics chains to shorten distribution networks. Rather than considering energy for cars, we should consider how to make cities provide a high quality of life for their inhabitants without private cars.
We must strive to think long-term; the shock of the war must be an incentive to move towards truly sustainable societies, not just to apply quick fixes. Because this crisis is just a symptom of the profound unsustainability of our way of life. We must not waste the energy resources that are becoming scarce by clinging to a consumerist society that is crumbling because it is unsustainable.
These are the solutions which, in my humble opinion, we should implement. But the problem is of such magnitude that neither I nor any group of researchers, can solve it. We need a technological, industrial, agricultural, social and economic transformation, as well as a shift in lifestyles and collective imaginations… A change of this magnitude cannot be achieved by a single person or a government; it must be a massive collective effort: it is a true Kaizen.
Kaizen, the strategy used by the Japanese people to rebuild their industrial production after the Second World War, is about change from the bottom up. We need and Energy Kaizen that asks every worker, farmer, teacher, healthcare worker and business owner: “How could you work and live using less energy? What support, what tools, what laws would you need to do so?”
But let us not forget that Kaizen only works when accompanied by that Japanese mindset of responsibility of the elites. We cannot expect the people to make an effort to save energy if the savings are spent on luxuries or on keeping the businesses of a select few afloat. Energy Kaizen is also about questioning which businesses are truly important and which we cannot afford; it is about questioning our economic model.
We have no plans. Our societies are not prepared because we have ignored the problem for decades. We dreamed that some technology would save us without changing our way of life. But technology is not going to save us: we have to save ourselves. As we have no plans, our plan must be to seek those plans we lack immediately, both individually and collectively.
This moment has arrived. It could not have been otherwise. We would all have wished it had come later. It is hard to start, even for me. It will be very difficult not to be swept away by fear, confrontation and anxiety, but… I breathe. On this cool, sunny spring day, something tells me that things aren’t as bad as they seem; it’s as if a scent of renewal were floating in the air. We are addicts. This is hard, but it is hard because life is slapping us in the face and snatching the cigarette from our mouths. Let’s breathe.
[1] See this post in Habas Contadas blog about the consequences of the use of biofuels to substitute fossil fuels in the event of an energy crisis https://contadashabas.wordpress.com/2026/04/13/la-peor-solucion-a-una-doble-crisis-energetica-y-alimentaria-biocombustibles/