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Oil today is at $138/barrel - it has risen 115% in the last year and 600% since 2002. This is the biggest problem in the world at the moment - yet most of the media is in denial e.g. the Irish Times article last Saturday by Tony Allbright. Mr. Allbrights article was so off the point, so vague, so uninformed and so misleading as to be an insult to people's intelligence. The issue is extremely relevant to the Tara situation (so below for the reasons) and actually creates an economic justification for a reversal of their motorway construction projects. The only transport solution to Peak Oil being to end motorway construction, and instead build small-scale sustainable solutions like the Meath MASTER Plan. To understand why oil prices are rising, what peak oil means then listen to this (you may need to download these): http://www.netcastd For a more detailed explanation I highly recommend this site: http://europe. The key problem is "not" that we are running out of oil (as Tony Allbright implied), the problem is that the remaining oil is prohibitively expensive to extract. The existing accessible oil fields are being exhausted, new discoveries have fallen drastically. None of them combined can meet the rate of production required to meet our fast increasing oil demand of 87 million barrels of oil per day. To see why we are likely to get to $150/barrel quite soon please listen to this: http://www.netcastd As these podcasts explain the main cause for the oil price is that our demand is at 87 million b/day but production is at 85 million b/day. The only solution is to reduce demand signficantly, i.e. stop motorway building and long distance transport, greatly reduce global transport of goods etc. <http://europe. The IT article mentioned the "guestimate" that the new fields in Brazil "may" contain 46 billion barrels. But he doesn't mention that the oil is 4.5 miles below the sea and under 1.3 miles of rock and salt layers. This depth of drilling requires completely new technology, its not been done before. The costs of extracting this oil will be massive and the max production per day that they can achieve is 500,000 to 1 million barrels/day. This will make a small dent in our oil demand and therefore will hardly have an impact on the oil price. To explain the Relevance to Tara - I simply need to mention Car use and Motorway construction: 1. the production of 1 car requires the equivalent of 20 barrels of oil in energy 2. the average car consumes the equivalent of 18 barrels of oil per year in fuel. ( there are about 1.7 million cars on the road) 3. 1 tonne of Cement production requires the equivalent of 1 barrel of oil in energy. (NOTE: it requires 1000-2700 tonnes of cement to build 1km of road. e.g. upto 2700 barrels of oil per km). 4. production of Bitumen (used in tarmac, and in base layers for roads etc.) mostly comes from Canada e.g. Tar sands, which is an extremely environmentally destructive extraction process and is threatening to put some of the companies involved out of business due to excessive extraction costs. What is happening in fact is that they are converting the bitumen to synthethic oil due to high demand resulting in a shortage of bitumen for road construction. 5. The oil used in the motorway construction process e.g. machinery and the cement used in bridges etc, would further add to this level of oil consumption. Add these points to the fact that the governments exchequer funds being in serious trouble - this now makes the concept of building so many motorways extremely bad economic policy. The M3 motorway and other motorways in Ireland will be obsolete if oil and petrol prices continue to rise. Add this to food price rises, air travel price rises, and Howley construction going bust - we have a great opportunity to promote the Meath MASTER Plan. thanks Tadgh Crowley
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